An Unpublished Writer, 1922-2013 #2.4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

Previous posts in this series of my mom’s writing:

WORLD WAR II, WELDING AND ME!

THE GREAT DEPRESSION
Part 1 – The Family & Food

THE GREAT DEPRESSION
Part 2 – Working

THE GREAT DEPRESSION
Part 3 – Housing

A Dangerous Schism

I guess Jeffrey Goldberg created some problems for himself when he made himself the arbiter of who can and who cannot remain “inside the Jewish tent.” Probably, he is guilty of little more than seeing red when he read a Tweet by President Carter’s National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski that claimed that the Obama/Kerry team is the best foreign policy duo since Poppy Bush and James Baker. Z-Big also noted that Congress is getting embarrassed by Benjamin Netanyahu’s efforts to “dictate” U.S. foreign policy.

Mr. Goldberg interpreted those comments as a slur against the Jewish people and erroneously responded, “Jews run America, suggests ex-national security adviser.”

Of course, that brief retort contains many logical errors and fallacious assumptions:

1. That Benjamin Netanyahu is representative of all Jews.
2. That Benjamin Netanyahu isn’t trying to bully American politicians into following his preferred foreign policy.
3. That Benjamin Netanyahu not getting his way is somehow proof that Jews run U.S. foreign policy.
4. That some members of Congress are not embarrassed (or annoyed) by Netanyahu’s efforts.

When a member of the J Street staff upbraided Goldberg for falsely accusing Z-Big of anti-Semitism, Goldberg responded haughtily, “I continuously defend @jstreetdotorg’s place inside the Jewish tent. But the behavior of its employees makes such defenses difficult.”

He, thereby, aroused the wrath of a lot of people who don’t think Goldberg has any right to decide who belongs inside the Jewish tent.

To me, this whole controversy is just a microcosm of a bigger issue, which is that Israel’s government is straining their country’s relationship with the American people, and with the American Jewish community more specifically, because they are now politically misaligned.

If the misalignment were only about the treatment of the Palestinians, the problem would be bad enough. But the disconnect is much broader than that. Netanyahu represents an unreconstructed neo-conservative policy in the broader Middle East that is thoroughly discredited here in the United States, particularly among liberal Jews. And, by attacking the Democratic administration is such harsh tones, and by nakedly endorsing the candidacy of Mitt Romney, Netanyahu has turned the vast majority of American Jews into his political enemies. The longer Israel goes on supporting right-wing parties, the more friction is going to be created between Israel and the American Jewish community. And this is certainly exacerbated when right-wing Israeli politicians interject themselves not only into our political fights but our presidential elections.

If you believe, as I do, that Israel cannot afford to be politically isolated from the United States and the American Jewish community, then you will agree that Benjamin Netanyahu is an existential threat to Israel’s future. You can be fervently pro-Israel and still not disagree with that statement.

Snowden 1st Big Winner In Time Mag Person Of The Year Poll

(But not for long. Read the comments.)

=============================================

I find these results very interesting:

Do you?

I also find the following percentages very interesting:

Edward Snowden: 72%

Barack Obama: 0.2%

In other words, for the kind of people who vote in this sort of poll…people who vote in elections, most likely…Edward Snowden is so far 360 times more deserving of the Person Of The Year award than is Barack Obama, who is tied w/the Koch Bros. in terms of popularity. And Snowden is 720 times more popular than Chris Christie, who came in at 0.1%.

This after truly massive media attempts to brand Snowden as a traitor and Christie as the next coming of The Holy President.

Hmmmm….

Maybe Bill de Blasio’s NYC mayoral election wasn’t so strange after all.

Hmmmm….

Of course, Time being a major government media complex cog, they also include a loophole.

As always, TIME’s editors will choose the Person of the Year, but that doesn’t mean readers shouldn’t have their say.

The PermaGov disclaimer writ large.

Translation?

Sure.

The U.S. is of course a democracy and alla that, but if …harrumph, harrumph…if we disagree with what the populace wants, we will choose the winner. You don’t like it? Buy another magazine…errr, ahhh…country.

Now there is always of the course the possibility of a curveball fix…build up Snowden to further tear down Obama, etc., etc., etc. I notice that Hillary Clinton isn’t even on the list of approved candidates.

HMMMMMmmmm!!!

Very interesting.

Bet on it.

Later…

AG

Can Wendy Davis Win?

I doubt Wendy Davis can win the upcoming gubernatorial contest in Texas, but I think the result hinges a little less on who her allies are than on who her opponent winds up being and whether or not Davis can appeal to a sufficient number of white women. If her opponent is an imbecile, that’ll be worth a couple of points. But the real challenge is eating into the Republicans’ overwhelming advantage with white voters. I don’t think Davis can do much about her lack of appeal to conservative white men, but she just might be able to make a connection with a not insignificant number of white women.

She’ll start out with some support from younger women who are concerned about their reproductive rights and are less culturally conservative than their parents. But, to make meaningful inroads, she’ll need to connect with married white women. An insensitive male opponent would assist her in that effort.

Finally, she’ll have to have a great turnout operation and clean up with the Latino vote. All the stars would have to align, but it’s not out of the question.

What We Definitely Don’t Need

I kind of like Sen. Mike Enzi of Wyoming. He’s a conservative Republican, and I think many of his votes have been unconscionable. He’s gone along for the ride with all the obstruction of the Obama presidency. But I like how he conducts himself. I like his low-key manner. I like how he runs a committee hearing when he is in the majority and how he operates when he is in the minority. He seems like a straight-shooter who is much more interested in legislating that he is in running his mouth. But, that also means about the only way to make Sen. Enzi interesting and newsworthy is for Dick Cheney’s daughter to challenge him in a primary.

I have to echo this gentleman’s observations:

Cheney is fighting for the same voters who have sent Enzi to the Senate three times. In the Senate, he has voted with Republicans more than 90 percent of the time in the past 10 years. While he’s shown willingness to compromise, that’s not necessarily a death knell in Wyoming, unlike in some other red states.

“Ms. Cheney, when she started out, criticized [Enzi] for being willing to compromise with the Democrats,” Republican state Sen. Charles Scott said. “A lot of people out here thought, ‘Jeez, the problem with Washington is they won’t compromise when they need to.’”

I don’t know how a normal human being can look at Congress and think that what we need is less compromise. It’s comforting to know that, at least in Wyoming, there are some Republican folks who put a higher value on Mike Enzi’s style than Liz Cheney’s.

On Critics

I agree with Gershom Gorenberg that Israelis, and even their prime minister, have come by their post-traumatic stress quite honestly. I also understand that it helps the United States’ bargaining position vis-a-vis Iran when Israel is unsatisfied and asking for much, much more. The same is true of Congress, including some Democratic hardliners. When they make credible threats to introduce new sanctions on Iran, it allows John Kerry to make a better case for some kind of interim agreement. So, I am willing to tolerate a certain degree of criticism of the deal that the P5+1 made with Iran over the weekend.

There are other critics, however, whose opposition, while entirely predictable, is far harder to stomach. Jennifer Rubin’s analysis, for example, treats the interim deal as though it is a final settlement. It’s the kind of sophistry she is known for.

I’m tempted to write something in Michael Tomasky’s vein. I feel like yelling at the people who supported war in Iraq (and Syria) but now offer criticism of negotiations with Iran. Don’t they realize that they are always wrong about everything?

If every instinct that John Bolton and Sarah Palin have is wrong, couldn’t you develop a fantastically successful foreign policy simply by doing the opposite of whatever they suggest?

I think you could get by quite well with a strategy like that.

I do think, however, that Netanyahu’s Agreement Anxiety Disorder is “is so intense it should disqualify him from public office,” and that “the poor man is not thinking clearly.” He’s going beyond playing the bad cop to Obama’s good cop. He’s creating ill-will toward his country from millions of people who support the party preferred by American Jews. There are twelve Jewish senators, none of whom are Republicans. Twenty-one out of twenty-two Jewish members of the House are Democrats. And Netanyahu is accusing their president of being some kind of disloyal idiot. This is not a way to maintain strong American support for Israel. It’s just not. Maybe some of our Jewish readers can chime in here and tell me I’m off base, but my strong impression is that most American Jews are pretty angry with how Netanyahu is behaving. Some of the other core groups in the Democratic coalition may pay less attention and feel less strongly about these issues, but they can’t be happy either. We elected Obama to pursue diplomacy and make war a last resort. He’s doing what we asked him to do.

Essay On Being Poor Goes Viral

This initially obscure blog post went completely viral, especially after it was picked up by the Huffington Post. It’s written by a woman who claims to be poor. She has two jobs (one as a cook), two kids, and takes a full load of college classes. The essay is about what it is like to live in poverty and why poor people often make terrible decisions that seem nonsensical to outsiders and which seldom elicit much sympathy. It’s hard to explain why it touched off such a nerve with people, but it is strangely compelling. Maybe it is because it is very well-written, which is not what you would expect considering the life she describes herself living.

Here’s a sample paragraph that, unlike most of the piece, doesn’t seem quite autobiographical.

Poverty is bleak and cuts off your long-term brain. It’s why you see people with four different babydaddies instead of one. You grab a bit of connection wherever you can to survive. You have no idea how strong the pull to feel worthwhile is. It’s more basic than food. You go to these people who make you feel lovely for an hour that one time, and that’s all you get. You’re probably not compatible with them for anything long-term, but right this minute they can make you feel powerful and valuable. It does not matter what will happen in a month. Whatever happens in a month is probably going to be just about as indifferent as whatever happened today or last week. None of it matters. We don’t plan long-term because if we do we’ll just get our hearts broken. It’s best not to hope. You just take what you can get as you spot it.

As you might expect, the essay made a lot of people angry. Why complain about the gas it takes to drive three hours to the nearest Planned Parenthood when you’re wasting your money and your health on cigarettes? Why take such a defeatist attitude and complain about your plight?

But most people don’t have conservative lizard brains and understood that the essay was supposed to explain what it is like to be poor, not to justify bad or irresponsible decisions. The outpouring of support was so strong that she drew in the equivalent of her annual income in PayPal donations.

I am not sure what to make of that, but it is an interesting thing to read.

Odds & Ends

It’s going to be an exciting couple of months for comet-watchers. Comet ISON is approaching the sun and, if it survives, it may create quite a show as it boomerangs back around toward us. Then, in January, Comet Siding Spring is going to come so close to Mars that the Martian environment will be enveloped in its tail. I’m glad that that is happening there, and not here.

Apparently, Sultan Qaboos bin Said, the monarch of Oman, played a a key role in the U.S.-Iran negotiations. He travels with his own orchestra.

A loya jirga in Afghanistan has approved a Bilateral Security Agreement with the United States and urged President Hamid Karzai to sign it. The Taliban referred to the agreement as “slavery.”

I don’t understand the point of rooting for the N.Y. Jets.

It looks like a winter storm is going to disrupt people’s travel plans on the East Coast.

When it comes to Iran, I feel like Benjamin Netanyahu is the boy who cried wolf. He keeps yelling “danger, danger,” but fewer and fewer people take him seriously. Frankly, I think all the hyperventilating might really about something else entirely.

How do you arrest a man 62 times for trespassing at his place of work? That’s messed up.

A philosophical question: if Al Sharpton says something that doesn’t fit the right-wing narrative, does it make a sound?

What’s on your mind today?

This Is Why We Fight

I don’t care that Mary Stamper “chose” to have 11 kids even though she doesn’t have a steady job with health benefits, or that Gary Gross has no job, smokes, and drank so much that he damaged his liver by the age of 36. I don’t care that Ronald Hudson has diabetes, five kids, and an income below $15,000. All I care about is that they are eligible for Medicaid in Kentucky thanks to ObamaCare. It’s not my responsibility to pass moral judgment on other people’s life choices; it’s my responsibility to make sure that everyone who needs to see a doctor can see a doctor. I don’t think there is a single political issue that should take precedence before this one, so I am ecstatic that these folks are signed up for Medicaid. This is exactly why I am became politically active.

It would be nice if some of these people decided to vote for the Democratic Party, but that is not the point of these reforms. The point is to help them whether or not we get any political credit for helping them.

But, at least one of them seems to get it.

Soon, Ronald Hudson walked in.

“Okay,” Lively began. “What Hudsons are you kin to?”

“R.T., Uncle Lenny . . .” said Hudson, a skinny 35-year-old who worked as an assistant director at the senior center and had just been released from the hospital after a blood-sugar spike.

He’d never had insurance before and said his hospital bills were up to $23,000 at this point.

“Good night,” Lively said, tapping in his information.

Kids: five. Salary: about $14,000 before taxes.

“You’re going to qualify for a medical card,” she told Hudson.

“Well, thank God,” Hudson said, laughing. “I believe I’m going to be a Democrat.”

Lively printed out his papers.

“RONALD’s Health Care Coverage Options,” one of them read.

“Oh, man,” Hudson said.

Hopefully, Mr. Hudson will be as good as his word and will vote against Mitch McConnell next November.

The New Obstruction

One way the Republicans can still obstruct nominations is to focus on hearings in committee. They can refuse to grant unanimous consent for committees to hold hearings in the first place, or they can refuse to show up for committee hearings, thereby denying a quorum for those committees. I don’t know how far they will be willing to go with these tactics, but I assume they will at least be willing to use them in a handful of targeted cases.

I think that the Senate Democrats have the ability to change the rules on hearings and quorums, but I don’t have a clear idea about how willing they will be to exercise those options. My guess is that they will tolerate a modest degree of obstruction but will strike back with fury if the Republicans try to make such obstruction a routine replacement for their filibustering tactics.