By Mickey Walker-May 22, 2011
During the Great Depression, I have been told by those who lived
and survived it, if you had a nickel you could stave off starvation by buying
an apple. Only problem is, neither
you nor your neighbor had a nickel. This was a time in the 1930s when times were tough and you had to make
do with the meager resources you had. There were no jobs. No
Social Security. No welfare, no
national healthcare, no real means of keeping body and soul together. We have all heard the stories about the
tough times then, and Jimmy Rogers (the Blue Yodeler) made hard times seem more
bearable with his hobo songs of boxcars and brakemen.
These times were before credit cards and other forms of
plastic that could command a meal. What you had in your pocket was the only thing between you and your next
meal. I can imagine such times in
one way, however, even though I did not live during the Great Depression. In 1961 I had a summer job as a
plumber’s helper in Kansas City. I
planned poorly one week and spent all my money. I needed some more for food before the end of the following
week, but my funds were next to nothing. What would I do? I had
about $5.00 in cash and that was it. It would have to suffice for all the food and all the gas I needed to
drive to work for a whole week. So
I stopped driving to needless places and bought a loaf of bread and some slices
of bologna. It would have to last
for almost a whole week. It was a
tough experience, and hunger visited me more than once. It was the closest brush I ever had
with what was everyday life during the Great Depression.
Looking for work, my Dad rode the boxcars all over South
Texas. He found only a little
hired hand work from time to time, but only enough to provide a little food
each day between sunup and sundown. He met many interesting characters on his journey seeking greener
pastures. Everyone was hungry most
all the time. Hobos had a way of
foraging for food that some might call organized. Some in a group would find the fare such as potatoes growing
in a farmer’s field and would be in charge of digging them. The potatoes were then taken to a source
of water, a pond or even a rain ditch still full of water, to be washed. Other hoboes would look for a metal
container to fill with water (from a ditch if necessary) so that the potatoes
could be boiled. Last then were
the cooks who boiled the potatoes. Sometimes there was salt and sometimes not. My Dad observed that potatoes, boiled in a tin can with
water from a ditch are not very tasty, but would do wonders for a collapsed
stomach.
There was a leader in one of Dad’s hobo groups named
Carney. He carried some salt and
after the first potato was eaten, Carney would distribute some pinches of salt
to the hobos for their second potato. He figured it would be better appreciated that way. One of the hobos asked Carney if he had
any pepper, too, and Carney told him, “Pepper is a spice and, unlike salt,
pepper is not a life’s necessity. Go and live your lives in a manner to where you will be called the salt
of the earth. Be a salt man, not a
pepper man.”
Such was the mundane existence of those without resources,
jobs, and food back then. Sometimes the roving masses could find watermelons, sweet corn growing
tall, and my Dad commented that many times the farmers saw them taking some
food from their fields. But no one
ever objected.
My grandfather, David Milton Pace, had 15 children, a wife
and a farm with a bank mortgage during the Depression. He was a sharecropper. Once a month Dave Pace would hitch his
mule to the wagon and go to Bartlett, Texas for provisions. To get the provisions, basics like
flour, bacon, and salt, he had to submit a list of his requirements to the
banker assigned to his account. The banker would study the list and render a judgment as to whether Dave
Pace’s list was acceptable or not. Prince Albert smoking tobacco in the red tin can was unacceptable to the
banker. He crossed it off Dave’s
list. “You can make do with Bull
Durham tobacco at half the price.” the banker said. And so the session went, with the
banker arbitrarily crossing off those things that he found to be unnecessary in
his opinion. When the banker had
you by the short hairs a poor man had little or no choice. And during the Depression, luxuries
like personal dignity often got trampled into the dirt by the heels of those
with money and power.
By accident, my mother met her father, Dave Pace, in the
town square at Bartlett one day. He was going to get his provisions at the general store and she was
going to high school there in town. Most all her brothers and sisters were small children and still lived at
home on the farm. Mother had come
to Bartlett because it was the closest town with a high school, and she stayed
with a family and worked for her room and board.
Mom told me how on that day, her dad pulled a dollar bill
out of his bib overalls and gave it to her to help with her expenses. “I knew it was the only dollar he had,
and I objected and told him to spend it on the children, but he insisted.”
Such an impression a dollar made on my mother, I
thought. It was truly amazing how
one dollar could conjure such a memory some 50 years later. The Great Depression was a phenomenon
indeed that gripped the human spirit.
In her early years, Mom picked cotton with her brothers and
sisters.
Mom told me: “I
would see these fine motorcars going down the country roads, and I told my
brother, Dave, how someday I hoped to have a nice shiny one, too. I remember then that I thought those
people were rich, that they probably had as much as $100!”
One day my mother was picking cotton next to her older
brother, Buck. His shirt had come
apart and fell off his back right there in the cotton row. So Buck went to the house and told his
mother he needed another shirt. Mom said that the best her mother could do was to cut the top off one of
her dresses, and when Buck returned wearing the dress top with puffy shoulders
my mother sat down in the row and cried. The poverty of her family overwhelmed her at that moment in time, she
said.
In 1935 Dave Pace died of pneumonia from plowing the cold
wet fields in January. Mom
persevered and graduated from college at Southwest Teachers College in San
Marcos, Texas. It was there that
she married my Dad, and they both signed contracts to teach school at Meeks,
Texas, a rural school with all the grades up to high school. The school provided a house for them to
live in, and their neighbors of Czech and German descent, were generous with
their food that came from their farms. Some of this food, my Mom and Dad took to her mother and the small kids
in the country. Without Dave Pace,
the farm had fallen into ruin. They had no relief or welfare or Social Security to help them. Mom and Dad stood between that remaining
family and starvation. And many years
later the kids remembered those times with fond feelings when Big Sister and
her husband would bring them food.
Nowadays there is much talk of another crash, another Great
Depression in the making for the whole world this time. I suppose if it must be we could
survive. Humans are resilient as a
species. We are resourceful. I have often wondered what the world
would be like without plastic credit cards to pay our bills. Or if all the social programs now
funded by government were to disappear or die on the cost-cutting operating
table in Congress. Could we save
ourselves?
If the US dollar loses its status as the world currency, how
will that affect our lives? Some
say that the rise in gold prices recently is the result of the dollars’ fall
against other world currencies. I
hope not. Will we Americans be
able to buy gasoline to get to work if it tops say $8 a gallon? Will we be able to buy food with what
resources we will have in the future? Will we ever go green with solar panels and electric cars? Or will Big Oil and Big Coal continue
to rule while foreign wars and occupation remain the way of the world as the
gap between Haves and Have-Nots
widens?