Blog post: Lessons from the Depression

Blog post from March 28, 2011

In case you haven’t seen it, Evergreen Newspapers is printing stories of people who lived through the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Each writer for the High Timber Times, Canyon Courier, Clear Creek Courant and Columbine Courier are interviewing those who lived through the Depression and have a tale to tell.

I’ve written one Depression-era story on Conifer resident David George and have done interviews for others. I talk with our older residents in Conifer and frequently I’ll ask about their life during 1930s. It’s a fascinating subject and the stories are a peek into a world that disappears each time someone from that era passes away.

Mary Lunk Menke came to America, arriving from Hungary on an innocuous ship that docked in New Jersey on May 25, 1912. According to documents at Ellis Island, she was 16-years-old and arrived with $75 in her pocket and relatives in New Jersey. She remembered her life through food she’s eaten and upon arriving in the New World on that May day, she ate her first ice cream on that dock. After disembarking, she disappeared along with the tide of human hope that lugged few possessions in their suitcases and American dreams floated on their minds.

Mary was my grandmother.

Rumors have it that she worked in New Jersey for a time, probably as a domestic and according to my mother, she spent time as a maid for the famous actress and singer, Lillian Russell. Mom swore she had pictures of grandma standing gaunt-and-grim in the background of a picture of Russell, primping and preening, a forerunner to the glam that would overtake Hollywood in the near future. I never quite believed mom, after all, she was the one who told me years later that out of family of 17 brothers and sisters and countless cousins that I was the only one in the family related to Princess Diana. When I pointed out that it would have meant she had sex with Diana’s father, mom didn’t talk to me for months after that.

Grandma denied being Lillian Russell’s maid, but a far off look in her watery-blue eyes made me wonder.

My aunt Emy also had a tale to tell about grandma, she knew for a fact that grandma had worked the gold mines of Alaska. I mean worked the gold fields, not on her feet, but on her back. I never had the courage to ask the stately matriarch who drowned kittens at birth and who didn’t clean, she scared dirt out of the house about a bawdy life of Yukon gold.

As she aged, grandma became more open to talking about her life, though in the cinema of her 95 years, I caught only a two-minute preview, carefully edited and craftily told.

She was 34 when the Crash happened and she remembered people throwing themselves out of a window or putting a pistol in their mouth.

From their home in rural Wisconsin, the Depression reached out and touched the Braun family with hunger and violence.

The hunger wasn’t so much physical hunger but a want for something better.

Piecing family stories together, I’ve learned that my grandfather was a first class prick. My father, William, the middle child between the older Fred Jr. and the younger Helen was the target of brutality from his father. Dad called his dad, “the old man” and grandma was powerless to stop the hulking drunk from kicking the tar out of little William. When the beatings were done, grandma would feed little Willy, her only way of reaching out to her battered son.

As the Depression wore on, Prohibition joined the procession. You may be hungry, you may be broke but whatever you do, don’t drink. The old man always managed to find enough alcohol to fuel his rage at his own ineptness, probably because grandma ran the cleanest still in the area.

You wanted to drink grandma’s hooch.

It was rendered with the same cleanliness and fastidiousness that the milk from the family farm was famous for. Frequently, the old man would disappear for a few months a time, giving little Willy a break from the assaults. Grandma would dress the kids up in their farm finery and take them to a place where they would greet the old man, who, according to grandma, had been away at sea.

Year later, Helen told me the visits to the old man were at a prison where he was serving time for violating Prohibition laws. She also remembered the time the inspectors were seen coming up the long dirt road that led to the farm and grandma instructed the kids to hide the mash from the still out in the yard. The kids misunderstood the instructions and dumped the mash into the yard where the chickens fed and the cows hunkered down. After the inspectors came and went, but the chickens and cows had a hard time standing up and Dad said the milk from the cows tasted funny for a few days after that.

Dad remembered people coming to the back door asking for handouts. He said the parade brought men, women and children; some of kids would play while their parents either worked on the farm or ate their handout of bread and meat. Grandma said one man came to the back door, asking for a handout, that he was hungry and hadn’t eaten for days. Grandma handed over a sandwich and the man. Grateful, he sat down on the porch steps to eat his meal and with great care, the man peeled the crust off the break and dropped it to the ground. Her attitude towards the parade changed a bit after that.

The years of the Depression hit the family hard and fear spawned a thriftiness that stood watch to ensure nothing like the Depression would ever damn the family again. Each member took up the cause and squeezed even the fingerprints off a copper penny.

Grandma saved rubber bands and old plastic bags and darned socks and sweaters that were long past their prime. She prayed the rosary and prayed for coupons for the local Safeway. She was happy when she was finally diagnosed with cancer at 94.

Fritz was starved for love and married 5 wives. All were charming but eventually he bankrupted their love for him. An avid outdoorsman, he was always on the hunt for something, game, fish, women. A kind uncle, he was my favorite. He let me drop rocks onto the crabs that lived at the foot of the 20-foot-long pier of his seaside home. Uncle Fritz died at 57 of colon cancer.

Dad and mom traveled, spent money on parties and friends and really lived it up in the early years. As time went on, he scrimped and saved and he would drive 5 miles to save a penny on a gallon of gas. After losing his beloved job at Boeing in 1969, he limped into a poor man’s life. He wore paper-thin dumpy clothing that offered no protection from the biting Colorado wind and snow. After he died, I found drawers filled with brand new shirts, wrapped in cellophane, crisp and unused. His only request of my mother was that he not be buried in Colorado; the ground was too cold. His poverty consciousness eventually ate his life away and he died of colon cancer at 56.

Helen snubbed poverty and during the good years, spent money, wore expensive pink suits and dyed her hair platinum blond. The expensive suits and dyed hair gave way to thrift store cast-offs but the real secret was out when she died: $895,000 in her checking account and $1.2 million in assets. Even all that money couldn’t keep her well. In the end, cancer didn't take her life, it was a heart attack and she died in her own home, in her own second-hand chair at age 70.

The people in my family are so different than the people I have come across for my stories. My interviews reveal lives were beset by poverty, but they survived and today are happy, successful and remember the Depression as a bump in the road. Poverty wasn’t a mantle you take up, it was a stiff breeze you braced against and you went on. Though I was braced for the stories of unbearable poverty, I was surprised to find out that the people I’ve talked to about the Depression didn’t see it as something they had become, it was just something you lived through.

These stories have taught me that the Depression didn’t mean being poor of spirit but rich in the love, friends and experiences that bind us all together. Unfortunately, my dad’s family chose the wrong friends.

When poverty consciousness is your companion; it takes everything from you.