An Unpublished Writer, 1922-2013 #2.4

Here’s the final installment of my mom’s Great Depression recollections. Today would have been her 91st birthday.

THE GREAT DEPRESSION
Part 4 – Enterprise, Entertainment, & The Larger World

One summer Daddy and Roy [Roy was my grandfather’s brother-in-law. – Jim] decided to run a huckster wagon. For those of you who are unfamiliar with that term, they became house-to-house peddlers. We must have had a surplus of produce in the garden that year, because every morning they would load up the vegetables on the old truck and sally forth to make money. The problem was that they felt so sorry for the would-be-buyers that had no money, they sold on tick and literally gave away their profit, as well as their produce. That venture was doomed from the start.

Daddy and Roy always reminded me somewhat of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. Nobody in the family were really drinkers, but when boredom set in they did strange things. During Prohibition somebody in the family was always making a batch of home brew, which smelled good and tasted vile. One time they made a batch and stored it in Lily’s cellar. While Roy and family were eating dinner one night something popped – and kept on popping. The home brew blew up, all of it. Lilly nearly killed her husband and her brother, the neighborhood reeked, and the cellar had to be cleaned and thoroughly aired out.

Then they took a step into the world of crime. For fun they decided to set up a still and make the real stuff – to sell, of course not to drink! The location of the still was a real winner – one of our upstairs bedrooms. Mother was a total non-drinker and put up an awful fight, but this time Daddy won. Mother kept all the shades pulled, peeped out the windows at five minute intervals, and got so upset they dismantled the still in a couple of weeks. That was another non-profit venture.

For several years we lived fairly close to the Pennsylvania Railroad station. This was in the days of the hobo. Most of the men who rode the rods were simply men who could not find work in their home area and took to the open road in hopes they would get a job and be able to send money home. They did not beg. They always asked if they could work for a meal. I am sure that occasionally some lifted a chicken off the roost or a pair of overalls and a shirt off the clothes line, but if they did they needed it.

Daddy used to swear our house was marked, and that every hobo that jumped off the freight cars headed straight for our door. I know Mother cooked too much intentionally, so she would have something to feed them. She leaned heavily on bean soup, chili, vegetable soup, and baked a lot of fruit cobblers from the stuff she had canned in the summer. More times than I could count I came home from school to find a scruffy looking man sitting on the back steps eating his fill.

We made our own amusements back then. It wasn’t a matter of choice, but of necessity. Television was years away. Radios were fairly common, ranging from the small table model to the large console. We had a Majestic at one time that had a green “magic eye” for accurate tuning purposes. The first radio I can remember hearing was when I was about five, and it belonged to a relative with more money than we had. We went over to hear a program called “Amos and Andy” and everybody thought it was hilarious. I didn’t – couldn’t make a bit of sense out of it.

Radios had to have antennas. The common folk had a stick on the roof with a wire connecting it and the radio. The aristocrats had a silver ball on a pole on the roof braced with guy wires. Brilliant child that I was, I thought the music and the people were in the silver ball. I never did figure out how we had the same music and the same people in that stick on our house. I still have never solved that mystery.

We also had a Victrola, a wind-up record player, in a rather pretty cabinet. Something happened that it wasn’t working too well and Daddy kept forgetting to tinker with it. One night while he was at work and we were bored, Mother decided it needed oiling. The only kind of oil she could find was linseed oil. Now that is pretty gummy stuff, but Mother gave it a good shot. When Daddy was told what we had done, he became rather upset. Needless to say, the old Victrola never spun another platter.

I spent another winter in bed when we lived on the un-electrified farm above Jeff. I know I nearly finished off the whole family with my demands for something to do, because in spite of having to be in bed I did not really feel that bad. The thing that saved my sanity, and probably that of everyone else, was the Jeffersonville Public Library. The librarian was, for many years, a tiny old lady with badly bowed legs and a wig when wigs were not “in.” It was a bad wig, rather red and always crooked. But she was a jewel. Mother or Daddy would take a grocery bag in and she would fill it up. I read things too old, too young, and sometimes totally unsuitable. I don’t think she realized a lot of the time just what she was giving me. When Daddy had some extra cash he bought me magazines; to Mother’s horror, True Detective, True Romance and Silver Screen. Whatever it was, I read it.

A lot of the amusements at that time were church oriented. The little Presbyterian church we attended had a minister from Kentucky. He finally persuaded the stern elders to let us have “play parties” in the church basement, and we did square dancing, only none of us called it that. Your entertainment also came from friends and family. The neighbors would gather at my grandmother’s big kitchen table when I was younger and would play pinochle till all hours. I never learned to play that, so I curled up in a warm corner and read. Uncle Warren was determined he was going to teach me two things: pinochle and how to use a slide rule. He failed on both counts.

There was a lot of family visiting, especially on Sunday, and I still miss that. It was a “come and spend the day” type of visiting, and that is exactly what you did. The adults talked, the kids sat on porch swings and sang, played checkers, shot marbles. Young people today would think that was not very exciting fare.

Being an only child, someone was always coming to spend the weekend with me, or I was going to spend the weekend with them. Some of us were semi-musical (I played at the guitar) and we harmonized on anything. When I went to my friend Juanita’s, she, her mother and I sang three-part harmony as we did the dishes. “Froggie Went A-Courtin’,” in all its many verses, was our top number, followed closely by “Tell Me Why.”

And when all else failed, you went for a ride – if the car had some gas in it. You might be lucky to get an ice cream cone – if Daddy or Mother had a few stray nickels. One thing about growing up in Southern Indiana, you could always go for a ride up in Floyd Knobs or along the river. In the spring, when rains were heavy, you checked the water level faithfully. At crucial times of the year you heard over and over again, “How high is the river today?”

It wasn’t all fun and games by any means. I know the adults worried frantically about things that barely touched me. I remember vividly the radio reports of the terrible droughts of the `30’s, and the newsreels of the Okies leaving their dust-buried farms. One summer, when we lived on the farm above Jeff, the dust was so thick it seemed that half of the West must have settled on Indiana or at least passed through. All that summer the air was thick with yellow haze and Mother and Sis dusted night and morning.

That summer was the first time I ever saw Mother put bread on the table in the wrapper. It was so hot, windy and dusty that if you put the bread on a plate it was toasted and dirty by the time the meal was over. We went to Illinois during one of those summers and were sickened by the parched pastures and the dead, swollen cattle along the road. It wasn’t nearly that bad at home and we counted ourselves very fortunate.

After Jim Bob and I married we compared notes on our growing-up years. His were much like mine. He grew up on farms in Johnson County, with “waste not, want not” the order of the day. They did a lot of truck gardening, taking their produce to the Farmer’s Market in Indianapolis, and you would have thought he would never have wanted to see another garden. But he always loved to garden and was very proud of his lovely tomatoes and everything else he raised.

I have always had a slight distrust of banks, brought on by the Crash I am sure. I suppose I’d really feel safer with my bits and pieces of money buried in the back yard. But don’t start digging, I’m living dangerously, and it is in the bank. I still keep an eye on the stock market, which is ungodly high, and I hope nothing like the Depression ever happens again. I know there are uncounted numbers of homeless people today, and I wish there weren’t. Herbert Hoover’s motto of “a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage” didn’t work out. I guess I would like to see a sturdy house with a good roof , a good bed and no hunger for every man, woman and child in the world.

Martha Ferguson
August 14, 1996