Great Depression Memories

I recently got the gout after experimenting with cheese dishes. Two cheesecakes on top of all the other cheese dishes did the trick. The doctor said no cheese, no wine. So what do you do when covering a wine and cheese tasting session? I sat and listened to the wine tasters who became more and more eloquent as the evening wore on. The store also sells my book. I got a stack and offered to sign them. Selling books turned out to be more fun than getting a cheap buzz on free wine. I did not have the usual witty prose to offer to the editor, but I did get a photo published of me handing a copy of Jep’s Place to a happy customer. An attorney who complained about me photographing him holding a glass of wine, thought he had turned the tables by using my camera to photograph me. The paper used the photo.

 
Most Memorable Fourth of July
by Joseph A. Parzych
During the Great Depression, my father was trying to clear stumps and boulders from a piece of land he had cleared at our farm called “Jep’s Place” by old timers in town who remembered Jepherd Carey previously owning it.
   John DeGrano, a blaster for Mass Broken Stone in Greenfield came to his aid on a Fourth of July weekend.  He brought a case of dynamite, a coil of fuses and a box of blasting caps to the farm. He stuffed dynamite under stumps to send them skyward in a glorious eruption of stump, dirt and dust. The boulders in the apple orchard shattered into a million pieces, riddling the tree trunks with shards of rock. It took years for the trees to recover from the trauma and produce any amount of fruit, again.
   Degrano cautioned my father to store the left-over dynamite and box of caps in a safe place until he came back the next day. Heeding his words, Pa slid the half case of dynamite and caps under his bed. When DeGrano came the following day to resume blasting, he blanched when he discovered Pa’s idea of a safe place. “If that dynamite went off,” DeGrano said, “they’d never find you.”
   DeGrano loaded the last few charges heavier to make sure the dynamite was all used up before he left. He let me light the fuse on one charge. As soon as I heard the fuse sizzling, I hightailed it back to a safe distance away. Those final blasts made it the most memorable Fourth of July ever.

A inventor in Maryland has designed a composting toilet. It requires no flushing, sewer or septic system–ideal for a camp in unpercable areas or rural homes. We had a similar composting toilet on our farm, Jep’s Place. The Maryland version has an exhaust fan to get rid of the odors and a misting device to keep the compost pile moist. We watered our outhouse compost pile with urine and layered it with sawdust from our saw righ and ashes from our wood stove. The ashes supply pot ash and have a liming effect to counteract the acidity of sawdust. The Maryland inventor adds bulk to assure aeriation and prevent the pile from becoming too dense. We used sawdust to achieve the same result. We had a different motive. Without an exhaust fan or electicity to runit, we just wanted to keep the odor down, not realizing that we were doing the right thing.

I spent nearly a year in Japan with the U.S. Army of Occupation. Many of the Japanese homes and our Army bases had communal outhouses that Japanese farmers cleaned out, hauling the waste in “honey carts”. Army vehicles gave them wide berth to avoid a collision. Some Japanese towns had open sewers leading to rice paddies. We were urged not to eat local fruit and  produce, nor drink water other than that on our base. Our base commander attended a banquet of Japanese officials. Out of politeness he drank the water, got sick and died. The Japanese apparently had developed immunities from long time use of local produce and water, if you can develope immunites to E-coli and similar pathogens. Outside of many homes, stacks of cakes of human waste, stood piled in the front yard. Nightsoil was a major source of fertilizer since they had little or  no natural deposits of minerals or petroleum to produce ferilizer. The Japanese were still using charcoal to fuel their vehicles after WWII. The Japanese motor pool outside our camp looked like a forest fire as the truckers fired up their charcoal gas generators.  

Sometimes, it seems that things go full circle. If gasoline prices resume their upward spiral, we may go back to using the Japanese technowledgy to fuel our vehicles, and convert to modern indoor outhouses to generate fertilizer as we did as described in the book Jep’s Place.

Reading by Kerosene Light

Since we had no TV or radio, we were all avid readers. The public library was a mile or more away but library night on Friday evening was the high light of our week. We all read in bed before going to sleep. Sometimes, I could not put a book down. It would get later and later, the kerosene in the lamp would get low and the flame shank until the kerosene was gone and the wick began to burn and stink, and finally smolder. I would put the book closer and closer to the lamp until it was touching the chimney glass. Ordinarily, with plenty of kerosene in the lamp, the flame burned above the wick with a clear flame, but as the kerosene became depleted, the smokey flame sooted up the lamp chimney. In the end, I lifted the lamp chimney and pinched out the smoldering embers with my fingers before going to sleep, sometimes in the wee hours of the morning.
My father never knew we read so late at night. When he worked, he was too tired to read, but later, when he became disabled with a heart condition, he also read in bed. My reading habits changed when I put together a crystal radio which became a major distraction that also kept me up late at night. That is the subject of my next blog.

Bored

Recently, I heard a teenager complaining that he was bored. I was not surprised since that is a familiar refrain.
To say that I was bored when I was growing up, on our farm, was a major blunder. Hearing that, either of my parents would have given me a really boring job–churning butter, weeding the garden or minding cows. Being a shepherd or a cowpoke may sound ever so dreamy and exciting. In reality, “minding cows”, watching cows eat grass, is about as exciting as watching grass grow. But even without making the mistake of uttering the fatal B word, I still got my share of brain dissolving boring jobs.
One day, seeing the cows strain to get grass that grew on the other side of the fence along the road, my father put me to work minding two cows eating the coveted grass on the other side of the fence. I had done it before and came prepared.
The cows did not like following each other as they ate. They would want to crowd in to share the same place, or leapfrog ahead. Once separated, if I watched one cow, the other would cross the road into the neighbor’s meadow or corn field.
This time I brought two short lengths of rope. I tied the rope around the base of the cows’ horns and made a loop that I could slip over the top of a fence post. Of course, the first thing the cows did was to try to get to grass on the other side of the fence. They then grazed along the edge of the road without constant watching. I could go down the road to check to see if I could see any fish in the brook. There was always an excitement that gripped me when checking the brook for fish.
After I figured the cows had grazed their section, I simply moved them along to a new section. They could not get away and get me into trouble. It was fool-proof. Or at least, I thought so. All went well until we got to the approach to the bridge where the road rose up and the pasture continued to slope down. The edge of the road began pitching down a bit from road to fence line. While I was busy checking for fish, the younger of the two cows, a slightly deranged cow, lost her footing as she strained to get grass along the shoulder that was now steeper. She lost her footing and toppled over on her side with her feet skyward and her neck bent back toward her feet pointing in the air. Her back was against a fence post and the rope was now stretched too taunt for me to get it off of the fence post. I was in major panic, as I struggled to get the rope up off of the top of the post, thinking the cow would surely die. My father had seen the whole thing evolve and appeared with his jackknife to cut the rope so that the cow could turn her head and scramble to her feet.
Seeing how scared I was, he said, “I won’t punish you. Let that be a lesson to you, don’t always be trying to do things the lazy way.”
For once, minding cows did not turn out boring.

A sure sign of spring was the day my father let the cows out of the barn after being confined to one place, day and night, all through a long winter of confinement. Tall wooden stantions allowed the cows to stand up or lie down, and to turn their heads. In the spring, Pa opened the barn door, released the catch on the stantion and stood back. The cow would stand for a moment in apparent disbelief, then charge out the door, run and kick her heels high in the air, twisting and turning like a bucking bull in a rodeo.
Other farmers let their cows out to walk down a fenced lane to drink from a brook or pond. Pa said it was cruel to make the cows drink the frigid brook water. We lugged water from the house, after tempering the well water with hot water from the tea kettle on the stove. He was very considerate of the farm animals.
When the old kids left or ran away from home, my mother lugged the water to quench the insatiable thirst of the cows, horse, pigs and chickens up until the day she went into labor.
One of our cows was a bit deranged, even before her winter in captivity. Long after she had been released in the spring, she still charged out of the barn door like a racehorse out of the starting gate.
One morning, I released her from the safety of the manger. One side of the stantion was hinged at the bottom. A U shaped metal clip that held the side of the stantion in the open position as the cow backed out of the stantion. This wild creature swung her head to get out before I could get the side secured in the metal clip, and broke the stantion, dashed to the open door, sniffed at a hoe and broom leaning in a corner at the door’s edge, knocking the hoe down. The timing was perfect. She leaped through the doorway like a gazelle just as the hoe was halfway to the floor. The hoe broke into three pieces. Pa came out to see the broken hoe. “No need to explaing,” he said. “The evidence is plain enough. You didn’t put the stantion side in the clip, the cow broke it, and you broke the hoe over her back in anger.”
I admitted I was angry enough to have broken the hoe over her back, but I could not convince him of the perfect timing of our arobatic cow.
She grew wilder and harder to handle as time went on. Pa did not offer any explanation when he sold her to a cattle dealer who came to the farm one day. Getting her to climb the ramp up into the cattle truck gave the dealer a clue as to why my father parted with her so readily.

At tea tasting the tea strainers reminded me of the time I appropriated my mother’s tea strainer in building a crystal radio when I was growing up. We lived far from electric lines. To keep a battery tube radio supplied with batteries proved to be prohibitively expensive. A relative gave me a simple crystal radio but it did not work. From plans I found in the school library, I assembled a fairly sophisticated crystal set, using variable condensers and rewinding coils with taps, from an old junked radio. I first tried using the crystal from the crystal radio gift. But, it did not work. I melted a piece of sulfur with lead, to make a crystal. That did not work. Finally, my father gave me a little reality talk. “Listen, Joe, you can’t get something for nothing. If the radio does not need electricity or batteries, how is anyone going to make any money off of people who listen? Stop wasting your time with this foolishness.”
I kept trying different things. I then learned that the crystal acted as a diode to rectify the AC broadcast signal to DC, when the current passed through a cat’s whisker (a fine wire) resting on a sensitive part of the crystal.
One day, my mother asked me to make her a cup of tea. When I used the strainer, a light bulb came on in my head. Eureka! – The wire that came with the useless crystal radio was relatively thick. Maybe I needed a thinner wire! I popped the wire mesh out of the strainer, and pulled a wire loose. The fine brass wire did the trick. It seemed truly miraculous to hear music coming from the earphones. I got energized, and called everyone to listen. My father listened, but would not admit to hearing a thing. Late at night, I was thrilled to tune-in stations from across the country–stations not available with a regular radio.
One day, when I came home from school, I found an ash tray full of cigarette butts next to the radio. I moved the cat whisker to a dead spot. When I got home the next day, my father asked me to leave the radio on. He said he liked to listen to the news.
Meanwhile, my poor mother was looking high and low for her lost tea strainer. I bought her a new one, but did not confess to running off with her old one until years later. If she were still alive, today, I would have bought her another tea strainer at the Gill Store tea tasting.

The minimum wage is about to be raised to $8. Even at that, a breadwinner with a family will have tough sledding. During the 1930’s there was no minimum wage and jobs were so scarce that employers took advantage of the unemployed. It was common for single men to work on a farm as “hired man” for room and board. The farmer was often just scratching out a living and took in the man out of compassion. Often the “board” was a shed or shanty equipped with a bed and a small wood stove for heat. Sometimes the farmer would then be able to find a skilled job in a factory as the hired man took over the farm duties, and he gave the hired man a stipend of a dollar a two each week in addition to room and board. Some farmers would allow the hired man to work for other farmers as long as the host farm was not neglected.

In Jep’s Place: Hope, Faith, and Other Disasters, my brother Walter worked hard all summer for a farmer for little more than his room board. When the last of the hay was in and corn harvested, the farmer sent him packing. He got a room with a family and worked at odd jobs until he was paralyzed with Polio and could not pay rent. The family needed the room rent, but they were good enough to let him stay in the attic. You can read more about his recovery at the hands of a kindly grandmother who took care of him.

If I could just earn a little more money, if I could just have a newer car, a bigger house and more, more, more, I would be happy. Thinking back, I realize that the tough times, when we had so little, turned out to be the happiest times. I can remember sitting on our front steps made of half rotted planks and catching fireflies for our awestruck kids, surrounded with love, as a moment that money could not buy.
On the farm, Jep’s Place, we had no electicity, nor radio or TV, nor refrigerator, nor washing machine but it was a different atmosphere, like being in a cottage at the beach, cut off from the world. I take back the washing machine. With my mother having to slave over a scrub board scrubbing every last damned piece of clothing for a family of 13 kids who could dirty clothes at an amazing rate. Washday was a nightmare with steam rolling out of a boiler sitting on a glowing woodstove in the stifling heat of summer, maybe that item of modern living–a washing machine–did bring happiness that could not be measured.
It was a gasoline washing machine, that my older sister went to work as a housekeeper for $3 a week in order to buy from Sears & Rowebuck, that created a debt of gratitude that my mother carried to her grave.

After our barn burned, my father nearly set fire to the house. He set up three 55 gallon steel drums with the ends cut out to smoke bacon. To steady them, he leaned them agains the house. That made a handy place to lean a ladder so that he could load the top with slabs of bacon. He made S hooks out of coat hanger wire and hung on iron rods placed across the top of the barrels, now about 12 feet high. He built a little fire of corn cobs and various kinds of wood to produce smoke. Everything was going well until a slab of bacon fell onto the smoldering fire. Fat from the bacon caught fire and the barrels acted as a chimney. Flames poured out of the top of the stack of barrels leaning against the porch roof. It looked like the house was soon going to go up in flames. My father got a long wooden pole and knocked the stack of barrels over. He put out the flaming bacon and set up the barrels at a safe distance from the house. After cleaning off the bacon slabs, he used a long pole with prong to position the slabs on the rods going across the top barrel. This time, all went well and the bacon got smoked without having to call the fire department to cool the embers of the remains of the house.

With 13 kids in the family, my mother did not nurse my younger brother Louis. We did not know why, but soon after drinking cow’s milk from his bottle, he would double up and cry pitifully. He grew skinnier and skinnier. No one expected him to live very long. My father bought a bottle of brandy and instructed my mother to feed him some to stimulate his appetite. My mother strained boiled barley through a flour sifter and fed him the gruel.
That did not cause colic as the milk had, so my mother reasoned, rightfully, that he could not tolerate milk. He soon put on weight and grew to normal size. My father credited the brandy.
“Did you ever feed Louis the brandy,” we asked. “Course not,” my mother said. “Give brandy to a baby?!! Are you crazy? I drank it myself.”

During WWII troops trained with wooden guns or real guns and no ammunition because of shortages. Right now, in 2006, troops training to go to Iraq don’t have ammunition for training because of shortages. We are or were the greatest power on earth and have ourselves in a no-win war sapping our resources and money. We are running record deficits, the national debt is balooning and we are running the country with money borrowed from the Chinese and the oil countries. We mobilized back then to produce war materials. We are so far in debt, we cannot cease civilian production and mobilize because we are broke and borrowing more and more each day. The Iranians love the position we have put ourselves in because we got rid of their archenemy, Saddam, and his army, and we are being bled white. Roosevelt had a plan: we have none. Maybe if we went back to gas rationing, we would not be dependent on mid east oil.

The minimum wage is slated to gradually go up to $8. During the Great Depression, jobs were so scarce women would take jobs as housekeepers, maids or nannys for room and board and possibly a small stipend. Men would do the same, working as the “Hired man”. With no social security or welfare, people were desperate.
In the book Jep’s Place, my brothers left home and worked for various farmers. Sometimes the farmer kept them all summer and fired them in the fall. I worked on the farm of a prep school for a month. I shoveled coal, picked produce, worked as a teamster and scrubbed student’s walls and ceilings. I neglected to ask the rate of pay. When I got $16 for a month’s work (I did not get room & board), I quit. The school paid men with families 35 cents an hour. I got 10 cents an hour for doing the same work. No overtime pay, either. I next got a job for 45 cents on another farm. I asked the rate of pay first. The farmer liked how I worked and paid me 50 cents an hour. It was all straight time. I worked seven days a week and was happy to get the work. My mother gave a sandwich to men who came around asking for a job even though there were 13 kids in our family. She knew they were in desperate straits.
A loaf of bread was a dime and gasoline was 6 gallons for a dollar.

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