Youth called upon during wartime
In her reminiscences, Helen Blackburn recalls that during the Second World War, children were encouraged to collect milkweed pods in the fall.
Helen, 7, and her five-year-old sister walked up the side of the road collecting them in a basket. They were rewarded with a movie screening in Creemore. It was the first movie they had ever seen.
The milkweed floss was used as the floatation in life preservers for the armed forces and the United Nations.
A call to duty from the Agricultural Supplies Board of the Dominion Department of Agriculture in Ottawa said, “Everyone can help by collecting pods of common milkweed. In this way you may save the life of a sailor or airman.”
The Agricultural Supplies Board would pay 20 cents per bag of properly dried pods. Instructions were that the pods should be picked the first or second week of September, when some of the seeds were brown in colour. The pods were placed in mesh onion bags supplied by the board, then hung outside on a fence for four to six weeks until perfectly dry, at which point the board would arrange for pick-up from the school or other collection point.
“Plan now to collect the milkweed in the fall,” the board urged. “Keep watch during the summer for good patches of it. Be certain that every milkweed pod in your vicinity is collected and that none got to waste. Collecting milkweed will make a real contribution to the war effort.”
The floss is a naturally buoyant and water repellent fibre that could be used as a substitute for kapok, a silky fibre from the fruit of a Ceiba tree grown in the Dutch West Indies (present day Indonesia.) Japan’s occupation of the region during the war cut off the supplyof kapok.
Because women were substituting for the men in the workforce, children were recruited to collect the milkweed pods – either through school, 4-H, or Scouts.
Each life preserver, which could keep a 150-pound man afloat for more than 40 hours, required 20 pounds of floss – equivalent to 1,200 to 1,600 pods. One pound of floss was as warm as wool but six times lighter and six times as buoyant as cork.
– with research by Colleen Stamp. Her mother Lois (Holden) Barber and her cousin Harold Holden also have memories of collecting milkweed pods at Banks, near Ravenna, where they grew up.
