"Roses are red, violets are blue.
"Sugar is sweet. Remember?"If you remember that rhyme, you probably remember May 1942 - 50 years ago - when the government imposed sugar rationing.
The nation had been in World War II for about six months when about 131 million Americans - men and women, boys and girls - trooped off to their neighborhood schools. After looking a teacher in the eye and declaring how much sugar they had at home, they received Ration Book One.
The Sugar Book, as it was known, marked the beginning of food rationing on the home front. The booklet contained a year's supply of ration coupons, each about half the size of a postage stamp, which allotted the holder 8 ounces of sugar per week.
Sugar had begun to get scarce in December, and the fall of the Philippines and a lack of cargo shipping space from Latin America created a shortage that would last until 1946.
Rationing worked, more or less, but no one liked it.
"No form of regulation conflicted more sharply with traditional American values," historian Richard Polenberg wrote.
So we laughed about it. About the farmer who demanded a ration book for his mule, which supposedly would not work unless rewarded with sugar.
There was the story about the housewife whose husband decided to play a prank on her. Disguising his voice, he called her on the phone and said he was an inspector for the Office of Price Administration, the federal rationing agency.
He said that he had learned that she had an undeclared 100-pound bag of sugar and that he was coming over to arrest her.
She panicked . . . and poured the sugar down the drain.
Another fellow supposedly went to the attic to hide a bag of undeclared sugar. He tripped over something in the dark - a bag of sugar hidden during World War I.