A recent New York Times article, “Culinary History of the Great Depression,” churned rough memories among some local residents – depending on age, or their recall of history.
In Nextipac, such recall was twisted by effects of a recent Telmex “refinement” that gave many modems and wi-fis a set of hick-ups. A bumpy introduction to last week’s “depression” column. Stirring echoes for some folks who grew up during a relentless time.
On one hand President-elect Herbert Hoover boasted in 1928 that the United States was leading the way to the conquest of world poverty. That stumbled past a realistic notice of the world’s growing challenges. Hoover family evening meals called for dinner jackets.
Yet thousands of families, due to be hit by disguised dislocations, would be forever shattered once Hoover was president, and bread lines were about to seem a permanent fixture. For what seemed like economic warfare was about to be waged. Still, some lucky folks were finding jobs – jobs that paid well by employers treating workers decently – for an abrupt while.
But circumstances and poor decisions – many by Hoover, even his allies said – tore apart families, farms, businesses. Children lost older kin. Lingering poor health made worse by bad weather claimed relatives of all ages. Bad weather taking worse turns. As vast dust storms hit rugged peoples’ lungs, and killed their livestock.
Grasshoppers, great gray clouds-full – summoned by dry weather – arrived to eat everything: sturdy ancient trees and fence posts as well as drying laundry. Relatives of people who survived the ‘30s on the plains still tell stories of how swarms of hoppers descended on ranches, eating not just fields, but farm implements and household items. Fields of corn, alfalfa, oats would disappear swiftly. Conventional wisdom said that hoppers liked salt: that’s why they would eat the shirt off your back, anything anywhere that sweat landed. Some talk of grasshoppers chewing away wooden tongues of horse-drawn equipment to get at the salt of the sweat soaked into the wood. That’s why chewed axe and hoe handles went so fast. It was easy to remember being hit in the face by grasshoppers smashed over small-town cement roads where roads were slick with smashed insects. There were reports of freight trains unable to get up hills because hoppers’ bodies so thoroughly “greased” the tracks.
I was maybe four-and-a-half, five years old. The family I lived with then had five hired men. Usually in the morning one of them would saddle a quiet gelding pony. When someone had time, he’d lead me for a short ride. Left alone, I took hard hold of the docile pony’s tail, and pulling, jumped up to plant my feet on the gelding’s rear hocks. I’d carry a thin piece of kindling in my teeth. The kindling let me reach over the pony’s rump and paw the rear saddle skirting toward me. That was a major step. Grabbing that skirting strings, I slowly hauled myself up onto the pony’s rump, rested a minute, then pulled myself toward and onto the saddle. A major feat. At that moment I was a ”free” rider.
I had a good piece of rope for practicing roping fence posts, one of the five family dogs, even geese, turkeys, the smallest calves. Hired men showed me tricky ways to use rope and pony together.
Then everything took a sudden curling dive. Abruptly, we had only two hired men. Every-one began working hard long hours. I milked the most docile cows. And cranked the milk separator, filling separate heavy cream and milk containers.
With a short shovel, I cleaned cow and horse stalls. Like the men, I lugged away pails of manure. I weeded vegetables to feed the house. Herded calves with my pony. Then one day I looked down from a taller bay gelding at a swiftly passing year’s end.
My mother lost where I was headed. I silently aimed at a trail into the forever stretch of the Great Plains. That would come. First my mother took an abrupt place in my life. She had a new husband. A second generation Italian-American. He said Mussolini would never stay hooked to Hitler. He beat me with a heavy metal insect-swatter. Three times, at parties, he told good friends of theirs how he would be a widely known success if only he wasn’t “burdened” by a wife and kid.
Three times I argued her out of divorcing him. Where would we go? Where would needed money come from? They had me enrolled in a Catholic school. Though she was working – at our small town’s up-scale women’s store – she and I couldn’t live on her salary and my thin earnings. She wanted to move to a large city. Depression echoes already shaved away the money she and her husband earned together. I saved money from pay I got from one of the town’s newspapers. Summer times, I earned more money by helping repave the town’s winter-smashed streets. In the local Carnegie Library I read of the vast waiting Great Plains. I carefully wrote plans.
(The second of a series.)