The Office of Dependency Benefits (ODB) was an agency of the U.S. War Department during and after World War II. It was located in Newark, New Jersey, and had 8,000 employees at its peak. The ODB handled the payments and mailing of checks for family allowances and allotments of American servicemen.
Sheila Seymour (Kay Francis) drives a 1942 Cadillac, the last model to roll off the Detroit assembly lines before production was turned over to wartime vehicles for the next three years.
In the middle of 1944, the Office of Dependency Benefits (ODB) had more than seven million accounts. That included more than 4.5 million family allowances and 2.75 million pay allotments. Disbursements then totaled more than $4 billion per year.
The ODB office had a check-writing machine that could print 150 checks a minute. Another machine would sign the checks and a third one insert them into addressed envelopes. That would be 9,000 checks in an hour and 156,000 in a day. It would take nearly a full month to issue the more than 4.5 million family allowances at the peak of the war.