Christmas After All

by Kathryn Lasky

  But I have to say that the best presents of all were from Willie Faye. Willie Faye had made each of us a picture book. Each book was different and had a different story that she had told us. Mine was the story of the calf being born in the blizzard. For Ozzie she had illustrated the cattle rustling story and for Lady the pumpkin one. For Clem she did a book on a tornado that she had told us about, and for Gwen she did one about the worst dust storm of all when she found Tumbleweed in a three-foot pile of dust and had to suck the dirt from his nose and ears. The drawing was pretty funny. For Mama and Papa she told the story of how she had come here on the train to Indianapolis, and she had made the best picture of Mama bending down to kiss her. She even got in the part about going to Stout’s for her new pair of shoes. She used colored pencils and water­colors. She worked on them most of the time in school in Miss Morse’s art class. Mama says these books are “absolute treasures.”

  Right now it is two o’clock in the morning, Christmas morning, and we have all finally gone to bed. We really didn’t want to because it is so beautiful in the living room. We had nearly forgotten to ask Papa how he had put up all that greenery and where he got it. Well, this was another surprise. It was Onesy, our old friend the hobo with one eye, one tooth, and missing a finger, who helped him. Papa had wanted him to stay the night and join us for Christmas dinner but Onesy disappeared. Papa snapped his fingers and said, “Just vanished like that!”

  But I am so happy, it is unimaginable. No, it is imaginable. I am so happy that I would gladly eat aspic for Christmas dinner tomorrow, or rather today. . . .

  December 25 — Christmas Day!

  I have never slept so late — none of us has on Christmas morning — but then I smelled bacon frying and heard a shout. Willie Faye and I raced downstairs to see what was happening. There was Jackie and Mr. Jasper standing in our kitchen. And Papa at the stove frying bacon! In an apron! I don’t know what shocked Jackie more — the fact that Papa was back or that he was standing there in an apron. Jackie was holding the most beautiful chicken. They made a pretty strange picture, standing there in the kitchen. We told Jackie how Papa had come back and how he’d sold his radio show about Ozzie, the Boy Wonder, and Ozzie said, “There’s going to be Martians in the third episode, Jackie.”

  Jackie said, “Them Martians ain’t going to be any weirder than what’s right here before my eyes.” And she looked straight at Papa, who was now flipping pancakes. “Little green men, shoot! I never thought I’d live to see a white man in an apron out in the kitchen frying bacon and flipping jacks.” This to Jackie was science fiction.

  Well, then Mama and Gwen came in. They were both wearing their feather hats. Next came Lady and Clem. They were wearing their hats, too. Jackie clutched her chicken harder. “They gonna turn you into a hat, darlin’?” Then I remembered the present we’d made for Jackie, so I ran upstairs. As soon as I brought it down Jackie said, “Oh, my word!” And she shoved that hen into Mr. Jasper’s arms and put the hat on. She really looked terrific. We didn’t hear another sorry word about chicken and hats. As a matter of fact Jackie just turned and said, “Jasper, darlin’, you take that hen out to the garage and put her with those other chickens where she belongs.”

  Later

  I’ll never forget this Christmas. Mama invited Jackie and Mr. Jasper to stay for dinner and Marlon came, too. There were eleven of us crowded around the table. And all the girls and Mama and Jackie wore their feather hats. I looked around the table at happy faces. Then I began thinking of all the really peculiar gifts we had made and exchanged. I thought of the Wise Men, the Magi, who brought the gifts to the baby Jesus. They say it was the Magi who invented the art of giving Christmas presents. I suppose that is right, but the Swift family along with Willie Faye have sort of reinvented this art of giving gifts in the year of this Great Depression, in the year 1932. I looked at Willie Faye and I think maybe it’s not just gifts we have reinvented, maybe it was belief. Willie Faye looked right back at me when I was thinking this. It was as if she knew what I might be thinking and she smiled softly.

  It’s funny but I shall always from now on think of my life as before the time Willie Faye came and after the time Willie Faye came. Before she came, I have to say, life seemed a little bit dull in spite of having three sisters who could yak your ears off and a brother who is inventing a way to listen for Martians and once blew up a trash can. In a funny way I’m thinking that Willie Faye, quiet as she is and in spite of not knowing before she came here what a toilet or a porcelain tub looked like, or what an adjective was, or who Charlie Chan or Booth Tarkington are, is sort of like one of those Wise Men from the Bible. She is kind of a fourth Magi. She blew in here on the skirts of a dust storm from a place called Heart’s Bend, Texas, and all she had was her cat, Tumbleweed, a straw suitcase with hardly enough clothes, a cigar box of colored pencils, a photograph of herself with the big­gest pumpkin in Texas, pumpkin seeds, and the wildest stories I’ve ever heard.

  It is the Great Depression and we have stood for a long time with our feet in the muck and the grime with our noses pressed up against the window, but tonight it was as if we just melted right through that window. And it wasn’t a world of glamour and fantasy. It was home and it was warm and it felt safe. And Papa doesn’t look like Clark Gable, and Mama, even though she is pretty, doesn’t look like Greta Garbo. And Lady’s hair is still funny and I swear I still sometimes see dust puffing out of Willie Faye’s socks. And I just think that before Willie Faye came I could hardly believe that we could have a Christmas at all, but Willie Faye helped me believe — believe that Papa would come back, believe that he indeed had a mission, believe that somehow, someway, things would turn out all right and in fact it has. We have had Christmas after all.

  On January 6, 1933, the twelfth day of Christmas, the celebration of the Epiphany and the Feast of the Kings, Ozzie, the Boy Wonder debuted on the Wild Oats Five Star Theater series. Wild Oats, a breakfast cereal company, sponsored a different half-hour show in the same slot five nights a week. Within a month Ozzie, the Boy Wonder was their most popular show. Within the next two years there were Ozzie comic books and then an Ozzie movie. The Swifts became very wealthy. They were able to pay Jackie a handsome wage. Gwen was able to return to college and every single one of the girls, including Willie Faye, completed their college education.

  On March 4, 1933, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was inaugurated as president of the United States and began laying the groundwork to help the nation recover from the Depression. But it would not be that many years after the Depression that World War II would break out in 1939.

  Some of the Swift children had completed their education by the time America entered World War II in 1941, but Minnie and Willie Faye had not. All of their lives were affected by the war. In some cases college degrees were put off; in others marriage and children were delayed.

  Minnie had indeed learned how to fly by the time of the war and joined the Army Air Force, a division of women pilots. With the need abroad for combat pilots there were not enough pilots left within the United States to provide support services. Minnie, having learned how to fly on her fifteenth birthday, joined up in 1941 upon turning twenty years old. This organization was soon consolidated into the Women’s Air Force Service Pilots, or WASPS, as they were known. It was a very selective organization and of the more than 25,000 applicants only 2,000 were accepted and 1,074 graduated. Minnie was one of them. Throughout the war Minnie flew a variety of assignments, including the towing of targets for air-to-air and anti-aircraft gunnery practice, engineering testing, ferrying aircraft, and other assignments.

  Ozzie actually graduated early from college, having skipped the eighth grade, and entered high school as a sophomore. He went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at the completion of his degree in physics, was sent to Los Alamos, New Mexico, to work on the atom bomb. After Hiroshima, Ozzie devoted himself to working on disarmament and taught at the Princeton Institute of Advanced Studies. He married
a Jewish girl who was a concert violinist and a survivor of the German concentration camp Auschwitz.

  Lady graduated from the Parsons School of Design in New York City and later became a costume designer for Broadway musicals. She eventually moved to Hollywood. In 1950 she received an Academy Award for the costume designs of the movie Some Gal. She never married but had many boyfriends even into her eighties.

  After completing college, Gwen returned to Indianapolis and worked at the Bobbs-Merrill Company, where she was promoted to editor. She got tired of editing the endless editions of Joy of Cooking and wound up in the juvenile department editing children’s books. She married Harry Knox, who completed a law degree in night school and began a law firm that specialized in legal work for war veterans. They had three children.

  Clementine received a master’s degree in social work and became the director of an orphanage outside of Indianapolis. She and Marlon married after a lengthy courtship. Marlon became one of Indianapolis’s leading businessmen. Pursuing his idea that the highest profit margin came from nonessential but amusing items, he began a small toy manufacturing company and then diversified into several other children’s products.

  Willie Faye went to the John Herron Art Institute in Indianapolis and began work as an art director at the Bobbs-Merrill Company. She later began to illustrate stories and became one of America’s most beloved children’s book illustrators. She and Minnie collaborated on a series of very popular books about a chicken that flew an airplane. Minnie wrote the text and Willie Faye illustrated the story. Willie Faye married Homer Peet and had twin girls.

  Minnie married Ashton Brannock, a captain in the air force who had flown five hundred missions during the war. Ashton was killed in the Korean War, leaving Minnie a young widow with two small children. Minnie went on to write novels for young girls that were adventure survival stories. She eventually remarried and continued to fly into her seventies. In 1993, Minnie was one of several women awarded a Distinguished Service Medal by President Bill Clinton in a White House ceremony. Her mother, Belle Swift, who was 101, attended the ceremony in the Rose Garden.

  By the time Herbert Hoover became president in 1929, the bubble of American prosperity had inflated to a size that signified immense wealth. Industry was booming and the stock market was reaching dizzying heights, but no one imagined that a little more than six months after Hoover took office this bubble would burst. The crash came on “Black Tuesday,” October 29, 1929. Wall Street panicked and there was a stampede to dump stocks. Stockholders lost forty billion dollars, and the most desperate times in America’s history began — the Great Depression. By 1932 banks were closing daily, the lines at soup kitchens were becoming longer and longer, and more Americans than ever were out of work.

  The people were so angry about Hoover that his name was used constantly in connection with their misery. The shantytowns that sprang up across the nation were called Hoovervilles. The newspapers that homeless people covered themselves with to stay warm were called Hoover blankets, and people who turned their empty pockets inside out were said to be displaying the Hoover flag. As if the economic situation were not bad enough, the southern plains in western Kansas, Oklahoma, and the Texas Panhandle were suffering the most terrible drought in memory. These once-lush farmlands had been overplanted through the years. Coupled with the drought and the strong winds that began to sweep through in 1931 immense dust storms started to roll across this land, taking not only the precious topsoil but making life nearly impossible. The dust was black. It blotted out the sun and lowered a dark curtain over entire towns. The region became known as the Dust Bowl. Birds were said to fly in terror before the storms, and many animals and people suffocated. Soon there were Dust Bowl refugees, and entire families packed up their belongings in jalopies and headed farther west to Cal­i­fornia. John Steinbeck, the famous American author, wrote a book about these poverty-stricken Dust Bowl travelers that has become a classic called The Grapes of Wrath.

  By 1932 one out of every three wage earners was out of a job — 12.5 million men and women. Malnutrition was also becoming a serious problem among children, and the Manhattan’s Children’s Bureau reported in 1933 that one out of five American children was not getting enough to eat. A gloom had descended upon the nation, and although Hoover was a man of great integrity the people blamed him. They felt he had done too little too late to help the nation on its slide into abject poverty. New ways were sought and new hope came with the election of New York Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt as president. At the core of Roosevelt’s campaign was what he called a New Deal for America’s “forgotten man.”

  Certain things flourished in these lean times, however: organized crime and entertainment. Famous gangsters and outlaws came to dominate the newspapers. In 1920 a law was passed prohibiting the sale of liquor. This era was known as Prohibition, and gangsters such as Al Capone made a lot of money by bootlegging, the illegal importation and sale of whiskey. But these criminals also were violent men who murdered. Ma Barker was the mother of a gang of outlaws, including her sons, who kidnapped, robbed banks and post offices, and thought nothing of shooting anyone who got in their way. Bonnie Parker and her boyfriend Clyde Barrow went on a violent crime spree of robbery across Texas, Missouri, Oklahoma, and New Mexico before they were finally gunned down in a roadblock ambush. The outlaws fascinated the American reading public, who could not get enough of their exploits and sensational crimes.

  But even more engaging than these dark heroes of American crime were the comedians and dramatic char­acters of the radio. The 1930s were known as the Golden Age of Radio. In 1931 twelve million of America’s thirty million homes had a radio, and maybe more than one. Through radio, Americans in their most dire times were brought together and the gloom was dispelled, perhaps through the deadpan humor of one of America’s most beloved comics, Jack Benny, or the zany Groucho Marx, or maybe through the popular show Amos ’n’ Andy, two of America’s favorite characters who recounted with outrageous humor their daily misfortunes. In addition to these comedians, there were detective shows such as Charlie Chan, Sam Spade, Dick Tracy, and The Shadow. And there were science fiction programs like Buck Rogers in the Twenty-Fifth Century or Flash Gordon. Many of these characters found their way into the comic strips along with Little Orphan Annie and Popeye. The movie industry flourished, for movies were cheap. Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, Gary Cooper, and Greta Garbo with their glamour and beauty provided relief from the dinginess of everyday life during the Depression.

  People tried their best to find cheap entertainment, whether it was the movies, listening to radio, roller-skating, which became very popular, and even board games. It was during this time that Monopoly was invented. Despite their heartaches and their despair, Americans were imaginative and resourceful.

  Franklin Delano Roosevelt was inaugurated as president in March 1933, and in his stirring inaugural address he gave the people new hope. He spoke his most famous words in that speech when he said, “Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” He went on to say, “Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment.” But he went forward with immediate action. His most urgent problem was the collapse of the banking system. Two days after his inauguration he declared a national holiday in which all banks would be temporarily closed. FDR had drafted an emergency banking bill that was passed a few days later, specifying which banks could reopen. Those allowed to reopen did so with their deposits now insured by the federal government. More safeguards were put in place to protect every single American citizen who put their money in a bank. Over time people’s confidence was restored.

  In addition to the emergency banking measures that were set up, President Roosevelt started many programs to assist hardship victims, restore jobs, and encourage industrial recovery. He also initiated several laws that were passed pertaining to stock and
monetary issues that would guard against future economic crises. Perhaps the most effective programs in FDR’s New Deal were the relief programs to relieve unemployment. The Works Progress Administration, or WPA, put to work more than 3.5 million people who had been jobless, building more than half a million miles of roads, 150,000 schools, parks, dams, and other public projects. In addition to construction the WPA sponsored artists and musicians to provide cheap or free recitals, puppet shows, and various classes, as well as public art such as murals and sculpture. Another program, the Civilian Conservation Corps, gave 2.5 million men between the ages of seventeen and twenty-eight jobs planting trees, fighting forest fires, protecting wild­life, building reservoirs, and making trails. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a man of immense imagination. He also had enormous energy despite being crippled by polio and unable to walk.

  FDR’s wife, Eleanor, was equally effective and energetic. She was dedicated to bringing women into the mainstream of American politics. She wrote a book called It’s Up to the Women, which was a call to action for women to lead the way in social justice movements. Eleanor Roosevelt’s primary concerns were the abolition of poverty, the end of racial discrimination, and women’s rights. She encouraged women to become active in trade unions and consumer rights groups. In 1939 Mrs. Roosevelt joined and became an active member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. She was the most visible first lady in history in terms of the press and the media. She was the first president’s wife to give press conferences, and she wrote columns for newspapers and magazines. Perhaps her most famous column, which was regularly published, was called “My Day,” in which she wrote about how the Depression affected daily life in the country.