(As we contemplate a new Depression, some notes on the last one from a child of that glorious era.)
Three meals at our boarding house cost $1. We didn’t go there but once a year (for a Sunday dinner).
In Iowa a young man came out to service our car in a day when service stations earned their name. As he leaned across cleaning our windshield, his Phi Beta Kappa key dangled from a chain in his bib overalls.
In Kansas City a family friend in my hearing told dad about his lunch on days he had no money. “I went to this little café. The waitress knew me well. On days I told her I was broke, she brought me a big coffee cup of hot water, the ketchup bottle and a basket of crackers. With the ketchup I made tomato soup with the hot water and ate that with the crackers. A Hoover lunch. And it was free.”
He was an architect.
A woman told my mother, “I just went to visit and looking up to me was this beautiful baby, 10 months old. He had curly black hair and black eyes. And he looked at me and smiled. Florence I had to take him! Do you understand?”
She said she understood, “But how are . . .”
“I don’t know! I don’t know! Taking care of him will be a huge problem for us. But just look at him. How could anyone leave such a beautiful baby in the orphanage?”
When she invited my mother to go with her to the orphanage “just to visit,” mother declined
The little adopted baby grew up and graduated from Texas A and M. When he invited me, a teenager, to come visit, I declined.
Some Sunday mornings, dad had me bicycle to one of the local bakeries (this town of 10K had several). He gave me a nickel for a dozen donuts. They would still be warm and their grease spotted the paper bag. Cycling back home their scent blew directly into my face and it was wonderfully maddening. Have always wondered if that nickel bought 13 (a baker’s dozen) donuts.
The Whites lived across the street. Elder son Dick was 3 years older than I so his old clothes and shoes came to me. After I outgrew them, the clothes went to John, his brother and 3 years my younger. It was OK. None of the three of us gave a damn about clothes.
I thought Santa Claus was a haberdasher. Each Christmas I got either a sweater, a shirt, a pair of shoes, or some trousers from the old geek.
Roosevelt’s visited on the nation a minimum wage: 25 cents an hour and my daddy cursed FDR for this Bolshevikism. In 1939, the local banker called daddy a Bolshevik for taking out an FHA loan to build a house.
Plus de choses change le plus ils restent le meme.
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