Grandma B on Hard Times

I've recently been sorting through some of my parent's "treasures" and came across this article that my paternal Grandmother wrote for a local paper.  They were running a special edition called Hard Times, and it was full of various submitted stores. According to her notes, this won 1st place, though there is no mention of what the contest was for or if it held a prize (but I'm guess that is the $43.83 that she alludes to in the first paragraph).  I thought it was an amazing story and wanted to pass it along.

Values of Life Learned During Depression
February 24, 1983

    Digging up old memories of hard times is not exactly my favorite pastime.  But sine we learned to be penny pinchers in the depression days of the '30s, I've decided to come out of hiding and make a stab at that $43.83.  What a fortune that would have been in that day!
    I started teaching school in Wayne County District 1 at $80 a month.  As the depression took a deeper bite, I taught the next three years at $50 a month and paid $16 a month for room and board.  Because I could not afford a car, I stayed at a home a mile from school and walked, having to build a fire after arriving.  Kerosene was poured on cobs to start a fire, then wood and coal added.  Feet were stomped and hands clapped till the room warmed up.  Sometimes the kids had to sit around the stove for the first classes so their feel would warm up.  The old pump in the yard had to be primed to get water for drinking and washing.  My boarding house room was entirely without heat.  Many a night, I went to bed with a soapstone, a heated iron or a hot water bottle and weighted under a half dozen quilts and blankets.
    In 1935, when the depression was nearing rock bottom, I married a high school classmate who was working at McNatt's hardware store for $50.  Our wedding was a very simple ceremony performed in my mother's living room with a single bouquet of roses picked from her garden as decorations.  Only family and a few friends were present.  The cost of the wedding, including my white sheet length dress, was less than $20.  Big church wedding were seldom heard of in those days.  Gifts were few and very practical.
   The next year we moved to a farm northeast of Wayne just in time to experience the dust storms of '36 and '37.  The reddish brown clouds blotted out the sun, the ruthless hot winds burned the crops, seared the ground, ad lapped up streams of water.  Many livestock died from lack of food and water or from clogged nostrils that caused them to suffocate.  It wasn't uncommon for people to die of dust pneumonia.  Drifts of dirt covered fences and crept up the eaves of houses.  Trains were sometimes stopped because of drifts of dirt on the tracks.
   The ensuing drought left us with little or no crops and very little garden stuff for food.  We ate lots of beans, cornbread and mush and oatmeal.  I think the children's favorite was homemade bread and peanut butter.  Of course, on the farm we raised our own chickens, hogs, and cattle so we had our own meat supply.  In the winter, we moved into town with my mother and my husband was able to find work which kept us over til the next spring and another drought year.
    As though the black blizzards were not enough to harass us, we had great herds of jack rabbits invade Nebraska as they fled barren lands of South Dakota and Wyoming.  Over 200 cars of poison bran were ordered to save the precious crops from extinction.  Another hazard was the grasshoppers.  They appeared in black buzzing clouds.  They would sweep in on a field and reduce it to nothing by night.  If you hung a washing on a line, you had to watch carefully because grasshoppers tended to land on wet articles and start chewing.
   All our cooking was done on a stove using cobs, wood, and coal for fuel.  Cobs were often picked up from the hog lot, wood from the grove and coal was used when we could afford it.  Kerosene and gas lamps had to be cleaned and kept in operation for lights at night.  A candle and a box of matches were emergency equipment.
   With no running water in the house, water had to be carried in at least twice a day from the windmill.  One of our blessed conveniences was an ld pump just outside the kitchen door where I could pump a tub of soft water in which I could rinse diapers.  They were then boiled in a wash boiler of water on the fired up kitchen stove.  This was quite a process when we had four little boys under three years old, including twins.  If washings were small, it wasn't uncommon to use the tub and washboard.  All washings were dried on outdoor lines of course.  The long underwear froze like stiff soldiers on the line.  At night, if still frozen, they had to be marched into "drying barracks" so we often had a regiment lined up around the pot-bellied stove to dry out.
    We had no refrigeration of any kind in the house.  All perishables had to be loaded on a tray, taken outside, and precariously carried down steps into a deep cave which also served as a storm shelter.  It was most inconvenient when the baby was demanding milk right now.
    Printed feed sacks and flour sacks were a popular source of material to make dresses, blouses, and aprons.  Underclothes were often fashioned from white flour sacks.  I even bleached out hog feed sacks and sewed them together to make sheets for our children.  Some lasted 17 years.  Straw mattresses were used on the kids' beds. They had to be restuffed often with straw from the barn to keep them bouncy.  A dime would buy a number of things such as baby underwear, a loaf of bread, or a dozen eggs.  We could buy skim milk from the creamery for one cent.
   Clothes from the children were almost all homemade from adult clothing given to us or perhaps an occasional new piece of material.  It wasn't uncommon to cut cardboard fittings at night for the boy's shoes so that they could last a little longer.  With no TV at the time, home entertainment consisted of listening to the radio, playing games, and going to visit friends or grandparents.  Some of the boys' favorite toys were cardboard boxes, old wheels, and pieces of wood from which they would invent their own playthings.
   We cannot leave a story about hard times without mention of the outdoor "privy."  Trips out there in the cold mornings of winter often meant sweeping the snow or frost from the seat before you could sit comfortably.  That building created the least nostalgia of anything I can think of from those "good ol' days."
    Our home furnishings were simple and our possessions were few.  I guess today we would be considered as the poor poor but I never once thought of it that way then.  We were so rich in love and caring for one another that if flooded our lives with contentment.
    I don't think anyone ever lived through those hard times without it leaving indelible marks on their memory and definite effects on how they spend and save money today.  It was an enriching experience that taught us what some of the real priorities and values of life should be.

--Dorothy Beckenhauer