As modern-day Washtenaw County residents cope with a recession, their thrift and sacrifices evoke the past. (Click on any image for a larger view).

This WWI-era flier details a conservation effort mandated by U.S. Fuel Administrator H. A. Garfield. If Ypsilantians ignored it, they risked losing the city’s allotment of coal.

“1. Light used for illuminating or displaying advertisements, announcements or signs, or for the external adornment of any building, or any unnecessary illumination of theatre entrances, shall be entirely discontinued on Monday and Tuesday of each week.

“2. Light used for illuminating or displaying any shop window, store window or any signs in store window, shall be discontinued from sunrise to sunset and shall be discontinued entirely on Monday and Tuesday of each week.

“. . .The distribution of all fuel is in the hands of the Fuel Administration and any Cities who fail to line up to the regulations will be made to suffer for lack of coal. Therefore any firm, corporation or person who fails to observe the rules after due notice has been given them, will have to be reported.”

In this spirit of wartime thrift, endorsed by no less an authority than President Wilson, one Ypsilantian asked City Council if he could keep a pig in his backyard. His request “placed the city council somewhat in the position characterized as ‘between the devil and the deep sea,’” said the June 20, 1918 Ypsilanti Record, “since President Wilson has petitioned every citizen to do that which the City Ordinances expressly forbid.” The Council hemmed and hawed and shuffled the question off on the local health department.

On a less countrified note, this frontispiece from a 1913 Washtenaw County telephone directory shows an urbane young sales manager above several examples of the wonders of the then-novel Bell telephone system— and why its cost to the user was justified.

“A New Haven commission merchant recently telephoned the order for a carload of butter in Minneapolis, Minn, fifteen hundred miles. The message was received by the dealer in Minneapolis at one o’clock and by nine o’clock that evening the loaded car was on its way East.”

“A quick deal in real estate. . . ”; “A salesman for a Boston bond house. . .”; “Immediately nineteen long distance Bell Telephone calls were filed in Pittsburgh to points in Ohio, and two to places in Pennsylvania. All the twenty-one calls were completed within one hour and ten minutes. . .” The modern-day ease of calling someone, anywhere, was still a luxury in 1913.

Years later, during the Depression, some U-M students were doing without any luxuries at all. They toughed out privation without complaint, some enduring conditions, as noted by the December 8, 1932 Ypsilanti Daily Press, unimaginable to today’s students. “Dozens of students. . . have only a bottle of milk and a loaf of bread for their entire daily diet. Many of them may be found rooming together in some attic at $1.50 a week, living on milk and bread or crackers and occasionally, a can of beans. “... Occasionally a member of the faculty turns in the name of a student who gives evidence in the classroom of malnutrition.”