Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression
By Studs Terkel
4/5
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About this ebook
In this “invaluable record” of one of the most dramatic periods in modern American history, Studs Terkel recaptures the Great Depression of the 1930s in all its complexity. Featuring a mosaic of memories from politicians, businessmen, artists, striking workers, and Okies, from those who were just kids to those who remember losing a fortune, Hard Times is not only a gold mine of information but a fascinating interplay of memory and fact, revealing how the 1929 stock market crash and its repercussions radically changed the lives of a generation. The voices that speak from the pages of this unique book are as timeless as the lessons they impart (The New York Times).
“Hard Times doesn’t ‘render’ the time of the depression—it is that time, its lingo, mood, its tragic and hilarious stories.” —Arthur Miller
“Wonderful! The American memory, the American way, the American voice. It will resurrect your faith in all of us to read this book.” —Newsweek
“Open Studs Terkel’s book to almost any page and rich memories spill out . . . Read a page, any page. Then try to stop.” —The National Observer
Editor's Note
Quarantine read…
Studs Terkel’s oral history of the Great Depression was published 50 years ago as of 2020, but it feels incredibly relevant as the COVID-19 pandemic has sent shockwaves through the economy. Hear from men and women from across the socio-economic spectrum who lived through one of the worst periods in modern history.
Studs Terkel
Studs Terkel (1912–2008) was an award-winning author and radio broadcaster. He is the author of Race: How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About the American Obsession; Division Street: America; Coming of Age: Growing Up in the Twentieth Century; Talking to Myself: A Memoir of My Times; “The Good War”: An Oral History of World War II; Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do; The Studs Terkel Reader: My American Century; American Dreams: Lost and Found; The Studs Terkel Interviews: Film and Theater; Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression; Will the Circle Be Unbroken?: Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith; Giants of Jazz; Hope Dies Last: Keeping the Faith in Troubled Times; And They All Sang: Adventures of an Eclectic Disc Jockey; Touch and Go: A Memoir; P.S.: Further Thoughts from a Lifetime of Listening; and Studs Terkel’s Chicago, all published by The New Press. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a recipient of a Presidential National Humanities Medal, the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, a George Polk Career Award, and the National Book Critics Circle 2003 Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award.
Read more from Studs Terkel
Touch and Go: A Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Hope Dies Last: Keeping the Faith In Troubled Times Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5"The Good War": An Oral History of World War II Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Studs Terkel's Chicago Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Will the Circle Be Unbroken?: Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5And They All Sang: Adventures of an Eclectic Disc Jockey Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5P.S.: Further Thoughts from a Lifetime of Listening Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Hard Times: An Illustrated Oral History of the Great Depression Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Studs Terkel Reader: My American Century Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLast Words of the Executed Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Outside the Magic Circle: The Autobiography of Virginia Foster Durr Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5
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Reviews for Hard Times
153 ratings6 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Oral history of the Great Depression. The 'common 'man' interviews are the best, but Terkel interviewed many politicians and government officials as well. Contains the only interview I've ever read with Topekan Alfred Landon, 1936 GOP candidate. The vitriol aimed at Roosevelt by some reminds one that every election is terrible.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5All in all, this was a good book. I enjoyed reading the first hand accounts, and Terkel did a very good job of including all opinions (including some truly disgusting, racist ones). It really gives you a good idea of what the Depression was like. Like Terkel said at the beginning, whether every fact was true or not, or every date remembered correctly hardly matters - it's what these people remember of the time that is the true legacy of the depression.
While I enjoyed it, I also felt that this book was about a hundred pages too long. Things seemed to repeat themselves. There also seemed to be no clear order to the book - the interviews seemed to be basically in a random order.
Nonetheless, it was truly an interesting and educational book. - Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
A masterfully organized relating of oral anecdotes from Great Depression America. The author collected them all himself and they range from touching to depressing to amusing to astounding. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5All in all, this was a good book. I enjoyed reading the first hand accounts, and Terkel did a very good job of including all opinions (including some truly disgusting, racist ones). It really gives you a good idea of what the Depression was like. Like Terkel said at the beginning, whether every fact was true or not, or every date remembered correctly hardly matters - it's what these people remember of the time that is the true legacy of the depression.
While I enjoyed it, I also felt that this book was about a hundred pages too long. Things seemed to repeat themselves. There also seemed to be no clear order to the book - the interviews seemed to be basically in a random order.
Nonetheless, it was truly an interesting and educational book. - Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5A bit of a slog. Less drama than I expected, less diversity (both in the interviewees and in their voices), and more interviews with the rich and privileged. As an oral history, it doesn't compare with Svetlana Alexievich's "Voices from Chernobyl." > I got out of art school in 1930. That was the proper time for any artist to get out of school. (Laughs.) Everybody was unemployed, and the artist didn't seem strange any more.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A very interesting thing happened about one-third of the way through this book; I suddenly realized it was not a current publication. That is, I was reading this book with the assumption that it was written in the early 2000s. Shame on me for not paying attention. However, that speaks volumes to the timelessness of content. Quite simply, this book published in 1970 reflects thoughts and ideas that are still being expressed today. This is a collection of interviews with people who lived during the Depression. It is a wide-ranging collection of individuals. It includes the rich, the powerless, the haves, the never-hads, the had-but-lost-its, the individuals untouched by the times, the people who worked to make things better, the people who did what it took to survive, the thieves, the industrialists, the farmers, the whites, the blacks, the Hispanics, the communists, the republicans, the Roosevelt-lovers, the Roosevelt-haters, the cross section of humanity that lived through one of the toughest times our nation ever experienced.The result is slightly disjointed and uneven. But that is to be expected. These are the actual words of the actual people. (As Studs notes in the introduction [and I apologize, this is not the exact quote – I couldn't find it after only a quick perusal] these are the people's stories. He didn't go back to make sure their information –dates, times, people – were exactly correct. He was letting them tell the story they remembered.) That pendulum swing of ideas and beliefs is both the strength and weakness of the approach. We are used to reading a narrative that presents a certain version of what has occurred. Because of the people involved, there are numerous versions that swing from far right to far left to in between to not even caring where it lands.And that pendulum swing sometimes left me feeling tired and, once or twice, bored. I wasn't sure I wanted to hear a person's tale. But I would go on and be amazed by the next story. And, as I have noted before, once I figured out the decade in which this was written, I was suddenly overcome by how little we learn and how we tend to say the same things again and again. Part of the premise of this collection seems to be to show that the nation has not learned – that the mistakes that lead to the Great Depression were in place and could happen again in the 70s. And sure enough, we took another plunge – nothing as big as the Depression, but a plunge nonetheless.And yet, I read this in 2014 and these people could just have easily been saying that the Great Depression was predecessor for the Great Recession (or whatever name we are currently giving it.) Discussions of the way banks mishandled the money, discussions of people overextending because it can't go anywhere but up, discussions of shoe-shines owning millions in stock (just replace that with million-dollar homes), discussions of the differences in the ways we treat the poor today, discussions of how it is the fault of the poor/fault of the rich/fault of the bankers/fault of the government/fault of my own/fault of anyone but me.We will repeat history because we do, indeed, fail to learn from it. But we have never plunged as deep as we did in the 30s. Maybe we learned a little bit.Read these remembrances and learn. And maybe the next time we repeat history, we will continue to make that plunge a little less deep.
Book preview
Hard Times - Studs Terkel
BOOK ONE
The March
Jim Sheridan
It is a large hotel: a halfway house for its hundreds of guests, who are convalescing from nervous breakdowns. The benches near the entrance—and the lobby—are overflowing with the elderly and the young, engaged in highly animated conversations. On this summer’s evening, it was certainly the most alive area in the neighborhood.
He is sixty-three years old.
THE SOLDIERS were walking the streets, the fellas who had fought for democracy in Germany. They thought they should get the bonus right then and there because they needed the money. A fella by the name of Waters, I think, got up the idea of these ex-soldiers would go to Washington, make the kind of trip the hoboes made with Coxey in 1898,¹² they would be able to get the government to come through.
D. C. Webb organized a group from Bughouse Square to go on this bonus march. Not having been in the army—I was too young for World War I and too old for World War II (laughs)—I was wondering if I would be a legitimate marcher. But the ten or fifteen other fellas were all soldiers, and they thought it would be O.K. for me to go. Webb said, Come along, you’re a pretty good bum.
(Laughs.)
We went down to the railyards and grabbed a freight train. Our first stop was in Peru, Indiana. We jungled up there for a little while, and then we bummed the town, so to speak. Go to different grocers and give them a tale of woe. They would give us sausage or bread or meat or canned goods. Then we’d go back to the railroad yards, the jungle, where we’d build a little fire and we’d cook it up in these cans. We’d sit around the fire and eat. . . .
Peru was the first division point outside of Chicago on the C & O ¹³ We’d stop off and rest and scrounge up something to eat. We’d generally be told by the conductors the train was made up and ready to go out. Some of these fellas had come with their families. Can you imagine women and children riding boxcars?
The conductor’d want to find out how many guys were in the yard, so he would know how many empty boxcars to put onto the train. Of course, the railroad companies didn’t know this, but these conductors, out of their sympathy, would put two or three empty boxcars in the train, so these bonus marchers could crawl into them and ride comfortable into Washington. Even the railroad detectives were very generous.
Sometimes there’d be fifty, sixty people in a boxcar. We’d just be sprawled out on the floor. The toilet . . . you had to hold it till you got a division point. (Laughs.) That’s generally a hundred miles. You didn’t carry food with you. You had to bum the town. It was beggary on a grand scale.
In one town, D. C. Webb got up on the bandstand and made a speech. We passed the hat, even, among the local citizenry. The money was used to buy cigarettes for the boys. Townspeople, they were very sympathetic.
There was none of this hatred you see now when strange people come to town, or strangers come to a neighborhood. They resent it, I don’t know why. That’s one of the things about the Depression. There was more camaraderie than there is now. Even more comradeship than the Commies could even dream about. That was one of the feelings that America lost. People had different ideas, they disagreed with one another. But there was a fine feeling among them. You were in trouble . . . damn it, if they could help ya, they would help ya.
One incident stuck in my memory. We had reached a place in Virginia. It was a very hot day. In this jungle, there was a man, a very tall man. He had his wife with him and several small children. We invited them over to have something to eat with us, and they refused. Then I brought something over to them in an old pie plate. They still refused. It was the husband who told me that he didn’t care for anything to eat. But see, the baby was crying from hunger.
Finally, me and some others went down to bum the center of the town. I remember going into a drugstore and bumming a baby bottle with a nipple. Now, can you imagine a guy bumming a baby bottle with a nipple? It took me a few guts to work it up. I explained the circumstances. Then I went and bummed the milk.
When I got back to the jungle camp, it was kinda dark. I first reported in to Captain Webb and then he kidded me about the baby bottle. Christ,
I said, that baby there’s gotta eat.
And he said, This afternoon you got pretty much of a rebuff.
Well,
I said, I’m gonna try again.
So I went over and addressed myself to his wife. And I told her: here is the baby bottle. We had even warmed up the milk. But she looked at her husband, and her husband said he didn’t want it.
What could I do about it, but just feel blue? I didn’t look upon it as charity. It seemed to me that here was a fella’s pride getting the best of him.
The tragedy came when the train was going through Virginia.
We had to go through these mountain countries. The smoke from the stacks of the engines, and the soot, would be flying back through the tunnels and would be coming into the boxcars. So in order to avoid getting choked, we’d close the boxcars and hold handkerchiefs over our noses. There was quite a discussion about this. What would happen to the little infant? We was afraid it would smother. The mother was holding the baby, but the baby seemed very still. The mother screamed. We didn’t know what the scream was about. After we reached Washington, we found out that the baby had died going through the tunnels.
When the baby died, a feeling of sadness came over those in the boxcar. It seemed that they had lost one of their own.
When we got to Washington, there was quite a few ex-servicemen there before us. There was no arrangements for housing. Most of the men that had wives and children were living in Hooverville. This was across the Potomac River—what was known as Anacostia Flats. They had set up housing there, made of cardboard and of all kinds. I don’t know how they managed to get their food. Most other contingents was along Pennsylvania Avenue.
They were tearing down a lot of buildings along that street, where they were going to do some renewal, build some federal buildings. A lot of ex-servicemen just sort of turned them into barracks. They just sorta bunked there. Garages that were vacant, they took over. Had no respect for private property. They didn’t even ask permission of the owners. They didn’t even know who the hell the owners was.
They had come to petition Hoover, to give them the bonus before it was due. And Hoover refused this. He told them they couldn’t get it because it would make the country go broke. They would hold midnight vigils around the White House and march around the White House in shifts.
The question was now: How were they going to get them out of Washington? They were ordered out four or five times, and they refused. The police chief was called to send them out, but he¹⁴ refused. I also heard that the marine commander, who was called to bring out the marines, also refused. Finally, the one they did get to shove these bedraggled ex-servicemen out of Washington was none other than the great MacArthur.
The picture I’ll always remember . . . here is MacArthur coming down Pennsylvania Avenue. And, believe me, ladies and gentlemen, he came on a white horse. He was riding a white horse. Behind him were tanks, troops of the regular army.
This was really a riot that wasn’t a riot, in a way. When these ex-soldiers wouldn’t move, they’d poke them with their bayonets, and hit them on the head with the butt of a rifle. First, they had a hell of a time getting them out of the buildings they were in. Like a sit-in.
They managed to get them out. A big colored soldier, about six feet tall, had a big American flag he was carrying. He was one of the bonus marchers. He turned to one of the soldiers who was pushing him along, saying: Get along there, you big black bastard.
That was it. He turned and said, Don’t try to push me. I fought for this flag. I fought for this flag in France and I’m gonna fight for it here on Pennsylvania Avenue.
The soldier hit him on the side of the legs with the bayonet. I think he was injured. But I don’t know if he was sent to the hospital.
This was the beginnning of a riot, in a way. These soldiers were pushing these people. They didn’t want to move, but they were pushing them anyway.
As night fell, they crossed the Potomac. They were given orders to get out of Anacostia Flats, and they refused. The soldiers set those shanties on fire. They were practically smoked out. I saw it from a distance. I could see the pandemonium. The fires were something like the fires you see nowadays that are started in these ghettoes. But they weren’t started by the people that live there.
The soldiers threw tear gas at them and vomiting gas. It was one assignment they reluctantly took on. They were younger than the marchers. It was like sons attacking their fathers. The next day the newspapers deplored the fact and so forth, but they realized the necessity of getting these men off. Because they were causing a health hazard to the city. MacArthur was looked upon as a hero. ¹⁵
And so the bonus marchers straggled back to the various places they came from. And without their bonus.
POSTSCRIPT: "After the Bonus March, I bummed my way to New York. I couldn’t get on relief there because I wasn’t a resident. So I resorted to one of the oldest professions—that is, begging. I became a professional panhandler. I had quite a few steady clients. One of them was Heywood Broun. Every time I put the bite on him, he’d say, For Chrissake, don’t you know any other guy in the city beside me?
(Laughs.)
A. Everette McIntyre
Federal Trade Commissioner.
ON A PARTICULAR MORNING—I believe this was on the twenty-sixth or twenty-seventh of June, 1932—the police blocked the avenue and turned the marchers back. The bonus men had undertaken to march around the White House. The President didn’t like that. A lot of other people didn’t like it, either, because they were clogging up Pennsylvania Avenue, in the busy part of the day.
About five thousand of the bonus marchers and their families were camping in some of the demolished buildings. The police encircled them. There was some brick-throwing. A couple of the police retaliated by firing. A bonus man was killed and another seriously wounded.
During lunch time, the following day, I heard some army commands. To my right, down by the ellipse toward the monument, military units were being formed. It looked like trouble. We didn’t have long to wait.
A squadron of cavalry was in front of this army column. Then, some staff cars, and four trucks with baby tanks on them, stopped near this camp. They let the ramps down and the baby tanks rolled out into the street. When the army appeared, the bonus people, who were in these old buildings, started beating on tin pans and shouted: Here come our buddies.
They expected the army to be in sympathy with them.
One of these staff cars unloaded—not very far from where I was standing—and out of it came MacArthur, Chief of Staff. He had a youngish major as an aide. His name was Dwight Eisenhower. With their hands on their hips, they surveyed the situation.
The 12th Infantry was in full battle dress. Each had a gas mask and his belt was full of tear gas bombs. They were given a right face,
which caused them to face the camp. They fixed their bayonets and also fixed the gas masks over their faces. At orders, they brought their bayonets at thrust and moved in. The bayonets were used to jab people, to make them move.
Soon, almost everybody disappeared from view, because tear gas bombs exploded. The entire block was covered by tear gas. Flames were coming up, where the soldiers had set fire to the buildings to drive these people out. The infantry was apparently under orders to drive this group toward the bridges, across the Potomac. Through the whole afternoon, they took one camp after another.
My colleagues and I decided that the army would assault the camp in Anacostia Flats, across the river. There were about twenty thousand to forty thousand bonus people there. We went on the roof of a building and watched what occurred there that evening. It happened after dark.
The 12th Infantry did march across the bridge, in full battle dress as before. This was quite a sight. We could see the fires. Soon, all the occupants of that camp were driven into the Maryland Woods, into the night.
The next day, I read accounts of some of the people who had been jabbed with bayonets. Some had been injured seriously. People who had raised their arms had their arms cut by some sabres. Others were hit by the flat of the sword. In some instances, ears were cut off. . ..
Edward C. Schalk
A veteran of World War I.
WHEN THE ARMY came out, what else could they do? They just walked off, like good Spartans would do.
I remember when they come back from Washington. They landed over here on State Street. They had sort of a reunion. It was nice weather, summertime. And all kinds of people came to visit ‘em. They had a flag spread out, and everyone was throwin’ money in—quarter, half a dollar. Showin’ that they were welcomin’ ‘em back and were all for ’em. They had quite a time. After that, where they went, nobody knows.
The Song
Once in khaki suits,
Gee, we looked swell,
Full of that Yankee Doodle-de-dum.
Half a million boots went sloggin’ through Hell,
I was the kid with the drum.
Say, don’t you remember, they called me Al—
It was Al all the time.
Say, don’t you remember I’m your pal—
Brother, can you spare a dime.¹⁶
E. Y. (Yip) Harburg
Song lyricist and writer of light verse. Among the works in which his lyrics were sung are: Finian’s Rainbow, The Bloomer Girl, Jamaica, The Wizard of Oz and Earl Carroll’s Vanities.
I NEVER LIKED the idea of living on scallions in a left bank garret. I like writing in comfort. So I went into business, a classmate and 1. I thought I’d retire in a year or two. And a thing called Collapse, bango! socked everything out. 1929. All I had left was a pencil.
Luckily, I had a friend named Ira Gershwin, and he said to me, You’ve got your pencil. Get your rhyming dictionary and go to work.
I did. There was nothing else to do. I was doing light verse at the time, writing a poem here and there for ten bucks a crack. It was an era when kids at college were interested in light verse and ballads and sonnets. This is the early Thirties.
I was relieved when the Crash came. I was released. Being in business was something I detested. When I found that I could sell a song or a poem, I became me, I became alive. Other people didn’t see it that way. They were throwing themselves out of windows.
Someone who lost money found that his life was gone. When I lost my possessions, I found my creativity. I felt I was being born for the first time. So for me the world became beautiful.
With the Crash, I realized that the greatest fantasy of all was business. The only realistic way of making a living was versifying. Living off your imagination.
We thought American business was the Rock of Gibraltar. We were the prosperous nation, and nothing could stop us now. A brownstone house was forever. You gave it to your kids and they put marble fronts on it. There was a feeling of continuity. If you made it, it was there forever. Suddenly the big dream exploded. The impact was unbelievable.
I was walking along the street at that time, and you’d see the bread lines. The biggest one in New York City was owned by William Randolph Hearst. He had a big truck with several people on it, and big cauldrons of hot soup, bread. Fellows with burlap on their shoes were lined up all around Columbus Circle, and went for blocks and blocks around the park, waiting.
There was a skit in one of the first shows I did, Americana. This was 1930. In the sketch, Mrs. Ogden Reid of the Herald Tribune was very jealous of Hearst’s beautiful bread line. It was bigger than her bread line. It was a satiric, volatile show. We needed a song for it.
On stage, we had men in old soldiers’ uniforms, dilapidated, waiting around. And then into the song. We had to have a title. And how do you do a song so it isn’t maudlin? Not to say: my wife is sick, I’ve got six children, the Crash put me out of business, hand me a dime. I hate songs of that kind. I hate songs that are on the nose. I don’t like songs that describe a historic moment pitifully.
The prevailing greeting at that time, on every block you passed, by some poor guy coming up, was: Can you spare a dime?
Or: Can you spare something for a cup of coffee?
. . . Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?
finally hit on every block, on every street. I thought that could be a beautiful title. If I could only work it out by telling people, through the song, it isn’t just a man asking for a dime.
This is the man who says: I built the railroads. I built that tower. I fought your wars. I was the kid with the drum. Why the hell should I be standing in line now? What happened to all this wealth I created?
I think that’s what made the song. Of course, together with the idea and meaning, a song must have poetry. It must have the phrase that rings a bell. The art of song writing is a craft. Yet, Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?
opens up a political question. Why should this man be penniless at any time in his life, due to some fantastic thing called a Depression or sickness or whatever it is that makes him so insecure?
In the song the man is really saying: I made an investment in this country. Where the hell are my dividends? Is it a dividend to say: Can you spare a dime?
What the hell is wrong? Let’s examine this thing. It’s more than just a bit of pathos. It doesn’t reduce him to a beggar. It makes him a dignified human, asking questions—and a bit outraged, too, as he should be.
Everybody picked the song up in ’30 and ’31. Bands were playing it and records were made. When Roosevelt was a candidate for President, the Republicans got pretty worried about it. Some of the network radio people were told to lay low on the song. In some cases, they tried to ban it from the air. But it was too late. The song had already done its damage.
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
It was twenty years ago today,
Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play
They’ve been going in and out of style
But they’re guaranteed to raise a smile.
—John Lennon and Paul McCartney¹⁷
Lily, Roy and Bucky
Lily is eighteen. Her brother, Roy, is sixteen. Bucky is seventeen. They are of lower middle-class families.
LILY: My grandmother’d tell us things about the Depression. You can read about it, too. What they tell us is different than what you read.
Roy: They’re always tellin’ us that we should be glad we got food and all that, ’cause back in the Thirties they used to tell us people were starving and got no jobs and all that stuff.
LILY: The food lines they told us about.
Roy: Yeah, you had to stay in line and wait for food.
LILY: And everything. You got when it was there. If it wasn’t, then you made without it. She said there was a lot of waiting.
BUCKY: I never had a Depression, so it don’t bother me really.
Roy: From what you hear, you’d hate to live in that time.
BUCKY: Well, I ain’t livin’ in that time.
ROY: We really don’t know what it would be like. It seems like a long time ago.
LILY: There’s a time I remember bein’ hungry. Livin’ away from home. I didn’t have anybody to depend on. (Indicates the others.) But they didn’t leave home. They stay home where it’s at.
ROY: Like little things when you’re home: where’s the butter? There’s no butter, you go out and buy it. But like them people: where’s the butter? No butter, you gotta wait till you get the butter.
LILY: Maybe it was margarine.
ROY: Now you just walk into your house and sit down, turn on the TV, walk out into the kitchen, get a glass of milk or somethin’, watch a football game, baseball game for a few hours. They couldn’t do that. If they were hungry and there was nothin’ there, they’d just have to wait.
BUCKY: When my parents talk: you should be glad and happy that we got all this now. The clothes you’re wearin’, the food we eat and all that stuff.
LILY: They used to tell us about this one silver dollar that they had. Whenever they ran out, it was this silver dollar they used to take down to the little shop on the corner and get a dollar’s worth of food. They’d give the silver dollar. The guy’d hold it for ’em and when they got a dollar of currency, they could take it in and get their silver dollar back.
I think we’d hurt more now if we had a Depression. You don’t see how they’d make it if it happened to ‘em again. Because they take a lot of things for granted. I mean, you see ’em now and they have everything. You can’t imagine how they would act if they didn’t have it. If they would even remember what they did. ’Cause they’re past it now. They already done it, and they figure they’re over it. If we fell now, I think everybody would take it a lot harder.
Everybody’d step on each other. They’d just walk all over and kill each other. They got more than they ever need that they’d just step on anybody to keep it. They got cars, they got houses, they got this and that. It’s more than they need, but they think they need it, so they want to keep it. Human life isn’t as important as what they got.
Diane
A twenty-seven-year-old journalist.
EVERY TIME I’ve encountered the Depression, it has been used as a barrier and a club. It’s been a counter-communication. Older people use it to explain to me that I can’t understand anything: I didn’t live through the Depression. They never say to me: We can’t understand you because we didn’t live through the leisure society. All attempts at communication are totally blocked. All of a sudden there’s a generation gap. It’s a frightening thing.
What they’re saying is: For twenty years I’ve starved and I’ve worked hard. You must fight. It’s very Calvinistic. Work, suffer, have twenty lashes a day, and you can have a bowl of bean soup.
I’ve never understood a society of want. We don’t have a society of want—not on a general level. We have a society of total surplus: unwanted goods and unwanted people.
The society I was raised in . . . you got into a car and you were driven to a high school, where you didn’t do a lot of work and you got A’s. I thought white gloves was the total protection. It was the ultimate armor.
To me, the Depression is old newsreels and the term, soup line,
and Grapes of Wrath with Henry Fonda looking sincere and downcast. I can identify with the Industrial Revolution sooner than I can with the Depression, because that was an instance of men being thrown out of work by things beyond their control.
I never could understand why the Depression occurred. Perhaps that’s why I’ve not been as sympathetic as I’m expected to be. You’re supposed to admire them because they’ve been in the Flaring Twenties
—is that what it was called? ¹⁸—where they danced a lot and drank gin in automobiles, hail F. Scott Fitzgerald! The connection is not made economically, but socially.
It runs from the morally errant generation of the Twenties, with the too-short skirts and the bathtub gin, the rise of the stock market and bad poetry. It’s all confused in my mind. Prohibition comes in somewhere. I’m not quite certain whether it preceded or came after the Depression. And then there’s Al Capone and people on film in wonderfully wide-shouldered suits, with machine guns, gunning down other people. It’s an incredible, historical jungle. It’s cinematically very mixed up, terribly fluid.
Andy, 19
WHEN I WAS at Cornell, a documentary film group showed The River, the Pare Lorentz thing, a fantastic movie.¹⁹ So much of it is this sentimental, renaissance-type feeling, which they got out of the TVA, which I’m sure sprung up out of the Depression, sort of regeneration and so on. The poem that Lorentz wrote, with all the names of the rivers, so, so derivative, but sort of nice when you listen to it—the great thing about the river.
And people were laughing, all through the movie. Laughing at all the corny lines. I was so horrified. It sort of hurt me. I said to the faculty guy, What’s the matter with these people?
He said, It doesn’t mean anything to them.
So, I suppose that’s the way it goes. . . .
Michael, 19
WHAT DOES the Depression mean to me? I don’t know. I’m not depressed. I can pot out any time I want. A Depression is to me when I can’t sit down on my chaise lounge and have a beer and this boob tube right in my face.
Tad, 20
IT’S SOMETHING that has been filtered through by my parents. I didn’t know much about it, and they don’t mind my not knowing much about it. They control the source of information—sort of like the high priest: you can’t approach the altar too closely, or you’ll be struck dead. This purple heart in their background has become a justification for their present affluence. If we got the idea they didn’t have it so bad, they’d have less psychological control over us. That’s why they don’t approve of the hippies. These people are saying: our parents told us it was this way. Now we’re doin’ it, and it’s not so bad. Our parents don’t like that. They want to keep it a secret. They try to control the information that filters down to us. They’re screwed up and they don’t want people to find out about it.
They say, You have it soft now.
The point is, they have it soft now. They sort of feel guilty about it. If they make other people feel guilty about it, it won’t be so noticeable in their own instance.
Nancy, 21
MONEY is one of my father’s big values. He wishes he was a millionaire. I don’t think of money in that way. I think of it as a sideline, as something you have to have. But I don’t think day and night about it. . ..
Marshall and Steve
Marshall is twenty-three. Steve is twenty-one. They had both attended college. One edits a syndicated service for underground newspapers. The other manages a coffeehouse.
MARSHALL: I never really thought much about the Depression until last year when I was at Resurrection City. I guess the first time there was a march of the poor, soldiers cleared the people off and there was a lot of fighting. The Depression is something I don’t think about. I guess I should. It’s been no part of my experience.
STEVE: It means something very personal to me. My mother graduated high school when she was young and had a chance to go to college. But she had to go to work, her parents were starving. Her life since has been one unremitting struggle to make do. I think of dreams people had, they were forced to give up in order to stay in American society. To make a buck. Like my mother did. Crushed hope.
It gets across to me that there were a great many Americans who were ashamed of the Depression. I remember the McCarthy period. People were recanting what they had done during the Depression. And publicly proving they were ashamed of what they had done.
MARSHALL: The Depression is an embarrassing thing. It is a shame to the system: the American Way that seemed so successful. All of a sudden, things broke down and didn’t work. It’s a difficult thing to understand today. To imagine this system, all of a sudden—for reasons having to do with paper, money, abstract things—breaking down.
In a lot of young people’s minds today, it’s proof of the irrationality of this kind of economic system. After all, there were all those factories, and all those people who wanted to work. There was the equipment. Yet nothing was being worked. Today, if we had great storehouses of grain, if they wouldn’t be opened up immediately to feed people who are starving, people would take guns and see that they were opened up. People are not imprisoned by the idea that you don’t have a right to food. Why should people starve to death when there is food?
STEVE: Many times, young people are told idealism is fine for youth, but there comes a point when one must face up to the realities of existence. That lesson was learned during the Depression. At least by my parents. They were forced to give up their idealism, forced to face the hard realities of making a buck to stay alive. This lesson was so hard learned, they felt it necessary to transmit it to us. These experiences have come to me second hand. I see its effects.
I repudiate it. I have repudiated the kind of life my parents were forced into. I repudiate the lessons that they seem to have learned.
MARSHALL: The issue between the generations is what is known as value. The value of the dollar. What it means to your generation is blood, sweat and tears . . . what you had to do to make a buck.
When a group of young people burnt money at the stock exchange and threw the bills down from the balcony, it caused pandemonium. There was a scramble for the dollar bills on the floor of the exchange. They were trying to say something about the value of money. A Vietnamese person can be burned with napalm. Animals are slaughtered. But a dollar is sacred. A dollar is not to be burned. In fact, it’s a federal crime. This worship of the dollar is inherently an alienated idea. The people who killed themselves in 1929 were victims of it.
STEVE: Our quality of life, character and tone since the Thirties has been determined by the Depression: the buck is almighty. Which side are you on? Most people—and that includes the young—would choose the buck.
Can you re-create—at least in your imaginations—the tone of the Great Depression?
MARSHALL: Fear. It unsettled the securities, apparently false securities that people had. People haven’t felt unfearful since. Fear of Communists, fear of people living in sin, fear of the hippies—fear, fear, fear. I think people learned it from the Depression.
Money brings security, that was the idea. But it turned out to be just the opposite. If you have a great big house, that meant you had to be fearful again: somebody might rob you. If you had a great big store, you had to be fearful now that there’s gonna be a riot—and everything in your store would be stolen. See, money brings more fear than security.
STEVE: Fear is an emotion people don’t talk about. But it’s one they reflect in their lives. My parents have managed to overcome a good deal of it. When I resisted the draft, they were with me every step of the way. But at the beginning, when I was joining the demonstrations, they were afraid my father would lose his job. Fear was so obvious you could taste it. That you were going to do something which might wreck your chance of achieving the economic success they never had. I can’t imagine that fear without the Depression. It shaped their lives and consciences.
I got the feeling it was a time of utter chaos, in which there were no road signs. The moral and social guideposts had been wiped out. Why wasn’t there more violence in that period? What shape did that violence take? What happened? Was it government pump-priming or was it the Second World War that pulled us out of the Depression? I don’t know enough of this period from the cold, printed page.
POSTSCRIPT: Marshall committed suicide, November 1, 1969.
Hard Travelin’
I’ve been doin’ some hard travelin’,
I thought you knowd
I’ve been doin’ some hard ramblin’
Away down the road. . ..
. . . I’ve been layin’ in a hard rock jail,
I thought you knowd
I’ve been laid out ninety days
Way down the road.
The darned old judge, he said to me,
It’s ninety days for vagrancy,
And I’ve been doin’ some hard travelin’, Lord.
—Woody Guthrie²⁰
Ed Paulsen
From 1926 on, when he was fourteen, he, himself, knocked around and about the states—I rode the freights
across the land. "I always went back to my home in South Dakota. My sister and her husband had a little farm. It was a retreat. I played semi-pro baseball up there at one time. You know who I faced? Satchell Paige. He was pitching for Bismarck. I worked punching cattle, $10 a month. I was never satisfied to stay there. I was always taking a pop at L.A. or San Francisco.
"Everybody talks of the Crash of ’29. In small towns out West, we didn’t know there was a Crash. What did the stock market mean to us? Not a dang thing. If you were in Cut Bank, Montana, who owned stock? The farmer was a ping-pong ball in a very tough game.
I finished. high school in 1930, and I walked out into this thing. . . .
He picked apples in Washington, hustled sheets
in Los Angeles, and worked on road gangs all along the coast. "It got tougher. We didn’t know how to make out in the city. It was terrifying. There were great queues of guys in soup lines. We didn’t know how to join a soup line. We—my two brothers and I—didn’t see ourselves that way. We had middle-class ideas without a middle-class income. (Laughs.)
We ended up in San Francisco in 1931. I tried to get a job on the docks. I was a big husky athlete, but there just wasn’t any work. Already by that time, if you were looking for a job at a Standard Oil Service Station, you had to have a college degree. It was that kind of market. . . .
I’D GET UP at five in the morning and head for the waterfront. Outside the Spreckles Sugar Refinery, outside the gates, there would be a thousand men. You know dang well there’s only three or four jobs. The guy would come out with two little Pinkerton cops: I need two guys for the bull gang. Two guys to go into the hole.
A thousand men would fight like a pack of Alaskan dogs to get through there. Only four of us would get through. I was too young a punk.
So you’d drift up to Skid Row. There’d be thousands of men there. Guys on baskets, making weird speeches, phony theories on economics. About eleven-thirty, the real leaders would take over. They’d say: O.K., we’re going to City Hall. The Mayor was Angelo Rossi, a dapper little guy. He wore expensive boots and a tight vest. We’d shout around the steps. Finally, he’d come out and tell us nothing.
I remember the demands: We demand work, we demand shelter for our families, we demand groceries, this kind of thing. . . . Half the guys up there making the demands were Negroes. Now there wasn’t a big black colony in San Francisco in those days. But they were pretty cagey, the leaders—they always kept a mixture of black and white.
I remember as a kid how courageous this seemed to me, the demands, because you knew that society wasn’t going to give it to you. They’d demand that they open up unrented houses and give decent shelters for their families.²¹ But you just knew society wasn’t yielding. There was nothing coming.
This parade would be four blocks long, curb to curb. Nobody had a dime. There were guys on the corner trying to sell apples to this moneyless wonder. (Laughs.)
The guys’d start to yell and there come some horses. They used to have cops on horseback in those days. Then there’d be some fighting. Finally it got to killing. I think they killed three people there that day, besides the wounded. It really got rough because the guys had brought a bunch of marbles and threw them on the street, and the horses were slipping and sliding around. This made the cops mad and they got rough.
There’d be this kind of futile struggle, because somehow you never expected to win. We had a built-in losing complex. That’s the way those crowds felt. A lot of them would drift back into the Sally.²² By now it’s one o’clock, and everybody’s hungry. We were a gentle crowd. These were fathers, eighty percent of them. They had held jobs and didn’t want to kick society to pieces. They just wanted to go to work and they just couldn’t understand. There was a mysterious thing. You watched the papers, you listened to rumors, you’d get word somebody’s gonna build a building.
So the next morning you get up at five o’clock and you dash over there. You got a big tip. There’s three thousand men there, carpenters, cement men, guys who knew machinery and everything else. These fellas always had faith that the job was gonna mature, somehow. More and more men were after fewer and fewer jobs. So San Francisco just ground to a halt. Nothing was moving.
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 talking 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.²³ 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.²⁴ 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. ²⁵ 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.²⁶ 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 jumper²⁷ 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.
We’d been raided a couple of times, but they never could find the booze. My mother had a clever gimmick. She’d drive a nail in the wall, take a jug of booze and put a hat and coat on top on it. They never found it.
There was another candy-store front used by a woman. A cop started comin’ around and gettin’ friendly. She knew he was workin’ up to a pinch. So she prepared a bottle for him. He talked her into sellin’ it to him. He pinches her, takes her to court. He said: I bought this half a dog of a booze. Half a pint.
The woman said, How do you know it’s booze?
The cop takes a swig of it and spits it out. It was urine. Case dismissed.
When we had this place, the downtown Cadillac squad came in there—the open cars with sawed-off shotguns. They didn’t want to drag us in. They wanted money. They wanted $40. My mother wasn’t holding that day. So she had to wait for the customers to come in and borrow it from’em. It took about three hours to pay these guys off.
Later on, in 1933, when Prohibition was lifted, alcohol dropped from $40 a gallon to $5. For a while $8 was the standard price, but $5 was the low point.
I wanted to get out of this. Get a job, more or less. I was goin’ to work one day with seven cents and my lunch in my pocket. Believe it or not, I was waitin’ for a streetcar. A truck was goin’ out of town. Its tail gate was down. I jumped on it and was gone for six months. This was maybe ’31. Still in Hoover’s time. I went as far as the truck went. A freight train comes by.
I had my seven cents, but I ate my lunch. I bought a pack of Bull Durham, but I needed food. I found a jungle, ate somethin’, and learned a few tricks from these ’boes.
Freight trains were amazing in them days. When a train would stop in a small town and the bums got off, the population tripled. So many ridin’ the freight. Women even, and quite a few were tryin’ to disguise themselves.
I ran into a couple of self-styled professors, safe blowers, skilled mechanics and all that. Quite a few boomers were traveling. These people usually had money. When they finished a job, they’d get paid, go on a bender and get rolled. They didn’t like the farmer types. And there were quite a few farmers buried.
I’m talkin’ about this big dam job out west, this big Hoover Dam. There was a lot of farmers in the concrete. They just shoved ’em in there. They didn’t like ‘em as job competition. Oh, there were some mean people travelin’ around.
Old time hoboes had a circuit, like a preacher or a salesman. The towns knew ‘em. They knew the good jails to spend the winter in. They would associate with each other, clannish. They wouldn’t let outsiders in very much. A young boy, somebody they took a fancy to, they’d break him in. There was quite a bit of homosexual down there—wolves, punks and all that. I pushed one guy in the river. I don’t know if he came up or not,’cause I ran.
There was always Sally. While you listened to a sermon, they’d feed you a little something, and then you’d go on your way. The missions are pretty horrible because they pre-judge ya. I wanted a flop so I took it. Once in a while somebody would take a nose dive, profess religion. They’d stick around a while just to have a roof. The first time they get enough money to get drunk, they did.
If you got lucky and got yourself a package of cigarettes, Camels was the bit, you put ’em in your socks and your Bull Durham was in your shirt pocket. So the ones that didn’t have would mooch the Bull Durham instead of the Camels.
These kids amaze me today. I