If there was a line, stand in it. Something good must be at the other end. And when there's not much on the store shelves, anything might be worth the wait.

That was Coriee Hall's lesson from the rationing imposed on American communities during World War II.

Hall, who was featured in the Yakima Herald-Republic's recent project on Dust Bowl survivors, also has vivid memories of the war effort -- that time when the entire country banded together to fight a common enemy, the Axis powers of Germany, Italy and Japan.

For Hall and others on the home front, that meant rationing almost everything, from meat to gas. A parcel of bacon was cut in half to make sure another family got some; nylon was used for parachutes, so women wanting to dress up would use an eyebrow pencil to paint a black line up the back of their legs to simulate a stocking seam.

"It taught me to evaluate things before I spent my money," she said of that time of scarcity.

Hall came to Yakima from the Oklahoma Panhandle after deciding there weren't enough opportunities in the dusty farm country.

She was also engaged to a serviceman, but her father advised her to hold off on marriage. She's glad she did.

She returned from work one day to learn the bad news that she otherwise would have had to deal with as a new bride.

"When I got home, his folks had just gotten a telegram that he had been killed," Hall said.

She soon drove out to the Yakima Valley with her parents, settling in the Tieton area. She started at beauty school, wanting to be self-sufficient. She later worked at Safeway, then settled into a career as a school cook as she followed her husband's transfers around Eastern Washington with the gas company.

Although she lost her first fiance to the war, she still ended up with a military connection in matrimony.

Her husband, Clarence "Dewey" Hall, served in the Navy.

They met soon after he arrived in Yakima -- getting here on the last day of the war.

Hall said the rationing ended as soon as the war did.

The change didn't carry that much significance for her, though.

"I just lived the next day like I always did," she said.

The couple eventually bought a farm in the Prosser area using Clarence's veterans bonus. After retiring, they moved to Yakima in the 1980s.

Coriee Hall still keeps her husband's military memorabilia in a special box in her living room.