Remembering the good old bad times
By BILL DUNCAN
The View From Here
The nightly news lately is depressing. To listen to the naysayers, one might think there is no way this nation can survive. We have survived worse and we have become stronger because of those trials. I teach a writing course and most of my students are seniors, many of whom lived through the last Great Depression. One of the students, Blanche Dickover of Canyonville, Oregon has been writing a collection of memories from her eighty plus years of living.
Many are stories about growing up during the Great Depression. While I have edited her story to fit into my column word count, I feel Blanche is writing to give all of us hope in these troubling times. The memory is so well written, I want to share it.
I was 13 at the time of the Great Depression of the 1930s. My family lived in Dorchester, Mass. Dad was a structural iron worker and was laid off from his job. He would look in the want ads in the evening paper and circle the ones he thought might be hiring. Early in the morning, he would make the rounds to see if there were any jobs. The answer was always, "not hiring."
Mother had put away a few dollars from Dad’s pay so there was a little money for emergencies. For breakfast, we had oatmeal or cream of wheat. As a treat she would make pancakes.
We ate a lot of soup in those days. The butcher would give her soup bones and she’d cook them with vegetables and rice or noodles that made a satisfying meal. She usually served the soup with corn bread or biscuits. For dessert we would have home canned fruit.
On Sunday Mother would have a roast beef or pork, or pot roast with squash or parsnips and carrots and pickled beets. She didn’t buy lunch meats at the deli because that took cash money. Bologna was a treat.
Every Saturday we had baked beans. Mother made several kinds of relishes and it went well with the beans. If Mother had some change left over, we would have hot dogs with the beans.
On Wednesday, we would have hash made from the leftover roast. We never thought of that meal as leftovers. Fish was plentiful and cheap. We’d go to the shore occasionally to get clams or oysters. Mother would steam the clams, saving the liquid to use in her New England clam chowder.
We had an extra bedroom so Mother took in a boarder. She charged him $15 a week for room, board and laundry. This helped in paying bills and living expenses.
There weren’t many bills as my parents didn’t believe in charging anything. If they needed something they saved until they had the cash to pay for it. We didn’t have a car. We took a street car or we walked.
One day Mother received a letter from her sister in Maine. She said that if Dad
hadn’t found a job, the man on the next farm needed a dairyman to milk and feed the cows, clean out the barn and do various other jobs connected with the dairy. My parents decided there were no jobs to be found in Dad’s line of work and living on a farm would allow us to have a garden and milk and cream from the dairy.
Dad prepared a space for a garden and planted potatoes, carrots, beets, parsnips, turnips and pole beans. Then came rows of red kidney beans and white navy beans. These were dried and stored in jars for the baked beans. My Mother canned green beans, tomatoes and corn for winter meals. With all this food put by, Mother didn’t have to spend money except for coffee, sugar and flour.
The depression was a hard time to live through, but it left us with good memories.
I only hope that the hard times we face now will do the same for the current generation.
-Blanche Dickover
(Bill Duncan also grew up in the Great Depression and has similar memories of the struggles his parents and his siblings lived through to make America one of the most prosperous nations in the world. He can be reached by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470)