by Studs Terkel
This short temper was a characteristic of the time. Men who were willing to work couldn’t find work. My father was the kind of man who had to be active. He’d invent work for himself. A child who was playing irritated him. It wasn’t just my own father. They all got shook up.
My old man went back to work in ’33, part-time. Nevertheless, he was earning cash money. That term, “cash money,” impressed itself on my childhood. A dime was a weekly event. It brought me a bag of popcorn and a seat in the third row of the theater where I could see Bob Steele shoot off the Indians. On Saturday—buffalo nickel day, they called it. It provided conversation to my schoolmates for the rest of the week.
Cash was extremely rare. I remember having found a dollar and my father gravely taking charge of it and doling it out to me a dime at a time.
When he was hired back, we went to the 160 acres that the finance company had. Because he was able to make payments, they waived the foreclosure. They were so hard up for cash money themselves.
There was a family that experienced a farm foreclosure. It was the first of March when they were forced off, and all their household goods were sold. Even family pictures. They went for five cents, ten cents a piece. Quite a few of the kids were brought there by their parents, partly by morbid fascination, partly by sympathy, partly—well, there was something going on. In those days of no TV, no radio in some places, an event was an event.
It was a hilarious thing for us kids. We got together, there were lots of new kids. Games…. Gradually, I was aware, slightly, of the events. Overhearing the adults talk. The worry and the relief they expressed: it hadn’t happened to them. The anticipation that it might … the fascination with catastrophe. I recall this undertone, horror, but also fascination. It dominated the conversation for weeks.
The dominant thing was this helpless despair and submission. There was anger and rebellion among a few but, by and large, that quiet desperation and submission.
The phrase, “Prosperity is just around the corner,” was something we kids would repeat. But we didn’t quite dig what prosperity meant. (Laughs.) Iowa is traditionally Republican. When my father was voting Democrat and announced it ahead of time—he voted for Roosevelt—it was something of a shock: “Collier is turning radical.” (Laughs.) Well, Hoover got blamed for the Depression.
“When I quarreled with my father and left home, I worked as an itinerant farmer for $16 a month and found.43 It was understood that a hired man went to church with the family. He didn’t sit with ’em. The hired help all sat in the back row. Your hired men and hired girls would sit at the table and eat with the family. But in public you had certain amenities you had to observe. You held the door open and let every member of the family walk in before you came in. Oh yes, we had social classes in those days.”
Among his other jobs: theater usher, bellhop, truck helper, coal loader. Finally at the age of seventeen, the army. Out of the entire company, only he and another had completed eighth grade; they were made medics.
In 1939, I went out an itinerant farm worker. I got a job cutting asparagus, fifteen cents an hour, as fast as you could move. I remember standing up once to rub my aching back, ’cause you worked in a crouch almost at a running pace, and the straw boss yelling: “See those men standing by the road? They’re just waiting to get you fired. If I catch you straightening up once more, one of them will be working and you won’t.”
We’d gather at a certain site at four in the morning. And stand there waiting for the truck to come by, and they’d yell the terms off: fifteen cents an hour. If you wanted work, you’d come to these intersections in Waterloo. Men would be standing there, smoking and talking, bragging, joking as men talk when they get together and don’t know each other. They’d decide: I’m not gonna work for fifteen cents an hour. After all, I got $2 cash money at home. The rest of us would pile on the truck, and a man would say: That’s enough.
They were bringing people out of town to work in the country. The people in the country were getting up in arms, refusing to work at these wages. At that time, I didn’t realize the exploitation, and the competitiveness of workers.
Was there talk of organizing?
Not in Iowa, not in that east central part. The people were too conservative. I was past forty years of age before I joined a union. I was conditioned—to join a labor union would take away your ability to stand on your own two feet. It would mean surrendering yourself. I probably picked up a great deal more of my father’s arrogance than I realize. I was too arrogant to join a union. Hell, I’d work for less money just to be my own self.
To be a union man had some sort of shameful label to it. There was a man in our neighborhood, whose wife was a part-time prostitute. This was known. He smoked tailor-made cigarettes, as opposed to Bull Durham roll-your-owns. The man had very little respect. In the same way, being a union man wasn’t quite respectable.
POSTSCRIPT: “Back then, a woman by the time she was forty or fifty, was an old woman. When I was back in Iowa last September, some of these forty-five and fifty-year-old chicks are better lookin’ than their twenty-year-old daughters. Labor-saving devices, cosmetics … and they’re health conscious: vitamins. I have noticed a peculiar number of people my age wear dentures. We didn’t get the right vitamins. We didn’t get the minerals.”
Dorothe Bernstein
A waitress.
I WENT INTO an orphan home in 1933. I was about ten. I had clean clothes all the time, and we had plenty to eat. We’d go through the park when we walked to school. Railroad tracks came somewhere. The picture’s like it was yesterday.
The men there waited for us to go through and hand them our lunches. If we had something the dietitian at the home would prepare that we didn’t like. We’d give them the little brown paper bags.
Today I tell my daughters: be careful of people, especially a certain type that look a certain way. Then we didn’t have any fear. You’d never think that if you walked by people, even strangers: gee, that person I got to be careful of. Nobody was really your enemy. These were guys who didn’t have work. Who’d probably work if there was work. I don’t know how they got where they were going or where they ended up. They were nice men. You would never think they would do you bodily harm. They weren’t bums. These were hard luck guys.
On Fridays, we used to give‘em our lunch, all of us. They might be 125 of us going to school, carrying the same brown paper bag, with mashed sardine sandwiches and mayonnaise on it. This was thirty some years ago. I still don’t eat a sardine. (Laughs.) Today when I serve a sardine in the restaurant, I hold my nose. Not with my fingers. Did you ever hold your breath through your nose, so you can’t smell it? ’Cause I still see these sardine sandwiches with mayonnaise on them.
You hi’d them, and they hi’d you. That was it. If you asked me where they slept at night, I couldn’t tell you. They knew we were friends, and we knew for some reason they were friends.
People talk about the good old times. These can’t be the good old times when men wanted to work and couldn’t work. When your kids wanted milk and you had to go scratch for it. I remember one girl friend I went to store with. She was real ashamed because they had food stamps. I remember how apologetic she was to me. It kind of embarrassed her. She said, “You want to wait outside?”
Louise was a Bohemian girl. Her mother had a grocery store that they lived behind. Louise used to do the books, and there was always owing. You never said to the people: “Do you have the money to pay me?” They would say, “Write it in the book.” And you wrote it in the book, because this was their family food, and they had to have it. It wasn’t that you were giving it away. Eventually, you’d be paid.
But there wasn’t this impersonal—like the supermarkets. They’d say, “Hello, Dorothe, how’s your sister?” And so forth. There’s no such thing as books in the supermarket. You go in, you pay, you check out, and you don’t even know what you’re checking out. The faith people had in each other was different.
There
are people out in the world today are ashamed to admit from whence they came. I met one at a PTA meeting. I went up nice and friendly and I said, “Aren’t you La-da-da?” She looked at me. I said, “I’m Dorothe. Remember me?” Her eyebrow raised. I mean she was all dressed up to the hilt. She said, “You are completely mistaken. I don’t know who you are.” I bumped into this person five or six times since. She is who I thought she was. I let the subject drop. A lot of kids felt the stigma. While it wasn’t your fault, they feel: I’d rather it’s a closed door, those times.
I never knew any real millionaires who were diving out of windows. I would read it like it was fiction. Who had that kind of fantastic money? They would kill themselves because of loss of it? To me, it’s easier and nicer to scratch a little bit and get up.
You know, when you get down so low that you can’t get any lower, there’s no place else to go but up. You do either one of two things: you either lay down and die, or you pull yourself up by your bootstraps and you start over.
Dawn, Kitty McCulloch’s Daughter
THESE WERE the years I remember my dad, who was a white collar worker, being derisive of the strikers. And yet this man put in seventy-two hours, he worked so hard, and he couldn’t see that it was necessary for people to strike. When the forty-hour week came through, boy, he really supported Roosevelt.
I can remember all the excitement. Politics was important. I remember that my folks used to get together with dear friends and listen on Sundays to Father Coughlin. It was a must that the kids keep quiet while this man was screaming over the radio. I don’t really remember all the things he was saying, but I remember I hated him. I really don’t know why, because I didn’t know then. I know now. But isn’t it funny, a child’s reaction… . My father used to listen to him and think he was right: Coughlin’s right. They would sit there and say he had the right idea. How important a part radio played in all our lives, all during the Depression.
Everything was important. If one man died, it was like a headline. Life was more important, it seemed to me. I remember a headline story of a young golfer—he had on metal shoes and was hit by lightning. Everybody in the neighborhood talked about it. It was very important that this one man died in such a freak accident. Now we hear traffic tolls, we hear Vietnam … life is just so, it’s not precious now.
Phyllis Lorimer
“I was unaware of what was happening. I knew what happened to me. I did hear of people jumping out of windows. It didn’t mean anything personally to me.
“I grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut, a lovely house. My family was extremely well off, but I always thought I was poor. All my cousins, everybody’s father was a millionaire. My best friends had their own island. They each had their boat, and all had their jumping horses.
“My mother and father were divorced. My father was a successful motion picture producer in California. My mother took me out there. Came the Crash, and we all stayed.”
WHEN IT HAPPENED, I was in a boarding school which I loved. At Glendora. It was the best boarding school in California at that time. A beautiful school in the middle of orange trees. I was about to be president of the student body and very proud of myself. Suddenly I couldn’t get any pencils and went to the principal to find out why. She was embarrassed because we were old friends. She said, “I’m sorry, the bills just haven’t been paid.” She complimented me, saying, “Were there scholarships, you could have it.” And, “I couldn’t be sorrier.”
I was mortified past belief. It was hard for the principal. I called my mother and said, “Come and pick me up.” Which she did. I went back home which wasn’t much of a home because we were living with a stepfather whom I detested.
It was rough on me, the Thirties. I wasn’t aware of it being with everyone else. I thought it was just personal. I was in no way aware that it was a national thing. Having grown up in some affluence, I was suddenly in a small court in Hollywood with a stepfather who was drunk and ghastly.
My brother was still at Dartmouth, where he was fortunate enough not to know what was going on at home. Whatever money there was went to keep brother at Dartmouth. We were living on a form of relief. We had cans of tinned bully beef. And we had the gas turned off. My mother was an engaging lady who made everything a picnic. We cooked everything on an electric corn popper, so it was gay in certain aspects. (Laughs.) My mother had humor and charm, so I didn’t know it was a desperate situation. When there wasn’t any money, she’d buy me a china doll instead of a vegetable. (Laughs.) She was an eccentric, and everybody stared at her. I was the little brown mouse.
My father was still holding up his pride. He had been successful, and then things went. Two houses with everything in it. His own career had nothing to do with the Depression. He blew it. Lots of times bills weren’t paid when there was no Depression.
I had come from this terribly wealthy family, with cousins who still had so much that, even during the Depression, they didn’t lose it. Suddenly I had four great white horses. They were given to me by my cousins. I was a very good horsewoman. (Laughs.) I rode at all the shows and steeplechases and all that. And went home to canned bully beef at night. (Laughs.)
My brother was socially oriented, a tremendous snob. While we were eating bully beef, he was living extremely well at Dartmouth. Nobody told him how bad things were. He lived magnificently, with a socialite friend, in a house with a manservant. He came back and found the truth, and the truth was ghastly.
He was five years older, a male, facing the fact that he had to go out and do it. It set for him a lifelong thing: he was never going to be caught in the same trap his parents were—never, ever going to be the failure his father was.
His first job was carrying rubber at the Firestone factory, and he got the white tennis clothes smelly and he violently hated the whole thing. He came home reeking of it and hating himself.
It was unbearable. He wouldn’t tell the people with whom he played tennis on the weekends. He had an old Ford with no door, but if you held on, there was a door. When he would take me out in the car, I would be the one that held the door on. It was that kind of Ford.
He was going to get somewhere and he fixed himself a little black book: what he was going to do by such and such a date. And he did it—to make up for his parents’ failures. He wished to be in color photography. He studied every night he came home from Firestone. Within a year, he was manager of the New York office of Technicolor. He had such determination….
Now it was necessary for me to make some money because the stepfather was drunk all the time and the father was pretending it hadn’t happened. Having gone to a proper lady’s finishing school, I didn’t know how to do anything. I spoke a little bad French, and I knew enough to stand up when an older person came into the room. As far as anything else was concerned, I was unequipped.
I heard there was a call for swimmers for a picture called Footlight Parade. At Warner Brothers. The first big aquacade picture.44 I went, terrified, tried out the high-diving thing and won. I couldn’t have been more stunned. I truly think this is where I got a lifelong point of view: respect for those who did, no respect for those who had … just because their father had done something and they were sitting around.
I loved the chorus girls who worked. I hated the extras who sat around and were paid while we were endangering our lives. I had a ball. It was the first time I was better than anybody at something. I gained a self-respect which I’d never had.
In the midst of my suddenly getting $7.50 a day for risking my life daily on the high boards and stunt work, falling out of wagons, and no overtime, I discovered what a good union could mean. I had spent most of my childhood alone. Now I came to respect those who worked for each other and for others. I got a great respect for the Screen Actors’ Guild, who were protecting us who were working under water for $7.50 a day.
It was the big thing in my life at that moment. I had been a brown wren in uniform in a lot of proper girls’ schools. My mother was an exhibitionist,
and I wanted just that nobody ever look at me. I just wanted to disappear. I was fond of my mother, who was of no world. She could have lived in any era. I never got from her what was going on. I did from my brother, because he was undone by it.
Always having felt slightly rejected by Westhampton society, Greenwich society, Great Neck society, I had the feeling we weren’t “it,” whatever “it” was. I was sure my relatives were “it.” I knew my mother was a loon, wore fishnet and rode bicycles. We were odd.
All of a sudden I found another group with whom I belonged. The ex-Olympic stars who were diving and swimming and the chorus girls who worked like mad. Suddenly I didn’t care about my brother’s friends, the socially important. He kept saying, “When they ask what you’re doing, don’t say you’re a chorus girl.” I said, “I’m proud to be a chorus girl.” That used to destroy him.
In Westhampton, Greenwich and Great Neck, my only knowledge of what people do about anything was to keep Polacks from moving in. I truly believed, as a child, the bridge across the canal from Southampton was to keep Jews out of the country club. (Laughs.) Suddenly I’m a wild labor enthusiast. I’m here with the chorus girls and the grips.
Bob Leary
A part-time cab driver, part-time student. During a tortuous ride through Manhattan’s narrow streets, there was time for fragments of conversation… .
MY FATHER spent two years painting his father’s house. He painted it twice. It gave him something to do. It prevented him from losing all his—well, I wouldn’t say self-respect, because there were many, many people who were also out of work. He wasn’t alone.
He belonged to the Steamfitters’ Union. They were putting up the old Equitable Building at the time. But I guess they ran out of steam, just around ’29.
He never forgot it. I guess it does do something to somebody to be out of work so long. It can affect your confidence in yourself. Not that it destroyed my father’s self-confidence. But I could see how it affected his outlook on life, his reaction towards success. He was inordinately impressed by men who had made it in business. It’s my feeling the Depression had something to do with this.
