Editor’s Note: The bitter cold of winter triggers memories of past winters. The following article, written in January of 1983, is a warm memory of the late Irene Ambler from the winters she experienced during the Great Depression some ninety years ago. The Breeze hopes Irene’s memories will produce some warmth during the present cold snap.
By Irene Ambler
If anyone should labor under the misunderstanding that the Great Depression lasted only a short time such as a summer vacation or a weekend or a few weeks or months, then they really aren’t in the know concerning those hard-up years. The stock market crash occurred on October 29, 1929 (Black Friday), and actually continued until the summer of 1940, at which time the United States believed itself to being a state of national emergency because of the worsening war in Europe.
How well I remember hearing Franklin D. Roosevelt assuring England, “You furnish the men and we will furnish the material,” and at the same time assuring mothers that “Not one of your sons will set foot on foreign soil.” Mr. Roosevelt made regular radio talks to inform citizens of international affairs and perhaps to stifle the fear we all had down deep that we, too, would before long be engaged in the conflict which, because of its very nature, was destined to ensnare the world in warfare which would end ultimately in the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
It was World War II which ended the Great Depression. It was the manufacture of weapons and ammunition and ships and planes – instruments of death – which put Americans back to work. Of course, not everyone got to work very long because during the whole tragedy of war nearly 300,000 young Americans did not return; and untold thousands returned as either physical or emotional cripples. It seems an undeniable fact that we cannot enjoy peace and prosperity at the same time. That possibility frightens me, especially at this particular time when millions are out of work, countries all over the world are suffering financial disaster, sabers are rattling continually, soup lines are forming in this country, people are going to get paid for not growing crops, millions of people just don’t want to work, foreclosures on homes and businesses are at an exceedingly high rate, and robberies are occurring with an alarming frequency.
All of these things make me wonder if we are on the threshold of another Great Depression, which, if it comes, will be a lot worse than the first one. I hear a lot about “recession;” but when you hear of all the poor people who have lost their jobs and have exhausted their unemployment insurance; when you hear of those unfortunate homeowners who can’t meet their mortgage payments and pay their taxes; when you ponder the cost of medical bills bills and utilities and food; and the shameful waste of natural resources and the waste in our governments, then it is pretty hard to manufacture a silver lining and dismiss the depression idea as merely gloom and doom thinking.
I started out to write about the depression of the 1930’s; and here I am trying to conjure up another one. That is not actually the case. When I started some time ago to write about my experience during that other depression, I was doing it merely to share my thoughts with a lot of people who went through those years and to tell the younger folks how it was. Now, however, I believe that people had better get into the mood of “making-do with nothing,” because I honestly believe that everyone will have to revise his lifestyle greatly in order to survive in case we do have another depression.
Survival without, or almost without, money was difficult; but survive we did by making the most of everything we had, wasting nothing, helping each other, and trusting that God had a better day planned for all of us. You know, I don’t remember seeing very much written about, or advertised about, dieting back in those days. Come to think about it, I can’t remember seeing very many fat people. Most people had a lean and hungry look. A lot of people had to take commodities from government agencies. Some people got plenty of butter and cheese. They also gave out flour and beans and other staples. Many fathers had to work on public works programs part-time, some receiving less than twenty dollars per month. I believe the most paid was around thirty-seven dollars per month for fathers of large families. I may be wrong about the amounts of wages; but I am not far off.
Summertime was pretty easy during the Great Depression, especially for youngsters. We got to go swimming in nearby clean streams unpolluted by public sewage. We got to go on a lot of picnics. We played dolls and ball, skated and bicycled, hike and camped, and went fishing. Most people who lived in the country and in small towns like Hurricane had big gardens and chickens. A lot of families, including ours, had cows. In the summertime, we pastured our cows in either Bernie Henderson’s or Harbour’s pastures for about a dollar or dollar and a half per month. We would go to the pasture field to do the milking. Most kids knew how to milk; and the milking was usually also an opportunity to play some catch ball. We had plenty of fresh green vegetables and eggs and milk and butter during the summer from lettuce and green onion time clear into the fall and early winter with the turnips and kale and turnip and mustard greens. Our diet would be a pediatrician’s dream. We had all the basic seven needed nutrients, plus generous helpings of homemade ice cream and home-canned fruits and juices.
Yes, summers were nice and pleasant and comfortable and lots of fun. And although I really loved cold weather and howling winds and mountains of snow, I will have to admit that, if we suffered any deprivation, it was in winter.
It was in winter that we had to walk a long distance to school. It was in winter that I had to ware those awful long tan stockings and those inch-wide elastic garters. It was also in winter that I had to wear the long underwear with the flap until I was a great big girl. Seems to me in recalling those winters that the snow was deeper, the rain was colder, and the wind more cruel than it had ever been since. Perhaps it was because I never had any galoshes. I can still almost feel that snow sliding into the heels of my shoes, wetting my tan stockings and sometimes my long underwear legs in the process. Of course, it didn’t stay in my shoes very long, because most of the time the soles had holes and the snow would melt and run out.
I hated going to bed at night since the bed was cold as ice because we turned out the fires at night. After we had been under the covers a while, it was very comfortable, though, because we had very warm covers. My mother, my grandmother and I would, every winter, gather up any old woolen clothing we had (which was very well-worn, I tell you); and we would cut and sew together squares of the material by hand and buy dark striped outing material and tack the comforters with big balls of red or green or blue twine.
While summertime milking was fun, wintertime milking was just about the most disagreeable, irritating, tiresome, unwelcome chore which I had to bear. When I was about eleven years old, I made the mistake of learning how to milk a cow, becoming very proficient in the job. I learned to milk in the summer, never dreaming what awaited me come winter and the snow and the wind and the cold, cold rain. We had two cows, which we kept in a small barn on one of our back lots in wintertime. The barn had a loft which held hay for the cows and also ears of corn when we had them. There was a narrow fenced-in lot behind the barn which ran clear back to Virginia Avenue. We raised a lot of corn in our gardens and in the wintertime we would harvest quite a bit of fodder complete with nubbins which we would feed the cows until the supply ran out. I had to milk those cows all the time, because by that time my brother Norman was learning the printing business at the BREEZE office. Well, as I said, we had two cows; and I tell you, one would have been a-plenty. We could well use the milk because we also sold milk to some of our cow-less neighbors for a dime a quart usually in an eight-pound lard bucket which our customers would bring. We would always give them almost a half-gallon – good measure, you know.
Well, I must get back to those cows. The reason I said one was enough was because the barn was so small that I really had trouble at milking time. Their names were Old Red, a milking Shorthorn, and Spot, a really good Holstein. Spot was a perfect lady who would stand still while she was being robbed of her milk; but that Old Red was a demon on hooves.
Usually I would milk Old Red first, then I would tie her up in the farthest corner of the barn, where she would kick and lunge and bawl as if she were being killed, all of this in trying to come over to where I was milking Spot, so she could rob Spot of her food. I never had to tie up Spot because she would stand quietly content, chewing her cud until it was her time to get milked. Another thing about Old Red was that she dearly loved to switch me in the face with her tail, which was so long it dragged on the barn floor and was not always too clean. She liked to dip her trail in the milk bucket, too, when the bucket had some nice warm milk in it. that is when she would sock me in the face with that dirty-well tail.
What she loved to do best was either to kick the bucket when it was full of milk, splashing it all over me, or to put her foot in the bucket, making it impossible for me to remove her foot. If I touched her leg in trying to remove it from the bucket, she would kick the living daylights out of my shin. The only redeeming features of milking in the wintertime were that I got to take the lantern to the barn at night; and I got to put on a pair of men’s four-buckle arctics, which I just loved to wear because it was the only time in winter that my feet were warm. And I dearly loved to carry a lantern because I could warm my hands over it after I had been shucking and breaking nubbins; and besides, I just felt very needed and important in doing such a necessary task as bringing in a good supply of milk.
Another hardship we had to face every winter was frozen water pipes. We did have a bathroom; but unfortunately, we didn’t have a very well-insulated house; and the pipes always froze every winter. Frozen pipes in themselves were not the worst of it. When the pipes froze we didn’t have any water and thus had to go to the little PWA comfort station sitting proudly near the alley at the back of the lot. In warm weather, it wasn’t so bad because you could sit on the throne and look at the stars and the lightning bugs and hear the drone of the jar-flys. You could even imagine what it would be like to be a movie star or to have a boyfriend who was a movie star who played roles as a sheik, or a Royal Canadian Mountie who sang while running down the villain, or maybe a cowboy who rode a horse, played a guitar and sang. You could even try to figure out how Dick Tracy could possibly escape from the crooks who were trying to kill him in the serial movie which was playing and playing and playing at the picture show.
In the winter, when we had to obey the calls of nature when the pipes were frozen, it had to be a matter of utmost urgency before we could travel that path to the little privy out back. Oh, mercy, it was cold! It wasn’t the sitting down that I feared. It was the getting up, because by that time you could be frozen nearly nub. Neither did I appreciate the Sears Roebuck catalogs. We did not feel we could afford the luxury of bathroom tissue both inside and outside the house.
Another hardship we had was in getting the butter churned in cold weather. It would take forever to get butter; and we would sit, not too patiently, up and down, up and down, with the wooden dasher, pouring in a little hot water here and a few grains of soda there until we finally got butter. When we achieved our purpose, the butter was usually sort of white in winter because the cows didn’t have any green grass and had to subsist on hay and fodder and nubbins and mill feed. I never like white butter. Sometimes in winter when the hens weren’t laying, we would have poor man’s gravy, side meat, biscuits, white butter and sorghum molasses. Now, that was a breakfast I could do without; but we realized that we were blessed in having that. Some folks weren’t so lucky.
Well, if we do have another Great Depression, a lot of people will have to learn to exist on a lot less, because survival will become more important than the second or third car, or the wall-to-wall carpet, or the bathroom with the gold fixtures. We will have to learn once again to ‘make-do with nothing”, perhaps even have to learn to eat sorghum molasses. If we have to choose between a depression or a war, let’s all pray for a good, big depression.
One thing for sure: if we do have either a depression or a war, crowds will fill the churches to overflowing; and we’ll hear more praying than we have heard since the Great Depression or World War II.
