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 suit 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.
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.