We were always trying to get to sea, but I didn’t have any ticket. Oh, I made that waterfront a thousand times. There used to be those great old liners that sailed out to Hawaii. You could hear the band play “Aloha Away,” and all the guys were standing there with tears in their eyes. As though you had somebody going some place. And you didn’t know a damn soul. (Laughs.)
We weren’t greatly agitated in terms of society. Ours was a bewilderment, not an anger. Not a sense of being particularly put upon. We weren’t talkng revolution; we were talking jobs.
We’d grown up in small-town high schools. There wasn’t much expression, in the press, of the intelligentsia. It was just a tough world, and you had been born into it. I had no great sense of fervor until I went to L.A. and ran into Upton Sinclair in 1934. If I were picking a time when I began to say, “What the hell’s this all about?” it came when I wandered into a meeting one day where Upton Sinclair was talking.
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This was the winter
of ’33, ’34. There was this litttle pink-and-white guy up there speaking, the least likely guy ever to be a radical you ever saw. You automatically think of pince-nez glasses and a shock of white hair. His audience was made up mostly of working stiffs.
He pointed out the great piles of oranges, the piles of lumber laying there idle… . They’d put up a rick of oranges and apples, put gasoline over it and set fire to them. Vegetables were being destroyed and everything. Everybody who cried so much later about federal programs destroying little pigs … they should have seen what industry was doing at this time. To keep the price up.
Sinclair’s idea was to relate the unemployed to the resources not being used. This appealed to me tremendously. It made sense to have this food eaten up by hungry people. I got a job singing with the quartet that was campaigning with him.
If I had to pick one constant enemy during this time, it was the American Legion. They were made up of home guard types. They were the most vicious enemies of this drifting, reckless, hungry crowd of people. Every place I went, Hoovervilles—they were raided. This bunch of Legionnaires with those damn caps on. Guys with baseball bats, driving them out of the jungles around the railroad grounds. Even in the little towns I lived in. I had a war with those guys by the time I was in high school. They were always the bane of my existence.
They were the Main Streeters. They were doing all right. Merchants, storekeepers, landowners. They had a fix that was just awful to live with. They were hard on the little candidate for Governor. They’d come to his meetings with baseball bats and clubs and break it up. Once, when we sang in the Valley, they attacked us and beat the hell out of us. We barely got out of there.
During the Sinclair campaign, I was going to the library, picking up books I’d never read before, books that never crossed my track. You’d go down to look for work in the morning, and then you’d give up at eleven o’clock and drift into that library. I got my education there, really.
By this time, Roosevelt was President. There was the NRA … mystical things were going on we didn’t understand at all. People were talking price-fixing and what have you. Very, very weird world. It didn’t mean a damn to us. There were three brothers of us, we got a freight and went down to Portland. They’d started to work on the Bonneville Dam. Beautiful sight down that river. On a decent day, if you set on top of a box car, it was beautiful… .
We drifted down to the jungle. We go into a beanery, ’cause there was no train out till eleven that night. In comes a Mexican whore and a colored whore. They order a hamburger. The proprietor says, “I don’t serve niggers. Get that dame out of here.” The Mexican girl comes back and orders two hamburgers. The guy grumbles, fries up a couple. The colored girl
walks in. This guy goes under the counter and comes up with a sap.
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He lashes out at the girl’s head, bong! Jeez, I think he’s killed her. She groans and staggers back off this stool. He cuts around the corner in a wild rage. I put my foot out and trip him. He just went ass over Tecumseh. The girls get out in time. He’d a killed that girl, I believe. We lam out of there, too. We grab the midnight freight and get off at Phoenix. It’s a hostile town, so we beat it.
We make an orange freight. We rode in the reefer.
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Clear to Kansas City. It goes like a bat out of hell, a rough ride. We broke through the wire netting and ate the oranges. We got vitamins like mad. (Laughs.) But your mouth gets burnt by that acid juice and your teeth get so damn sore from that ride. By the time we got off at K.C., I could hardly close my mouth.
We catch a train into Kansas City, Kansas, that night. At the stops, colored people were gettin’ on the trains and throwin’ off coal. You could see people gatherin’ the coal. You could see the railroad dicks were gettin’ tough.
Hal and I are ridin’ on the top of the boxcar, it’s a fairly nice night. All of a sudden, there’s a railroad dick with a flashlight that reaches a thousand miles. Bam! Bam! He starts shooting. We hear the bullets hitting the cars, bam! like that. I throw my hands up and start walking towards that light. Hal’s behind me. The guy says, “Get off.” I said, “Christ, I can’t.” This thing’s rollin’ fifty miles an hour or more. He says, “Jump.” I says, “I can’t.” He says, “Turn around and march ahead.” He marches us over the top. There’s a gondola, about eight feet down. He says, “Jump.” So I jumped and landed in wet sand, up to my knees.
We come to a little town in Nebraska, Beatrice. It’s morning. I’m chilled to the bone. We crawl into a railroad sandbox, almost frozen to death. We dry out, get warmed up, and make the train again. We pull into Omaha. It’s night. All of a sudden, the train is surrounded by deputies, with pistols. The guy says, “Get in those trucks.” I said, “What for? We haven’t done anything.” He said, “You’re not going to jail. You’re going to the Transient Camp.”
They drive us up to an old army warehouse. They check you in, take off your clothes, run them through a de-louser, and you take a bath. It’s midnight. We come out, and here’s a spread with scrambled eggs, bacon, bread, coffee and toast. We ate a great meal. It was wonderful. We go upstairs to bed. Here’s a double-decker, sheets, toothbrush, towels, everything. I sat down on this damn bed, I can’t tell you, full of wonderment. We thought we’d gone to heaven. Hal’s a young punk, he’s seventeen. He said, “What the hell kind of a place is this?” I said, “I don’t know, but it’s sure somethin’ different.”
The next morning, they called us up to a social worker. By this time, there’s a thousand guys in there. They’re playing baseball, some guys are washing down walls—bums, bindlestiffs, cynical rough guys who’ve been on the road for years. It’s kind of like a playhouse. It’s unbelievable.
Through a social worker, he is assigned to a job with the National Youth Administration, at “a little cold-water college” in Aberdeen, South Dakota. “And then the good life began for me.
“Before Roosevelt, the Federal Government hardly touched your life. Outside of the postmaster, there was little local representation. Now people you knew were appointed to government jobs. Joe Blow or some guy from the corner.
“It came right down to Main Street. Half of them loved it, half of them hated it. There was the immediacy of its effect on you. In Aberdeen, Main Street was against it. But they were delighted to have those green relief checks cashed in their cash registers. They’d have been out of business had it not been for them. It was a split thing. They were cursing Roosevelt for the intrusion into their lives. At the same time, they were living off it. Main Street still has this fix.”
The NYA was my salvation. I could just as easily have been in Sing Sing as with the UN.
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Just every bit a chance. Hell, yes. Everybody was a criminal. You stole, you cheated through. You were getting by, survival. Stole clothes off lines, stole milk off back porches, you stole bread. I remember going through Tucumcari, New Mexico, on a freight. We made a brief stop. There was a grocery store, a supermarket kind of thing for those days. I beat it off the train and came back with rolls and crackers. This guy is standing in the window shaking his fist at you.
It wasn’t a big thing, but it created a coyote mentality. You were a predator. You had to be. The coyote is crafty. He can be fantastically courageous and a coward at the same time. He’ll run, but when he’s cornered, he’ll fight. I grew up where they were hated, ’cause they’d kill sheep. They’ll kill a calf, get in the chicken pen. They’re mean. But how else does a coyote stay alive? He’s not as powerful as a wolf. He has a small body. He’s in such bad condition, a dog can run him down. He’s not like a fox. A coyote is nature’s victim as well as man’s. We were coyotes in the Thirties, the jobless.
No, I don’t see the Depression as an ennobling experience. Survivors are still ridin’ with the ghost—the ghost of those days when things came hard.
Pauline Kael
Film critic
, The New Yorker.
THE FIRST VIOLENCE I had ever seen was along the Embarcadero. The anger of the men. I never saw it again until recently in Philadelphia—between cops and little Negro kids.
Angry men were yelling. They had weapons and were angry at other men. I was in a car with my father. I had seen passive bread lines. But this was different. Girls don’t usually see this, particularly if you’re a bookish girl from a bookish family.
It may have been a prelude to the San Francisco General Strike. I’m not sure. That was almost like a blackout. It had a sense of paralysis.
The kids with lots of money had actually been moved to the peninsula out of harm’s way. The rich people thought there was going to be a revolution, and they moved out of town.
My neighbors were angry with my mother, because she fed hungry men at the back door. They said it would bring others, and then what would she do? She said, “I’ll feed them till the food runs out.” It wasn’t until years later, I realized the fear people had of these men. We didn’t have it in our house.
I understand why these neighbors were afraid. They had lived with domestic violence all their lives. They were beaten up by their husbands every Saturday night. You could hear them screaming. So their fear of men was generalized. I’m sure my father never hit my mother. Ours was a nonviolent family, so we weren’t particularly scared of these strange men.
Frank Czerwonka
“I’m a garbage man. Work for the city. I have a steady income, twice a month. My wife has an independent income—me.
“I mean, there’s a conditioning here by the Depression. I’m what I call a security cat. I don’t like the job I have, but I don’t dare switch. ’Cause I got too much whiskers on it, seniority.
“I won’t hang around with failures. When you hang around with successful people, it rubs off on ya. When you hang around with failures, it may rub off on ya, too. So I’m a snob, so do me somethin’.”
WHEN MY FATHER DIED, my mother involved herself in speak-easies, blinds and beer flats. Married a couple of times.
In 1928, I started working. And I got laid off a week before the Depression. I had everything I wanted. I didn’t want much. My life’s ambition was to be a bum, and I failed at that. (Laughs.)
In 1930, my stepfather had this flat, where we had a speak-easy going. People from a small syndicate moved in the next flat. In our neighborhood, we wouldn’t drink moonshine, just refined alcohol. My stepfather would peddle the moonshine on the South Side.
These moonshiners, they got the gas company men to tap the main with a three-inch pipe. Using company tools to steal their own gas. The gas company men, I mean, they take money, too. They tapped the gas main pipe and ran it up to the second floor and put a burner on it. Put a hundred-gallon still on it, going twenty-four hours a day. Just time off to put a new batch in.
There was cooperation in the neighborhood. Like this friend of mine, his father ran a joint. He got a job with the utility company to repair meters. Things got rough in the neighborhood. So everybody was cheatin’ on gas, electricity, everything they could. A lot of people had their meters taken out. So he’d rig up jumpers on the meters in the whole neighborhood. He warned ’em: if they see anybody climbin’ up a pole to put a meter on, let him know. The electric company came around, put a meter on it. So he climbed the pole and put a jumper
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on the meter.
The whole neighborhood would cooperate … ?
Yeah, to beat the utility. And there’s the bit about the case workers, too. The case worker was the enemy. They’d see case workers snoopin’ around—they’d know ’em by sight—they’d pass the word around. If they were havin’ parties or they were eatin’ or the old man was moonlighting somewhere to pick up a few bucks, they’d cover up for each other.
The syndicate boys had barrels of mash all over the place. One day my stepfather gets drunk—he was goofy that way. He liked to get arguments goin’ and get pounded up. So they asked my mother if it’s all right to kill him. She said: “No, I haven’t got insurance on him.”
Our speak-easy had a candy-store front. That was the come-on. The fuzz wasn’t botherin’ us. They were just shakin’ down the syndicate. They were tryin’ to get money from them because it was a big operation. They’d take out two truckloads of this moonshine. In five-gallon cans that were always a quart short. Even the one-gallon cans were about four ounces short. They never gave you a full measure. That was the standard practice in them days. They were gyppers.
Did you pay off the syndicate?
No, we bought through their channels. We bought alcohol. This moonshine was obviously for the South Side trade, the colored. The syndicate got a big place cheap to cook, about eight rooms. They used to get knocked off every so often, but not too often. Because the police captain was taken care of. They didn’t believe in payin’ off the men on the beat. They’d give him a drink and that was it. Because it would run into many expenses otherwise. ’Cause if one got something, he’d tell everybody else, and they’d all be in on it. This way, they’d pay the captain off and he wouldn’t come around.