M
y mother and father were born in the nineteenth century and my grandparents were born during the Civil War. I was born in 1917. (in Keeseville, NY)
We lived on a farm run by my uncle and grandfather along with their own farm about 4 miles away. I learned to drive a tractor and truck before I was 10 and loved working with horses. Our cellar was cold and our vegetables and fruits could be kept firm all winter. I remember my impatience when we couldn’t eat pears until after Christmas. I also remember eating cherries much too green so I could beat the birds who stole so many of them, We buried carrots in boxes of sand, wove the tops of onions together and hung them, and filled bins with apple and potatoes. My mother liked celery and each fall, Daddy bough two flats of celery which he stored in a dark corner of the cellar where it did not grow much but stayed white and crisp. I don’t know how long one could keep celery this way because we ate it so quickly. The real joy of the cellar was in the rows upon rows of canned fruit, vegetables and meat. One section of the shelves was reserved for pickles, relishes, jams, jellies and homemade ketchup. If you were fortunate enough to have maple trees there would be maple syrup but you could always obtain some by bartering some of your products. In an upstairs dry room, there would be hams and bacon hanging from a rafter. In the winter, a side of beef was often kept frozen in an unheated room. I remember sawing off thin strips of beef that were frozen hard. It was almost paper thin and when cooked in butter made a wonderful gravy to pour over baked potatoes. For some reason we called it frizzle, probably because it curled up when it was fried.
The decade of the twenties was a time when people were filled with a great deal of confidence. People were convinced that good times were here to stay. People had money and spent it freely creating a demand for factory goods and a movement of workers to the cities and large factory towns.That all came to an end with the collapse of the stock market. Many who had left the farms wished they had stayed on the land. I was in college at the time and having lived on a farm couldn’t quite envision people not having plenty of food in the cellar. City life, even village life had so changed that people were trapped by the economic condition of the country. I remember how shocked I was when my roommate, a farm girl, and I went down to Margaret Street and saw the crowds lined up at a soup kitchen and outside the bakery. Ladies with diamonds and fur coats could be seen carrying little tin pails. The bakery gave out hunks of dough that people took home to bake. If they had no fuel, families got together to bake their bread. It was a terrible time Valuable items like furs and diamonds had no value because people had no money to buy them. Bread was the most valuable item for them and God Bless the bakeries that gave away dough. We knew the country was in bad shape but news was not as pervasive as it is today. The radio did have news but not everyone owned a radio or could afford a daily paper. It was only years later that we learned how desperate the situation really was.
The 1929 collapse of the stock market so shocked the people of our country that a historian likened it to the nation having been “struck by a fireball in the night.” Banks closed and people who did have money stashed away were unable to get it. Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected president and his promises brought hope to the country. Roosevelt put people to work in a great variety of ways. We laugh at the W.P.A but they built a lot of roads and bridges, cleaned up messy places and used shovels to good advantage. The C.C.C. was a life saver for young people and created parks, and camping grounds we are still using today. I remember one Sunday when a young man who had been home for the weekend was hitchhiking back to his camp and stopped at our place for a drink of water and we took him back to his camp. It was an attractive log building which a person today would enjoy.
Some of the lessons we learn when we are young stay with us all our lives. When I was just seventeen, I learned something about generosity that still affects my response to people who need something that I have. I was a very nervous college student. There was no money from home. I had one dress and some iffy underwear. I had worked all summer but my wages barely covered my initial expenses. I was determined that I was going to go to college and make it through but how I was to do it, I had no idea. Each week I would need $2.50 for room and kitchen privileges. There would also be expenses like paper which was 5 cents a pad and 5 cents was not easy to come by in the depression years. I worked for my board at whatever tasks I could find. I was strong so I could usually find sidewalks to shovel. I had also learned a great deal about coal fires so I was often able to find a furnace to tend.
Once in a while I was able to get a ride home for the weekend. Often I walked. Fifteen miles with a heavy book bag was not the biggest problem. The biggest problem was the wear and tear on my shoes. In depression years, shoes seldom cost more than three or four dollars but that was an astronomical sum. At that time, Daddy with five children and a wife, was earning $10 a week as a draftsman. It was a day for celebration when he received a $2 raise. Twelve dollars a week was darn good pay then, Prices were low but wages were even lower.
My other expense that was a constant strain all three years of college was food. I lived on the very cheapest items. On those weekends when I was able to get home, my aunt gave me food to take back. Once in a while she gave me a quart can of canned beef. To this day there is nothing to compare with canned beef. The week I carried those goodies back to my room on Cornelia Street, I lived like a king. It often bothered me that there was nothing I could do to pay back this largesse. One day in my first year, I became quite agitated in my arguments that I ought to be able to do something for my aunt. She gave me a very kind lecture, telling me that one can’t go through life paying people back, that there would be many times when this was impossible. She gave me this motto: “If you can’t return it, pass it on.”
I was in high school when we got our first radio. It was the most wonderful thing in our lives even though we seldom were able to hear much for the only station nearby was one in Schenectady and it had such a weak signal that it could only be heard over the mountains in good weather. By 1936, when I was teaching in Ticonderoga, radio had improved so much that there were regular programs that we listened to. We never missed Grand Ole Opry on Saturday nights.
