In spring, some yards are a virtual dandelion vineyard where their pre-blossom fuzz drifts throughout the neighborhood squeezing the life out of any blade of grass that dares to sprout.  The sight of the resulting bright yellow blossoms causes near apoplexy in neighbors who have squandered a fortune on weed control products, to say nothing of the intensive labor they have expended in producing a perfect lawn.

And, as if that’s not enough insult to their labors, next comes the cottonwood down that overnight turns a once verdant neighborhood into a scene straight out of “The Night Before Christmas.” The dumbfounding power of this feather-like fuzz has the capability of messing up the most ardent of landscaping plans.

But, another — and nearly forgotten purveyor of nature’s fluff — is the common milkweed. It is currently recognized for providing crucial habitat for the precious monarch butterfly.  Sad, but true, there are those of us who remember the many butterflies that flitted around us when we were kids, while readily admitting to now rejoicing when we spot even one!

I now challenge you to recall when milkweed was treasured for yet another even more significant purpose: our war against Nazi Germany and Imperialist Japan. You see, in 1944, before the current pervasive use of synthetic fibers, the white wispy milkweed hairs were utilized in the manufacturing of life preservers. The secret lay in the buoyancy of its “floss.” Surprisingly, the floss of this simple plant saved the lives of countless American and Allied airmen and sailors because so much of the war was fought on and over the seas.

Still, as effective as the milkweed fluff was, it was not the first choice for stuffing life preservers.  It was the delicate strands of the cotton-like fiber in kapok.  Unfortunately for us, though, the Japanese gained control of the Dutch East Indies (today Indonesia), thus cutting off the main supply of the tropical kapok to the U.S.

Fortuitously, milkweed proved an acceptable substitute.  However, the biggest drawback to its use was that it would take upward of three years to produce a commercial crop. Thus our government had no choice but to ask the people of America for help.  We were commissioned to collect the seed pods of wild-growing milkweed.

With available labor both in the cities and countrysides at a premium, the task fell astonishingly upon the shoulders of America’s children. Amazingly these young ones were enlisted for the noble cause of saving the lives of our servicemen.  School children spent untold hours walking fencerows, roadsides and railroad right-of-ways in search of milkweed, a plant that before the war was considered little more than a weed.

Onion sacks were distributed to carry the collected pods and children were paid 15 cents per bag.  If the pods were dried, they received an additional 5 cents.  It required the fluff from two full bags of pods to produce one life jacket.  Alarmingly, the U.S. military called for the nation’s children to gather 2 million pounds of floss which would be enough to fill 1.2 million life jackets!

Harvesting the floss required picking the pods before they cracked open and released their seeds.  Obviously it would have been impossible to gather this floss, so the pods consequently doubled as handy storage units as they were transported to the processing centers.  There they were opened and the seeds were used as stuffing for the life jackets.

Quite possibly the champions in this war effort were the children of Illinois’ McClean County.  In a small school called “Six Mile,” its total enrollment of fourteen students collected a county record of 109 sacks of milkweed pods. In second place was a total of 85 sacks, while in third place was an even smaller school of only eight students who gathered 48 … “all of whom were small children.”

All told, the McLean County schools collected 1,900 sacks which were trucked to Towanda, Illinois, where they were stored in two steel corn bins.  From there the pods were shipped by rail to Petroskey, Michigan, the home of a milkweed floss processing plant.

Unlike our current conflict, World War II required the continual sacrifices, both large and small, of the general public.  You may well retain the memory of scrap drives, ration cards, war bonds, blackouts and even higher taxes, but who remembers the smallest among us who, while dragging their bags of milkweed pods behind them, helped win the war?