Both of my parents and many others who I knew experienced the home front in Portland, Oregon during WWII. (My dad was drafted in 1943 and was medically discharged by the Air Corps back to Portland.) Portland was the port for 90% of the value of Lend-Lease materiel for the Soviet Union.
It also almost had the distinction of being the biggest city to be declared off-limits due to a VD rate exceeded only by Providence, RI. A secret 1940 federal study observed that "law enforcement in Portland is typical of that in other West Coast ports." (Think movies
Chinatown, Maltese Falcon, films noir.) As my mother said: "anything good for you was severely rationed, anything bad for you was widely available." As my father says "you could see the slot machine in front of the Vanport supermarket from the steps of the sheriff's precinct" in the doomed unincorporated housing development.
Some transport notes: the SP&S ran a commuter train from Union Station for the Vancouver Shipyards. Rolling stock came from Interurban Electric cars from the SF Bay Area. A redundant SF Bay coal-fired ferry ran between downtown Portland and Swan Island shipyards, until the ODT and MarAd buses showed up. Vanport Express motor coaches overlapped the Interstate Avenue trolley coach line, with the drivers madly cranking the registering fareboxes to get change, while shifting gears and punching transfers. Commissioner of Public Utilities Dorothy Lee had to fight to get copper feeder wire for Portland Traction because the loads on the outer ends of streetcar and trolley coach lines were way higher than the power distribution could handle. PTCo took 40 streetcars off the rip track, painted them and put them in service. PTco ripped the asphalt off of a stretch of the Bridge Transfer line (Grand Avenue line) and replaced buses with streetcars. Transfer rules were cracked down on to prevent riders from going downtown and back to shop during their layover. The 1:32 a.m. St. Johns Owl trolley coach had to be double-headed due to the load (owls met hourly at :32). The overnight North Coast Line buses to Seattle from Portland (later Greyhound) picked up commuters to Boeing Field along US99 to ride as standees. My dad rode Pool Trains 401/402 as a standee. The NP pulled a bunch of tourist sleepers into the shops and installed walkover seats salvaged from wooden cars.
During the blackout my father was delivering the morning
Oregonian. People were waiting at salespoints in the middle of the night for editions that had served rural readers in pre-war days. His future father-in-law was patrolling the Rose City Park neighborhood in the blackout as an air raid warden. And about every 15 minutes the huge flare of poisonous gas from the Portland Gas & Coke Co. "lit up the Willbridge junction, the Shell oil tank farm, and the docks like a giant flashbulb in the blackout."
All of this strenuous effort had good and bad effects. Posted bus stops were introduced to save rubber and gas. For railroads and transit, many people who had never ridden a train got their first impression in overloaded, obsolete equipment. Conductors and motormen included men in their 70's who didn't really want to work a 48-hour week. My father-in-law for the rest of his life was mad that the CPR
Great West had no dining car between Edmonton and Winnipeg. (It did before the war.) Demand for new autos soared, even if they had needless accessories. Dorothy Lee was elected mayor in 1948 and cleaned up the town.
Another Dorothy and other women became "operators" instead of "motormen" and while many women left the transit and rail jobs after the war, PTCo retained Dorothy and she lasted in service into the 1970's on my neighborhood line. My high school added Russian to the curriculum, which I took up in 1960.
And going out for coffee before or after the crazy night shifts, my parents got to know each other.
Postscript: Vanport wartime housing, see attached.