Excerpts from an entry by Beulah (Deibel) Hendricks in a book celebrating the centennial of the city of Walker, Minnesota:
"My parents Wilbert and Julia May Deibel purchased the farm where I still live in the fall of 1922. The home was a two-story log house with a very small parcel of open land. The area had been logged off so there was lots of brush and only a fe trees... The Jack Rodekuhr family still occupied our house, so we stayed at the Patrick Henry Hotel. I had never seen a flush toilet before and my mother had a difficult time trying to keep me from pulling the chain just to see how it worked.My father farmed with horses and we never owned a car We walked most everywhere we went... Back then, during the busy seasons, neighbors worked together, sharing equipment. During the depression years we had many neighborhood get-togethers, such as hard-time parties, when we wore our worst clothes so no one was embarrassed if their shoes or clothes had holes or patches... No one had money but we shared food and all had fun together. Some of my fondest memories are of those times...The first school bus I rode in was an old Model-T truck with a wooden body. We sat on benches along the side and in winter, there was a manifold heater pipe down the middle of the bus on the floor. Never much heat but an odor of burnt rubber if our overshoes got against it..."
I don't think most Americans nowadays can quite grasp what life was like in the Great Depression. Posted because the "hard-time party" concept was such a great idea for socializing at a time of widespread poverty.
I have heard precious stories about those hard times from my East Tennessee grandmother, uncles, and father (who was born in '39). They were sharecroppers in the backwoods of that ridge and valley part of the Appalachians. My uncle would often say, "We was so poor, we didn't even know there was a Depression!"
ReplyDeleteLike being on the football team or serving together in war, I imagine that hard times have a way of bonding people who are sharing the same difficulties. I have often read of folks who were willing to share their food with others who were struggling. Of course, biscuits and gravy are not all that expensive to make, so it became a staple of my dad's family. (In fact, my dad said he thought he could count on one hand the number of times that his mother didn't prepare gravy and biscuits when he was at home--he married at the age of 21. He said one of the times grandma didn't cook, he went on to school, but upon returning home, he found that he had a new brother!)
As bad as the Depression was, I think in some ways it "made" America. I doubt the generations after that would have done so well, for we are too used to the government taking care of retirement, job loss, etc. But those in those hard years...they had bitten off more than they could chew...but chewed it anyway.