Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Growing Up During the Great Depression

During the roaring '20s, my mother's birthplace was a prosperous community, known for its coal mines and steel manufacturing.  However, the stock market crash of 1929 changed everything.  In Johnstown, Pennsylvania, the mines closed down and my grandfather, along with hundreds of other immigrants, was out of work.

Daily life, during the Depression, was bleak.  My grandmother gardened and canned.  At least once, my grandfather and great-uncle Leo managed to raise pigs and make sausages.  A chicken was baked and boiled and stretched to last a whole week, and a 5-cent knucklebone from the butcher become soup (or at least, beef broth).  When her parents realized the butcher thought young Molly was cute, they sent her to the butcher with a nickel because she always got "the ones with the most meat on them."

I suppose things could have been worse.  Both of my grandparents were skilled gardeners and craftspeople.  They could grow, make, or repair almost anything.  And they weren't ashamed to forage for edible wildplants.  My mother told me many times how she and her father would go to the cemetary to pick dandelions for a bitter spring salad.  Her father made her promise not to tell anyone that the dandelions came from the graveyard, and her mother made her promise never to pick dandelions from the graveyard.  "I couldn't win," she said - she was caught between the threat of Father's leather strap, Mother's "kuhansa" (the Yugoslavian word for spoon), and the Catholic church's prohibition against lying.

When it was time to pay bills, my mother would walk for miles with her parents to drop off the payment in person, because who could afford a stamp or bus fare?  If a store on the other side of town had canned milk on sale, the kids walked there together, Molly on one side of the street and her brother Johnnie on the other, pretending not to know each other.  I don't know why Johnnie was embarrassed to be seen with his sister, but he was, so they walked separately, bought their canned milk individually, and then carried the heavy bags home again, still pretending not to know one another.

There weren't many pets in those days, perhaps because no one could afford to buy food for useless animals.  A neighbor had a vicious German shepherd that would lunge at little girls, and choke itself when it reached the end of its chain.  Another neighbor had a cat that hated children and scratched my mother when she tried to pet it.

When my mother was given two pet rabbits, she was excited, until she realized that she had to feed them.  Of course, there was no money for rabbit food, so she spent her free time gathering grass and woodland plants for them to eat.  As the rabbits multiplied, so did her workload.  Nevertheless, my mother loved her rabbits and took good care of them all summer long.

When fall came and the plants died, my grandfather pragmatically butchered the rabbits and my grandmother canned the meat.  My mother was heartbroken.  Although her parents tried to force her to eat the rabbit meat, my mom refused and she never bonded with an animal again.

In those tough times, food was far too precious to throw away, even if it tasted terrible.  Once, my mother was putting salt into her soup and the lid fell off the salt shaker, along with all of the salt inside.  Her father made her eat the whole bowl of soup.  And, though it's been decades since that incident, I have never seen my mother add soup to a dish at the table.  One negative experience, apparently, was enough to teach her not to take risks with seasonings.

My mother's birthday fell in December, but nobody celebrated it.  Her birthday was too close to Christmas, and her family could not afford an extra gift.

For Christmas, Molly and Johnny each received one orange and one piece of candy.  I'm sure, like all kids, they wanted toys.  Perhaps they scrutinized the pages of the Sears catalog before using it in the outhouse, and dreamed of dolls or soldiers, but what they got each year was one orange, and one piece of candy.  No toys, no socks, no warm jammies, no new clothes for school.  An orange and one piece of candy, and that was it.

Sometimes, when I'm in the produce section at Christmas, I see bin after bin of ripe navel oranges, and I try to imagine my mother as a little girl wearing a too-short skirt and darned, tattered socks, carefully peeling her one orange of the year and savoring every bite, making that precious fruit last for as long as possible.  My childhood was so much easier than my mom's!

Maybe because her childhood was so hard, she did her best each year to make Christmas wonderful for us kids.  We had a beautifully decorated tree with lights and tinsel, and lots of presents that magically appeared under the tree on Christmas morning.  We always had warm coats for winter, shoes that fit, and new clothes for the holidays.  My mom would cheerfully do without, to make sure we had what we needed.

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