Posted: 6/21/2009 5:35:21 PM EDT
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An Email I got from Mom. She will be 83 in July. Still living in the home I grew up in. I am the closest to her now ( geographically speaking ), and I do everything I can to help her live there. As long as she wants. Dad had the same viewpoint, from North central Iowa. He has been gone a few years. Makes our times seem not so bad.
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––- Dear Family––-Growing up in south central Nebraska in the 30's, it was hard to separate the hardships of the depression from the hardships of the drought/duststorms. We lived on a farm-no big cities close and no T.V. so I never saw soup lines or unemployment lines nor bankers jumping from windows. There were three things related to the depression that I do remember. One was that we had to learn Roosevelt's Revised Alphabet. Pres Roosevelt established a number of federal agencies to fund federal, state and local projects to create jobs and restart the economy. I don't know if all school children had to learn the agencies. I know that in our rural one-rooms school, we were to know them––-PWA,WPA,CWA,CCC,TVAetc etc. The second thing was thanks to the CCC-Civilian Conservation Corps-our school received two new outside priviesThey were really impressive. They didn't come with toilet paper however-we still used the Sears Roebuck or Montgomery ward catalogues. The third thing I remember was the talk that there were to be only so many pigs in a litter allowed to survive. This upset my Dad. With so many prople starving, why were we destroying food. He loved the land and his animals––each little pig probably had a name––and he was a Republican and didn"t like Roosevelt. We had food. We had a large gardenfrom which we canned, dried and stored everything. We had chickens, cows and pigs so there was milk, eggs and meat. Probably the only ready cash was in Mom's Baking Powder can. On Wed and Sat we would take cream and eggs to the "store" and trade for food we couldn't raise like coffee, sugar, salt and flour. If there was money left over, it went into the Baking Powder can.Mom churned butter and had a few customers in our totn. She even left out the salt for those on salt free diets. Mom planted everything. She was a 4-H leader and recognized the importance of Nutrition. We planted potatoes, sweet potatoes and onions which we stored in the storm cave. Green and was beans and limas, peas and tomatoes were canned, cucumbers were made into pickles-sweet, dill and bread and butter, beets were pickled and canned, cabbage was made into saurkraut and stored in crocks in the cave and corn was canned or dried and stored. Mom even planted salsify, a root vegetable, which when prepared tasted like oyster stew. Fruit was more of a problem. We had rhubarb and mulberry trees and a seedling peach. There is nothing more insipid than a mulberry/rhubarb canned mix. A Great Uncle had strawberries and cherries so we had some of them in season. Oranges were a luxury which we got mainly at Christmas from church or school. Bananas were also a luxury. I wore "hand-me-down" clothes from my cousin. One Aunt was an excellent seamstress and would come for a day and sew with Mom. Flour and feed sacks were a source of material. You had to really plan to get enough matching sacks to make a dress. Two ladies(sister-in-laws) lived in town. Mom took them butter, eggs, buttermilk and other produce. One of their daughters lived in Lincoln and would occassionally send a box of assorted things. One of my favorite dresses was made from material out of one of the boxes. It was green with flecks of gold. My dress had an empire waist piped with gold and gold buttons. I realized when I was older that it was drapery material, but I loved it. If our shoes had holes in the soles, we cut out pieces of cardboard and lined them. Does anyone today even wear a hole in their shoes. Everything was used and reused. We recycled and didn't know what it meant. Everyone was in the same situation. Some hadd more material good and some much less but we were't envious (well maybe sometimes over bananas) I don't remember serious feelings of "poor me". I'm sure Mom and Dadhad many worries, but they didn't pass them on to us. We kept busy with school, church and family get-togethers. WE SURVIVED. Note. I have no idea why my Dad was a Republican. No one in the extended family was involved in politics that I am aware of. Maybe it was our Amish/Mennonite heritage in the you take care of your own and at that time that philosophy was similar to the Republicans. Maybe because they were farmers and in business for themselves. –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– It just struck me that this would belong in the Survival Forum. Scott |
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Quoted:
Note. I have no idea why my Dad was a Republican. No one in the extended family was involved in politics that I am aware of. Maybe it was our Amish/Mennonite heritage in the you take care of your own and at that time that philosophy was similar to the Republicans. Maybe because they were farmers and in business for themselves. I'm too pragmatic to be political - they all suck, IMO. However, I had an eye-opener yesterday. Found out last-minute that our (D) representative was going to do a "meet the peasants" visit to a coffee shop less than a mile from my house. This had always apparently been a very (R) county so I attended expecting to have a few people ready to give her an earful with me. When I showed, the place was mobbed, absolutely packed. Better than I was anticipating. I almost felt sorry for her. Then she showed and folks started sounding off. Almost every single one of them was there to argue for more "federal money" and to have the rep push for getting more from healthcare because "it's so expensive". Gimme, gimme, gimme, me, me, me. Every damned of them. 
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| I grow up listening to the same stories from my dad, he loves to say "Depression, what depression. We lived the same way, before, during and after." I love to hear from older people telling stories about how they didn't need help from the .gov. Now, if we can get the young people thinking the same way. And some old farts in Washington. |
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Quoted:
Almost every single one of them was there to argue for more "federal money" and to have the rep push for getting more from healthcare because "it's so expensive". Gimme, gimme, gimme, me, me, me. Every damned of them.
That really makes me sad.
To the OP –– thanks for posting that, I really enjoyed it. I'm glad to see my grandmother isn't the only one using a computer –– she is ~89 and while she doesn't use the internet, we have helped her learn Excel so she can do the bookkeeping for her church. |