The Elder Statesman

By BILL DUNCAN
The View From Here

Yes, I know today is Halloween, but this column is not meant to scare you, although it is my take on the economy, something with which all the talking heads have tried to frighten you of late. I am a Depression kid. I grew up in the heart of the Depression.

In those years, children contributed to the family income by working. I had many jobs as a young boy, including a newspaper route, one I walked because I did not own a bicycle. One of my fellow carrier boys on the local newspaper offered to sell me his bicycle for $5, a virtual fortune in the 1930s. He agreed to set up a payment program so I could pay it off at 50 cents a month –

a-ride-while-pay plan. What a deal.

When I rode my great achievement home, my dad asked how I had come by the bike. I told him about the easy credit plan I had negotiated. His stern words were “take the bike back to your friend and when you have saved up the $5 then you can buy the bike.” I was devastated, but I continued to walk my paper route until I had paid of the $5 at 50 cents a month.

Of course that was known in those days as the Layaway Plan. It worked for both the merchant and the consumer long before plastic brought instant gratification and put everyone deep into debt. Sometimes it takes a crisis like the current credit crunch to bring us to our senses, or as Wall Street has said many times before, it is “a correction in the market.”

Christmas is coming. And when I looked at the newspaper ads Sunday I believe the merchants have discovered the Layaway Plan. If the big banners are right, it is being touted as if it were a new phenomenon for making purchases in the economic crisis.

I would be a fool if I tried to convince you the Depression era was the good old days, but it did strengthen the resolve of those of us who lived through it. We may have something to give to the young from that experience.

Rita Van Amber of Menoomine, Wisc. is doing just that. She is 89 years old and a survivor of the Depression. She has written four volumes of cookbooks with recipes from the Great Depression, called collectively “Stories and Recipes of the Great Depression of the 1930s.”  Not only does she provide economy ways of feeding a family, but she includes stories from those who survived the Depression era offering tips on just about everything in life.

I telephoned her for this column and she told me the books are very much in demand today. The books can be purchased individually, or as a set. The cost is $13 each, plus a $5 shipping fee for one or more. If you order all four books, she said, the shipping price is the same. She said she is still very active in the Van Amber Publishing Company, but now her daughter, Janet Perske is the CEO of the firm.

That stern, Scottish father of mine taught me the pitfalls of easy credit back in the 1930s, a lesson I still practice today. That lesson caused me to wonder about the letter I received the other day from a brand new, at least to me, credit card company telling me it had reserved a credit card in my name with a $50,000 credit limit. Did we not learn anything from this latest crisis?

But maybe we have. This week I saw a sign posted on a business: “We don’t accept credit cards, debit cards, checks or IOUs, just hard cash.”

What did I do with the credit card offer? That’s what shredders are for.

(Bill Duncan can be reached by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470) 

This entry was posted on Friday, October 31st, 2008 at 9:40 am and is filed under Column. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.