Hard Times

by Studs Terkel

  Well, I went to Washington and came back.175 It was rainin’. When I got home that morning around eight o’clock, that whole wall was wet. There was no gutter to throw that water off. I had a two-room apartment. I sent for him. So Wilkins comes up. I said, “You see this? You think I can sleep here tonight? You put some gutters up.” He said, “Come here.” He showed ‘em to me layin’ out in the yard. I said, “Those gutters have been laying out there for over three weeks. They’re no good out there.” I said, “Look, I’m not paying any rent until you get those gutters up there.” He put the gutters up the next morning.

  And I had asked him about enamel paint. He promised me. So he had a cousin that did his painting. He sent him up with cold-water paint. I sent him back: “You can’t put that on my walls.” He finally come up with the right paint. Painted my two rooms beautiful.

  That evening, everybody in the building wanted to see my apartment, it was so pretty. I say, “Look, I’m gonna tie up this whole floor.” I tied up the whole second floor. Nobody on this floor paying no rent, ‘cause everybody wanted what I wanted, and he didn’t give it to ’em. All right. I got everybody’s rent. And I wouldn’t give it to him. I said, “You’re gonna pay your rent when you got the decorations that I got.” Some of ‘em wanted a bed and some of ’em wanted linoleum and some of ’em wanted chairs and tables.

  They got Mrs. Griffin right across from me, they did hers next. I asked her, “Now, you need anything in the apartment?” She said, “I don’t need nothing like that.” I said, “Then go downstairs and pay your rent.” Mrs. Saddler, the next little lady next to me, she had a lot of children. And her husband was dead. I said, “Now what you want in here?” She say, “I need a mattress for my children’s bed and I need some chairs and a table.” He got it downstairs in the store room, but he won’t give it unless you protest for it, see. I say, “Go downstairs and ask for it. But I’m not gonna give you this money unless you get what you want.” She went downstairs and got what she wanted. Major176 up and brought it. As they did the decorating, whatever those people said they wanted, they got it, before he got any rent.

  So then he proceeded to evict me. I let him evict me. I let the bailiffs come and set me out.

  They put your furniture out on the sidewalk … ?

  Mm-hmm. Yeah, I let ’em come and did that. But we had a committee, see. We had everything arranged. We stayed out there a whole week. That was to excite the neighborhood. To what was happening. I had a very dear friend that lived around that same building. Every morning when I got tired from picketing, I’d go up there and sleep. My little daughter, she slept upstairs every night. So finally he came. “Miz Jeffries,” he say, “there’s no need for all this.” I said, “Sure, there wasn’t, but you put me out. So I’m gonna stay here as long as I want. You can’t put me off. I’m not on your property, I’m on city property. The block don’t belong to you.”

  It rained, but the men had tarpaulins. Nothing got ruined. We cooked, we had more to eat out there than we had in the house.

  A lot of ‘em was put out. They’d call and have the bailiffs come and sit them out, and as soon as they’d leave, we would put ’em back where they came out. All we had to do was call Brother Hilton, he’s about ninety some years now. Look, such and such a place, there’s a family sittin’ out there. Everybody passed through the neighborhood, was a member of the Workers Alliance, had one person they would call. When that one person came, he’d have about fifty people with him.

  Well, now the landlord’d disconnect that stove and put that piece of pipe away. If it wasn’t up the ceiling, they’d take it, and just put the lights off. We had in the organization some men who could do electrical work, see. We’d sneak around through the crowd, and all this nice furniture sittin’ on the street, and sometime it snowin’. Find out who own it, see. “If we put it back, would you stay there?” “Yes.” “All right, let’s go.” Take that stuff right on back up there. The men would connect those lights and go to the hardware and get gas pipe, and connect that stove back. Put the furniture back just like you had it, so it don’t look like you been out the door.

  She moved in and out of several buildings in the area, getting in and out of trouble. She remembered precisely all her old addresses. During the 1936 Campaign, she was assistant to the Democratic precinct captain. She carried every vote in her building for Roosevelt. The landlord was a Republican. “He was gonna put me out because I carried his building Democrat. I said to ‘im, ‘You shoulda been in that boat.’ ” As for the other Roosevelt campaigns, “I have swang him every time he got elected.”

  Nobody had any money. And we formed this organization. We would allow people to pay ten cents a month dues. Then we would give parties and raise money so we could carry on the work. But the majority of people when the war come along, they got ahold to a little money. Then you couldn’t tell ‘em nothin’. They didn’t need you, see. Back in the Thirties, when it was really tough, and nobody was working, we divided whatever we had with each other. Being on relief, I’d get that little piece of check, pay off my rent. They were givin’ you then a little surplus food, remember? You’d have to go to the station and pick up some meat and some beans and bread and stuff like that. We’d divide it with our friends.

  Now, if they see you ain’t got nothing, they ain’t thinking about you. They’ll throw it in the garbage first. Some of them think they’re better than you are. Some of ‘em say, “I wouldn’t give ’em the time to die.”

  The same is when we had the picket lines and struggled to get these colored fellas on these streetcars and els. That was a tough struggle, too. But we got ‘em on the jobs. Now some of ’em don’t know how to treat us. Some of ‘em are so nasty when you get on these buses over here. They don’t know how they got it. And sometimes I call out and say, “You don’t know how you got on here. You got on here, but you don’t know how you got on here.” There are some of ’em who are sympathetic and will talk about it. I say, well, it was a struggle.

  Most of the people from the Thirties are gone in. I’m just around here, me and Drummer Yokum. That’s about the only two from the Thirties that I know of.

  Harry Hartman

  It is somewhere in the County Building. He overflows the swivel chair. Heavy, slightly asthmatic, he’s a year or two away from retirement. He’s been with the bailiff’s office for “thirty-three and a half years”—elsewhere, a few years. He had begun in 1931.

  During the Depression, “I was the only guy working in the house at the time. So the windup is they become big shots and I’m still working.” But he has had compensations: “It boils down to having a front seat in the theater of life.” As court bailiff, he had had in his custody, a sixteen-year-old, who had killed four people on a weekend. During the trial, “he bet me a package of cigarettes, understand, he’d get the chair. And I bet him a package of cigarettes he wouldn’t. When the jury come up and found him guilty, he reached back in a nonchalant way back to me and said, ‘O.K., give me the cigarettes.’ I gave it to him in open court and pictures were taken: KILLER BETS PACKAGE OF CIGARETTES. You know what I mean, and made a big thing about it.” The boy got the chair—“it was quite a shock to him.”

  During the Thirties, “I was a personal custodian to the levy bailiff.” Writs of replevin and levies were his world, though he occasionally took part in evictions. “Replevins is when somebody buys on a conditional sales contract and doesn’t fulfill their contract. Then we come out and take the things back. ’Cause it ain’t theirs till the last dollar is paid for. Levy, understand, is to go against the thing—the store, the business—col—lect your judgment.”

  WE HAD ‘EM every single day. We used to come there with trucks and take the food off the table. The husband would come runnin’ out of the house. We’d have to put the food on the floor, take the tables and chairs out. If they were real bad, we’d make arrangements, you understand, to leave a few things there or something. So they could get by. But it was pretty rough there for a lo
t of people.

  Once we went to a house and there were three children. The table seemed to be part of the furniture company’s inventory. That and the beds and some other things. The thing that struck us funny was that these people had almost the whole thing paid for, when they went to the furniture company and bought something else. So instead of paying this and making a separate bill, the salesman said, “You take whatever you want and we’ll put it on the original bill.” They paid for that stuff, and then when they weren’t able—when the Depression struck—to pay for the new articles they bought, everything was repossessed.

  You know, like radios. You remember at that time, they used to take the radio and put it in a cabinet that would cost $200 or so. The cabinet was the big thing. These people paid off the bedroom set and the dining room set. Next thing they’d want is a nice radio. The radio was put on the bill and boom! everything, the whole inventory, went.

  It was a pretty rough deal. But we arranged that we left a lot of things there. On the inventory, we overlooked the beds and some of the other stuff. When we got enough, we said that the mattresses were unsanitary and we weren’t gonna take it. If we had our way, we’d see that these people—if the original bill was $500 and they paid $350—we’d figure, well, you could leave a bed for $350 and you could leave a table. Or we’d say the mattress was full of cockroaches. We’d never touch the stuff. I’d just put down: bed missing. I’d ask the guy, “Can you identify that bed as the one sold?” And I’d say to the guy, “Hey, that ain’t your bed. Say your brother-in-law’s got it, and he gave you this one instead.” Or something like that.

  I mean, we always had an out. It was a real human aspect. If you really wanted to help somebody, you could. By making it easier for them, you made it easier for yourself. In most cases, people had plenty of warning that if they couldn’t pay it, something would have to be done. They were broke and they were holding out as long as they could. But when it came around, a lot of cases they just gave up.

  Some of the most pitiful things were when you went into a fine home, where if they were able to sell an oil painting on the wall, it could more than pay their judgment. When you went into factories, where the guy pleaded with you, so he could have his tools, understand, and do his work at home. When you took inventory, if you let him take his stuff, you know, if there was a beef, it’d be bad. But if you let him take what he needed, he didn’t care about the rest. ’Cause he’d have bread and butter to go. So you’d use your head in a lot of cases.

  It was a question of going in like a mensch. There was a rewarding part of it. If you treated that guy good, he appreciated it. And in the long run, we did better than any of the guys that went out on the muscle stuff. When we took inventory, it was our inventory that stood up. I could open a brand new box, say in haberdashery, for shirts. What’s to stop me from marking one box “partly full?” All I had to do is take out a shirt and throw it out and I can call it “partly full.”

  We’d even go out at night to repossess cars in a different way. The attorney would want this or that car, and he’d give you an order to take it. But if we thought the guy was a nice guy and he could get some money up, understand, and he needed the car for his business, we’d tell him to park it half a block away and be sure to get hold of a lawyer, or otherwise we’d tow it in the next time. You see? We did some good.

  At that time, they tried all their pullers, the companies, they tried to recover on their own. So they wouldn’t have to file in the municipal court. They tried to save that. They had their own pullers. We put a check on them and we took all kinds of phony stars away from them. Chicken Inspector 23, you know. They tried everything. It got so, people were so mad at me—or, you know, anybody to come out. These guys would come out with their fake stars and say they were deputies. Then when we come out, they were ready to shoot us.

  One of your greatest guys in town, a fella that’s a big banker today, when we went to his home, he met us at the head of the stairs with a rifle. And my boss at the time said, “Yeah, you’ll get one of us, but we’ll get you, too. Why don’t you cool off, and maybe we can discuss this. We don’t want this place. We knew you had the money, we knew that. Why don’t you get together with the lawyer and work something out? What good would it do if you shot us? We didn’t ask to come here.” People would get emotionally disturbed.

  One time I went to take out a radio and a young girl undressed herself. And she says, “You’ll have to leave. I’m in the nude.” I said, “You can stay,” and we took it out anyhow. All we did was throw her in the bedroom and take the thing out. But we had to have a police squad before the old lady’d let it out. Screamed and hollered and everything else. It was on the second floor and she wanted to throw it downstairs. There were many times we had sofas and divans cut up by a person in a rage.

  The only way to gain entrance is if people would open the door for us. Whoever wouldn’t let us in, we’d try to get it another way. There are ways, if you want to get it bad enough, you can do it.

  I used to work quite a bit at night. We’d go around for the cars and we’d go around for places we couldn’t get in in the daytime. We did whatever the job called for.

  Remember your feelings when you had to go out on those jobs?

  In the beginning, we were worried about it. But after you found out that you could do more good and maybe ease somebody’s burden—and at the same time, it was very lucrative as far as you were concerned—why then you just took it in your stride. It was just another job. It wasn’t bad.

  But we had places where we had to take a guy’s truck and take his business away, and he’s gone to the drawer and reached for a gun. We’d grab him by the throat, you know what I mean, and muscle and something like that. I don’t know if he reached for the gun to kill himself or to scare us or what. Anyway, he went for the drawer and boom! I slammed the door on his hand and my partner got him around the neck. I opened the drawer, and there’s a gun there. I said, “Whataya goin’ for the gun for?” He said, “I’m going for my keys.” (Laughs.) The keys were in his pocket.

  We’ve had guys break down. We’ve had others that we thought would, and they were the finest of the lot. No problem at all. No matter how much they were burning on the inside.

  There were some miserable companies that wanted to salvage everything. When we got a writ from them, we didn’t want it. But we had to take it. Some of ‘em really turned your guts. And there were others, it was a pleasure to know. All in all, we used to look at it and laugh. Take it for whatever it was. If you got so, you knew how to allay hard feelings there, and you knew how to soft soap ’em, you did all right.

  Aside from the bed, the table—I suppose the humiliation …

  We tried to keep it down. That they were sending the stuff back or that they were gonna get new stuff. Frankly, their neighbors were in the same classification as they were. It was things that people knew. It was part of the hardship.

  When you saw guys around the house, they’d just stand by … ?

  Depressed … if you came in there and they thought they were failures to their wife and children. But like everything else, they always got over it. Look, people were trying to get by as best they could, and this was our way of getting by. We might as well make it as pleasant as we possibly can. And that’s what our boss wanted: less trouble. Because after all, he held a political office and he wanted good will.

  The poor people took it easier and were able to much better understand than the people who were in the middle or better classes.

  If I walked in a house, say, where they had furniture from Smyth177 and you come into them … first of all on account of being ashamed of never having had things of this type … they were the ones who hit hardest of all. They never knew anything like this in their whole career. They’d have maybe a Spanish cabinet, with all the wormwood and that. And realize that if they could have sold that, they could have paid their bill what they owed, what the guys were closin’ in on ’em for. We had men walk out
of the house with tears in their eyes. And it was the woman who took over. The guys couldn’t take it. Especially with cars, you know what I mean?

  The poor mostly would make the best of it. They knew it was gonna be taken. They knew what they were up against and they knew it was only a matter of time, you know, until somebody took it away. We had less trouble with the poor. Not, I mean, that we enjoyed going against them, ‘cause if they were poor, you had to help ’em more than anybody else.

  It was a real rough time, but we tried to make it along with a smile. Instead of being a vulture, we tried to be helpful. But they were interesting times.

  Did you encounter much resistance in your work?

  No. I’d say one in a hundred.

  If you’d walk in another room and somebody all of a sudden gets hot and grabs a knife and goes for one … I mean this can happen. But you usually get ’em when they start crying, understand. When they start crying, they’re already spent. Most of all, it was surprising how they accepted their fate.

  What we did then, I don’t think we could do today. With the way the people look at the law. And with their action and their feeling, you know what I mean. They wouldn’t accept today as they did then. What we did then was different. People still respected the courts and respected the law. They didn’t want to revise our laws to satisfy them. (Weary, resigned.) What am I gonna tell you?

  Today you get a guy in court, you don’t like what the judge says, he calls him a m f, you know what I mean? So how can you go in a house, understand, where we had law-abiding citizens like we had in the Thirties? Today we’d possibly run into a lot of trouble. If we started these evictions, we’d move ‘em out on the street, they’d move ’em right back in. Whataya gonna do then? Today I think it’s different, a different type people.