On October 15, 2013 my mom died. To review, she was a writer who never had the confidence to submit anything for publication. Whenever someone or some group she was working with needed something written, she’d get the job. She filled notebooks and thre-ringed binders up with poems, stories, reminiscences, and thoughts. Andi and I gave her a computer 25 years ago and she transcribed much of what she wrote and added new material until about 4 years ago.
On the 15th of each month, I’m going to publish something of hers. This month I’m going to break my self imposed rule and publish a longish piece she wrote about The Great Depression into four shorter pieces over the next ten days.
THE GREAT DEPRESSION
Part 1 – The Family & Food
As I grow older I find myself becoming a storyteller. When I was younger I didn’t have a great deal of patience with those elders who began a large part of their conversations with “When I was a boy/girl,” or “Many years ago -.” Now I find myself falling into that pattern.There are, however, events in my life that have left such an impression on my memory that I feel an uncontrollable urge to share them with the “younger” generation. The Depression, which began in 1929 and did not want to leave, is one of those things.
I was born in 1922, so I was seven years old on Black Friday in 1929. I had learned to read at a very early age and was reading newspapers by this time. I well remember all the newspaper articles regarding the stock market crash. I wasn’t sure what the stock market was, but I knew it dealt with MONEY. I have always been blessed and bedeviled with a vivid imagination, and I was horrified at the articles describing business men who leaped from windows to their deaths, the soup kitchens and bread lines, and the pencil and apple sellers on corners. The newspapers had photographs of the above, with the exception of those poor people who jumped from tall buildings, and they had drawings of those!
Prior to the crash my mother and step-father worked for the same firm, a wholesale paint company. Daddy was a salesman and Mother was the bookkeeper. I remember being taken to work on rare occasions and being allowed to play with the Royal typewriter (very “manual”). I also remember Mother’s ledgers. She was a double entry, full charge bookkeeper and, since she wrote beautifully, her ledgers were works of art. The rows of tiny figures were written in very black ink with a “straight” pen, the kind you dipped in a bottle of Carter’s ink and blotted carefully. You could buy blotters, but a lot of companies used them as advertising, their message on one side and green or blue blotting paper on the other. I suppose the advent of the ball point pen made blotting paper obsolete.
When the stock market crumbled, taking large and small businesses with it, Mother and Daddy’s jobs went along. The full weight of this catastrophe did not sink in on me for some time. I was an only child and there were many things I did not suffer that lots of other children did.
For one thing we always seemed to have food in relative abundance. It may not have been gourmet fare, but it tasted pretty good. Daddy’s mother had a small truck farm and everybody hove to and gardened and farmed like crazy. Summer was a continual succession of steaming kettles in equally steaming kitchens. And every time you looked up somebody was coming in the back door with a basket of something that had to be seeded, peeled, broke or otherwise prepared for those kettles. Mother, my great-aunt Sis, and all the other women in the family canned, preserved, jellied, pickled – you name it, they “put it up.”
To them the mark of a good housewife was to have every Ball fruit jar, jelly glass, crock, or whatever container that didn’t have a hole in the bottom packed full of goodies. Cold packers were modern inventions which they used, but a lot of the canning was done by the open kettle method. We are now told that either method is sometimes a quick passport to botulism, but it worked for us and nobody died. The filled jars were lined up in rows in basements, cellars, cupboards, or whatever nook or cranny that was available. And they looked beautiful!
One of the loveliest things they produced was watermelon rind preserves, made of recycled rinds. Watermelon rinds were religiously saved and turned into very sweet preserves. They glowed with stained glass colors inside the jars, but two bites of total sweetness were enough for me. Apple butter was made in a large copper kettle over an outside fire, stirred with a long handled paddle, and if it “plopped” on you the resulting burn was no fun. Sauerkraut was made in a large crock in the cellar, with a brick-weighted plate on top. It smelled terrible in the making and tasted great when it was done.
We – or someone in the family – always had cows, chickens, sometimes turkeys, and we raised hogs. The cows furnished us with milk (unpasteurized), cream and butter (full of that nasty cholesterol), and the chickens laid eggs in abundance (we thought these were healthy, too). Leftovers from the above fattening products were fed to the pigs, which became hogs, and the first really good cold snap was butchering time.
The worst thing about butchering was just that – the killing of the hogs. I hid in the house, fingers in my ears, because I did not want to hear the shots and the occasional death squeal.
Now the following passage may be too gory for some of you tender-hearted city folks, but this is just the facts. Once the hogs were killed, they were bled, scalded, scraped, hung up on a scaffold, slit up the middle and gutted. The intestines were saved, cleaned and became sausage casings. The head was turned into head cheese (souse), the feet into pickled pigs feet. Daddy’s family, being German, saved the blood and made that national delicacy, “blood pudding”. I ate everything else but not that.
Since home freezers were non-existent, you ate as much of the small meat as possible and shared the rest out with neighbors. The nice thing about that was when the neighbors butchered, they shared back. Small meat consisted of tenderloin (do you know what that costs now?), back bones, ribs, liver, etc.
Hams, shoulders and bacon went through the smokehouse and came out tasting heavenly. They hung in the smokehouse indefinitely, with a daily fire going beneath them. Sometimes before they were used up they molded just a tad, but that was sliced off and nobody worried about it.
As the old saying goes, we used everything about the pig but the squeal. The excess fat was cut up in little pieces and rendered (cooked) into lard. This is where I earned my keep, cutting lard and sausage meat. It was a greasy mess, but somebody had to do it! My memories of all this may be tempered by time and distance, but I do remember good food – and I stayed as skinny as a rail!
However, there were things that the farm and garden could not provide. These things required cash, which was in very short supply. The forerunners of today’s “super markets” were the A & P in Jeffersonville, and the Piggly Wiggly in New Albany. Mother preferred the A & P and when she went shopping there she counted pennies very closely. She figured that each large brown bag of groceries would cost $2.00. Eventually she had to raise her rule of thumb estimate to $3.00 a bag and she was shocked. In the fall they would have cases of canned goods on sale, and she would buy whatever fruit or vegetable that had been in short supply in the garden that summer.
We seldom raised beef to butcher, so when we got sick and tired of pork and chicken she bought chuck roast or hamburger. She always had to buy staples and cleaning supplies. We had toothpaste when she could afford it, but when the cash was skimpy a mix of salt and soda did just as well. I am sure everyone has laughed about the comedy routines concerning the Sears catalog in the outdoor johnny, but this was no joke. There was no use to waste money on toilet paper if you did not have an indoor bathroom and had last year’s catalog handy.
Martha Ferguson