An Unpublished Writer, 1922-2013 #2.3

This is part three of my mom’s view of The Great Depression.

THE GREAT DEPRESSION
Part 3 – Housing

There were darker sides to those years. We lived in rented houses and we moved a lot. Whenever you saw a house with cheaper rent, that was equal to or slightly better than the one you currently lived in, you moved. The houses we lived in were not hovels, but by today’s standards they wouldn’t even rate a zero. They were heated with coal stoves, and we had a coal/wood range in the kitchen and a kerosene stove for summer. Sometimes the furniture fit and sometimes it didn’t.

The curtains and window shades usually caused a problem. Does anyone remember curtain stretchers? For those who don’t, they were collapsible frames with dozens of viciously sharp little tacks pointing out. The curtains of that era were mostly the coarse lace type which, even as I write, are back in style. The modern ones are permanent press. Ours were cotton, which meant they had to be dunked in starch, put on the stretchers wet, and they dried stiff as a board. The red polka dots you saw on them were blood – my blood, because helping with curtain stretching was one of my chores.

Mother had a knack of moving into a house, scouring, disinfecting, and making do. Within a few days it was home. The curtains were up, the linoleum waxed, the furniture in place, and you knew that in a few weeks it would be time to wash the darned (literally and figuratively) curtains all over again. Mother washed curtains for fun and relaxation.

One of the horrors of moving into another house was the fear of bedbugs. These little creatures have another name, I am sure, but we called them exactly what they were. Mother and Sis would conduct a minute inspection of the house, and then, just to be sure, start scrubbing. Since this was before the days of many insecticides, kerosene was the best cure they knew. Sis and Grandad moved into one house that had seen better and cleaner days, and Sis took a chicken feather and a can of kerosene and went over every crack and crevice in the house. Then she put a small jar lid of the stuff under everything in the house on legs. We were very careful with the use of matches for several weeks. Flies swarmed , particularly on farms, and curls and sheets of fly paper were everywhere, the fly swatter was kept handy, and a Flit sprayer was always full. Mother hated flies, calling them “nasty, dirty things.” I do not remember ever having had roaches. They wouldn’t have dared cross the threshold.

If the houses needed repair Daddy, with the help of Grandad and his brothers, did the work. It was a safe bet that the landlord couldn’t or wouldn’t, not with rent averaging $10 a month. Very few of the houses had indoor plumbing, sometimes not even water in the kitchen. The houses did have electricity, except the farm above Jeff. Heat in the winter was scary, because Mother and Daddy tried to lay in a winter’s supply of coal, four tons at least. But sometimes they couldn’t afford this, so as the coal pile shrank, tension mounted.

Strange things were done in the interests of making ends meet during the Depression. At one point, when we lived on Missouri Avenue, the electric bills shot up unbearably. Everybody blamed a new manager of the power company and his name became a curse word every time the electric bill came. So with Depression-born ingenuity, a way was devised to “jump” the meter. Meters were inside the houses in those days and were not sealed. A wire with a clip on each end was attached to some vital area at the bottom of the meter, which caused the meter not to register usage. The trick was not to leave it on so much the power company became suspicious, and above all, not to have it on when the meter reader came to call.

I had whooping cough the winter we lived on Missouri Avenue two doors from Daddy’s sister and brother-in-law, Lily and Roy. I probably had rheumatic fever too, because my heart became very irregular. So I spent the first of two winters in bed, driving everybody crazy. It was bitter cold and in an effort to conserve coal, my bed was moved into the dining room where the big “parlor furnace” was. The meter was up over a china cabinet in the kitchen.

One day the jumper was on when a knock came at the back door, followed by “Meter man!” In theory Mother should have been able to jerk the long string hanging from the jumper and it should have fallen down behind the cabinet out of sight. But this time it didn’t work. Calling out “Just a minute!” she jerked and yanked, but the jumper wouldn’t budge. This was a major crisis, because the penalty for jumping a meter was the immediate discontinuance of electric service.

Mother called through the back door, which fortunately was solid wood and not glass, that she was bathing her sick daughter and that he would have to wait. She sailed through the house, out the front door, leaving me cowering in bed with my heart thumping worse than ever. Mother was slightly over five feet tall, and the front gate wouldn’t open, so she leaped it in one bound, no small feat for someone her height. She sprinted two doors up the street to Uncle Roy’s . He was a tall man, and they raced back down the street, both jumped the gate, Roy got the jumper off, hid in the bedroom, and Mother let the meter man in. I am sure he knew what was taking place, because Mother was gasping for breath after her hurdle and dash. In the meantime the neighbor across the street called my Aunt Lilly, wanting to know what was wrong at Mabel’s that caused her and Roy to keep jumping the gate.

I don’t know what Lily told her, but I am sure it was not the truth.

Martha Ferguson