Hard Times

by Studs Terkel

  My father taught us how to adjust to situations. We were fortunate compared to others. We always had food. Very little money, but there was so much spiritual guidance. I don’t mean this Billy Graham type. I mean this thing that develops in a family where you anticipate the other’s needs. I can kiss my father and not feel ashamed that I kissed a man. This is the type of thing we had going.

  One time, my father and I tore a wall down to enlarge the business. I must have been around eight or nine. I could see blood coming from his hands, from using the crowbar, and I kissed his hand.

  The restaurant was in the black community. But we made as much money off white people as we did off blacks. White people wanted to come in and get fried chicken. He had them fooled that there was something mystical about the batter he used. Another device he would use: they say that colored people like watermelon. Well, he raised the price of watermelon when white folks came in. All these survival techniques… .

  I started washing dishes in the restaurant about five. My father didn’t start me, I insisted. I’d get up on a Coca-Cola box to bend over the dish trough. My mother worked the cash register, and my sister was the waitress. It was a family type.

  During the Depression, my father bought most things cash. The biggest thing we bought was a car and a refrigerator. I remember distinctly he paid on this in cash, because he didn’t want to keep going back up to the store and taking this white man money and receipt book. My father did not like hat-in-hand situations.

  My family always had a lot of white friends because there was always some food. A white friend would forget his supposedly superior attitude if there’s food involved. They were going to get some of my father’s mystical fried chicken.

  There was a unique thing about this black community. It wasn’t like Chicago. There were Caucasians in the community. The police chief lived right in the heart of it. I guess there must have been ten white families within fifty feet of us. I remember feeding snotty-nosed white kids. It was the Depression because no white and no blacks were working. The whites not working made it official. Father and Mother did that thing out of the goodness of their hearts.

  I remember when times got so hard, this sheriff pawned a radio to my father for $10. He had come to the black man to get $10. He really needed the ten. He had some people out of town, he wanted to bring them there to eat some chicken. So he told my father he didn’t have the money. Dad told him he had to have some collateral. So he brought the radio.

  My father carried black people on the tab during the Depression. We had a basement in our home and people who would come there, down and out, my father let them live there as long as they would keep it up, work around the garden, keeping up the roses and things. This is how I learned to gamble and shoot dice, from these guys. We got in a couple of boxers there. One of them became a champ.

  The schools were segregated. I doubt if we had one teacher who had a bachelor’s degree. These were tremendous people, black people. One lady’s been teaching there over fifty years. I doubt if she’s finished tenth grade. You’d go to a sandbox, she’d show you how to make a pond in the sandbox by taking a mirror, putting it in the sand and letting the mirror shine through.

  It might have been in eighth or ninth grade. It was in one of the English classes. We didn’t have a library in the black school. We depended on what people who came in would give us. We were reading Time Magazine. There was an article on Raymond Moley on economics. We were supposed to get this article and make a report on it. I had to go to the white high school.

  A frowsy Caucasian woman opened a crack in the door and threw the book on the floor. I tried to determine what’s more important: this affront or getting Raymond Moley? My immediate thing was to get Raymond Moley. But my father always told me never to stoop. So I left the book on the floor. It hurt. I cried because I wanted the article so bad.

  Hot Springs was a unique place. It was a health resort. It depended on rich people coming in. They came to the race track with their women. There was a sort of sophistication. A sort of Encyclopaedia Britannica attitude. It was cosmopolitan and yet semi-rural. A rurban area.

  They had one mayor. It seemed like he stayed in office a million years. He would ride around in his carriage with two black ponies. He lived in the black ghetto. Only he was on top of the hill. He would visit all the gambling places in the community. White people came down and shot dice. They’d come down looking for women, too. The red-light district was always in the black area. The only white prostitutes you would find would be in the hotels. They would be the high-priced ones. They would go with the Negro bellhop. Say, if the bellhop caught a politician, maybe she made a couple of hundred bucks. She’d give him some money, plus she’d go to bed with him.

  The church I knew was controlled by City Hall: “Every Christmas we’ll get these niggers some turkeys. We’ll send somebody from the white school board to talk to them. We might let one of you come to our church, sing.” To keep us quiet like that. It was easy to control the black community in Hot Springs, because everything was geared toward money. “O.K., you don’t give us any problems, we’ll let your gambling houses stay. We’ll let you play policy. We’ll let the black racketeer who’s in charge of everything, we’ll let him get the nigger out of jail on Saturday night. You can fight and whip your woman on Saturday night, just don’t bother us over here. We’ll give you a break, a suspended thirty-day sentence. We’ll let you go home and be a good boy.”

  We’d get the Chicago Defender. They had one edition for the North and another for the South. That’s how we heard about the Scottsboro case. One of the people defending the boys came and spoke at the black church there. Oh yes, we knew about this case and this white woman, Ruby Something—

  Ruby Bates.

  This was during the time when a lot of young people wanted to get a job and venture out and go places, and they were afraid to hobo because they didn’t want to get caught up in a Scottsboro case.

  The Defender was read openly. It was brought down on a white railroad and thrown off a white boxcar. It was sold in the black community on the newsstands.

  During the Depression, they had a transient bureau in my home town. Poor whites and poor blacks. This bureau would have them do work in the mountain area, say, cutting vines or shrubbery. This was in Roosevelt’s time. They would go down and show people how to farm this no-good land. They would also give them a dole. I would see a line waiting to get beans. Boll weevils in them. It’s almost an impossibility that some people lived through. Eating those beans and separating the bugs from the beans.

  Roosevelt touched the temper of the black community. You did not look upon him as being white, black, blue or green. He was President Roosevelt. He had tremendous support through his wife. Yet the immediate image is “Great White Father.”

  The WPA and other projects introduced black people to handicrafts and trades. It gave Negroes a chance to have an office to work out of with a typewriter. It made us feel like there was something we could do in the scheme of things. I don’t remember any serious black opposition to Roosevelt. When you see a blithe spirit, naturally you’re attracted to it.

  I think the powers-that-be missed the boat, during the Depression. There was a kind of integration of poverty. But even though everybody was poor, we still had this stiff-collar, white-shirted Puritanical Wilson thing going. So even though we were all in the same boat, I’m still white and you’re still black, and so we don’t need to get together. Things are going to get better for the white folks, and you black folks will have to …

  Do you think a Depression of that depth could come again?

  I think it could. But it would behoove the Federal Government not to let it come. Because you’re dealing with a different breed of cat now. If they really want anarchy, let a Depression come now. My sixteen-year-old son is not the person I was when I was sixteen. He has manly responsibilities. And he doesn’t want any shit. When I was sixteen, I wasn’t afraid to die. But the kid, sixteen now,
is not afraid to kill.

  Dynamite Garland

  In the old hotel, once elegant, where she is the most popular guest, from whom elderly widows and male pensioners ask advice and solace, her apartment flows over with paperbacks, art work, her own and others’, oddments, indicative of varied and passing interests… .

  She is an attractive forty-five-year-old waitress at an Italian-style restaurant in Chicago’s Loop.

  She comes from Cleveland, “a working-class family.” Her father, before the Depression, had been a railroad man. “He’s now seventy-eight and one of the roller skating experts in the country. He and my mother used to dance in marathons.”

  I REMEMBER all of a sudden we had to move. My father lost his job and we moved into a double-garage. The landlord didn’t charge us rent for seven years. We had a coal stove, and we had to each take turns, the three of us kids, to warm our legs. It was awfully cold when you opened those garage doors. We would sleep with rugs and blankets over the top of us. Dress under the sheets.

  In the morning, we’d get out and get some snow and put it on the stove and melt it and wash around our faces. Never the neck or anything. Put on our two pairs of socks on each hand and two pairs of socks on our feet, and long underwear and lace it up with Goodwill shoes. Off we’d walk, three, four miles to school.

  My father had owned three or four homes. His father left them to him. He lost these one by one. One family couldn’t pay the rent. They owned a bakery shop. They used to pay him off half in money, half in cookies. We lived on cracked cookies and those little bread things. So my father was pretty sharp in a way.

  He always could get something to feed us kids. We lived about three months on candy cods, they’re little chocolate square things. We had these melted in milk. And he had a part-time job in a Chinese restaurant. We lived on those fried noodles. I can’t stand ‘em today. He went to delivering Corn Flake samples. We lived on Corn Flake balls, Rice Krispies, they used to come out of our ears. Can’t eat ’em today either. Can’t stand ’em. My mother used to make the bread, put it under a blanket to raise. Oh, that was tasty. I never tasted such good bread since.

  Every Sunday we used to go house hunting. That was a recreation during the Depression. You’d get in the Model A with the family and go look at the houses. They were all for sale or rent. You’d go look and see where you could put this and where you could put that, and this is gonna be my room. I knew where I was gonna have my horse in the barn. My mother’d go down in the basement, saying, “Oh, this is well constructed. This is where we’re gonna put the potato bin, this is where we’re gonna put the onions.” We knew just where everyone was gonna be. (Laughs.)

  My mother was raised in a lace curtain Irish family and went to a finishing school. We had our napkin rings even during the Depression. My mother’ d set up everything just so and so. I used to go to my girl friend’s to eat. They used to have a pile of Italian food on the table. She’d come over to my place to eat, because she liked the way everything was set up.

  Some of the kids seemed a little better off at the Catholic school. I used to spend most of my time under the desk, lookin’ at the nun’s black-top shoes. It seems I always was doin’ somethin’ to get punished. I was gonna bite her in the knee one time. (Laughs.) I wanted to be a nun. I was in awe of those lovely ladies. So I wound up bein’ a strip dancer. (Laughs.)

  They made you put your name on the collection envelope. All my mother could put in was two, three cents. Gold stars on the wall for scholastic achievements. I know doggone well I did better than some of ’em. They got a star and I never got one.

  My mother always picked a school where the other children were far better off than we were. She would work at a cleaning store, managed the tuition and books. We could have gone to a free public school.

  It was status with my mother. She used to walk around and my father used to call her “Queenie.” She always had grandiose ideas.

  My father did the best he could. He used to stuff in the mailboxes those little sheets, “Pink Sheets for Pale Purses.” I think it was for a left-wingish organization. My father disagreed with whatever philosophy was on there. He got $3 a week for this.

  ’Cause he got a job in Akron, delivering carry-out food, we moved there. That was a dandy place: dirt, smoke, my mother scrubbing all the time. We lived right on the railroad tracks. They used to throw us watermelons and things like that. When the trains slowed down, he used to jump on and have us kids pick up the coal.

  I was about fourteen when I joined the NYA.41 I used to get $12.50 every two weeks. Making footlockers. I gave half to my mother. This was the first time I could buy some clothes. After I bought some nice clothes, I decided I didn’t want to be a nun. (Laughs.)

  My girl friend’s father was in a new movement, Technocracy,42 I used to wear a badge with her ’cause it was my girl friend. I remember the circular sort of thing on the badge.

  I worked part-time in a bakery. I used to slide plastic papers under those nice chocolate eclairs. You’d be surprised how many times you picked ‘em off the floor. Cockroaches runnin’ all over the place. (Laughs.) Nobody got sick. You’d just kick ’em out of the way. They were big roaches, too.

  I finished high school and got sort of engaged. I thought maybe if I got married I could eat hamburgers and hot dogs all night, have a ball, play the guitar and sing. I was singing with a hillbilly band and married the guitar player. Anything would be better than coming home and sleeping on the floor.

  Trains along the Illinois Central tracks, just outside the hotel, are heard. “I miss those low train whistles. I’d like to take off like my grandfather did. He was a hobo, not a bum. He was an able-bodied seaman. He’d go maybe to China, bring back gifts, tell us fantastic stories. We didn’t have a place for him, so he ensconced himself in the bathtub. He had a nice little pillow and bed right in the bathtub. He was an alcoholic. We used to hide all the silver, because he’d take it out and hock it to get a little mist… .”

  Eleven months later, I had a baby. I was pregnant with another when war was declared. When we got married, my husband was making $14 a week. Seven of it went each week into the coat and suit we bought for the marriage. From $14 a week, we jumped to $65 a week, working in a defense plant. It sort of went to my head. Wow! Boy, we were rich. First thing I did was to get me one of those red fur chubbies. I had to have a fur with that amount of money. Oooooh, those things looked awful. With my red hair, it looked like I was half orangutang. Then I had to get the shoes with the crisscross straps and balls hanging down, and the skirt with the fringe. Ick!

  They say if you’re raised poor, you’ll know how to handle money. We were raised poor as church mice. But when I get it, I blow it. It’s a personality thing. I don’t regret any of it. But still… .

  Slim Collier

  A bartender.

  “I was born in Waterloo. A great deal of Iowa, southern Iowa, particularly, didn’t have electricity until the end of World War II. I was eleven years old before I lived in a house with running water. That was 1936.

  “My people are Manx. The island between Scotland and Ireland. The first Collier came here in chains off a British warship. 1641. He was known as a white nigger. He was a political prisoner. He was sentenced to seventeen years for sedition. After ten years of servitude, he was granted a King’s pardon. Nope, my people didn’t come here on the Mayflower.

  “Every Collier would go back to the Isle of Man to get himself a wife. My father broke the tradition. He married the daughter of a German immigrant living in the Dakotas. My mother was really a snot-nosed big sister. She was only fourteen years older than I was… .”

  MY FATHER was sort of a fancy Dan. A very little man, five feet two. He was a tool-and-die maker in addition to being a farmer. The kind of man that would get up in the morning and put on a white shirt and tie, suit, camel hair coat, gloves, get in his late model Chrysler, drive from the farm into the city, park his car in the parking lot, get out, take off his coat, put his su
it in the locker and put on those greasy overalls to be a tool-and-die maker. He had a lot of pretensions. When the Depression hit him, it hit hard.

  He was the kind of man that would put a down payment on a place, get a second mortgage, put a down payment on another place. The Depression wiped out his houses. The anger and frustration he experienced colored my whole life. He was the kind of man, if somebody went broke he was pleased. Now it happened to him.

  It was a 160-acre farm, primarily corn. My brother farms the same 160 acres today. He does it in an hour, two hours, with automation. But my father was a stubborn old cuss. I ran off because he wouldn’t buy a tractor. I was fourteen in 1938, when I ran away from home. My last day’s work that I did for the old man was taking logs out of the woods, with oxen. He bought a tractor in 1939. (Laughs.)

  My father was laid off in the fall of ’31 as a tool-and-die maker. He worked at the John Deere tractor plant. I was seven, and I just barely started school. All of a sudden, my father, who I saw only rarely, was around all the time. That was quite a shock. I suddenly became disciplined by him instead of my mother. The old woodshed was used extensively in those days.

  Fear and worry was the one thing that identified the people. John Paul’s was a furniture store in Westfield, near Waterloo—I suppose you’d call it a suburb today. It was sort of a village where roosters wake you up in the morning, where people kept cows and pigs. Parts of it had street lights, but it was rural enough to have farm animals. We kids would patronize the store, too, because it carried candy and a few school supplies.

  I remember men congregating in the store. One man bragged how he had never been on welfare and wasn’t going to be on welfare. Quite a few people there resented it, because most people in Westfield were on welfare.