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Christine
Wolfrum's father was a miner for 17 years until the Depression. “There
was never any money,” recalled Christine, who was born in Kentucky in
1921. “School paper cost 35 cents a year. It would take me all year
to get the money, a few cents at a time. Teachers would embarrass you
continually asking when you would bring it in. You figured, ‘probably
never.'” When Christine was 11, she went on the road with her family,
including her nine-year-old brother and her sickly mother. They trekked
through Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina and Ohio on her father's
search for work. “We told our friends were traveling by bus or train,
but we were really hitch-hiking.”
Lee Leer, a grocer's son, found home to be no more than “a place
of existence.” His father's general store at Olive, Oklahoma failed
in the early 1930's. Lee's parents, who had six children, moved to an
abandoned cotton farm a few miles outside town. They eked out a living,
working to raise the food they ate and a few extra bales of cotton for
cash. On a spring morning in 1937, when Lee's mother ordered him to
fetch stove wood, he took his savings earned from picking cotton and
selling a pig, collected his bedroll and left to begin life as a hobo:
“Little did I realize that life could be worse than on that 40-acre
cotton farm, and that I would even become homesick,” he recalled later.
While children might have difficulty comprehending the slow unraveling
of home life, a single defining moment could capture it all. Coyle Case's
family were “Sooners,” who had staked out their claim in the first Oklahoma
land rush of l889. Growing up in the town of Padua, Coyle saw the land
literally blown away in the “black blizzards” of the Dust Bowl, which
desiccated the western Great Plains in the early 1930's. He watched
as friends and neighbors were dispossessed. “They swept and shoveled,
planted and prayed, but finally the banks moved in like vultures,” Coyle
recollects. “My friends left in battered cars and trucks piled high
with children and dogs and mattresses and cooking utensils.”
His grandfather Wallace Case held no debts and owned the land
on which he raised cattle. The income from the sale of the cattle and
cream kept the family from starving.
“Poppa Case was my hero. A giant tree higher than any other on my childhood
landscape. On a day I recall vividly, I met my grandfather at the edge
of a canyon, sobbing as though his heart would break,” says Coyle. His
grandparents had witnessed government agents shoot his cattle herd,
a forced stock liquidation in compliance with the Agricultural Adjustment
Act aimed at stabilizing prices. “Poppa Case was the rock to which our
very existence was anchored. I had never seen him cry before. I knew
something was wrong.”
Brooklyn teenager Harold Dropkin would never forget February
1, 1933. Around noon that day, he was sitting in the kitchen of his
home when there was a knock at the door. A well-dressed young man asked
his mother for something to eat. Invited inside, the stranger sat down
at the table. Harold's mother asked her son to get a can of tuna fish
from the refrigerator. Opening the fridge, Harold saw only one item:
the can of tuna fish. His mother spread the tuna on three slices of
bread and gave one to their guest. When he finished, the young man thanked
them and left. “I walked over to the refrigerator and looked inside.
Nothing. Nada , ” Harold remembered more than 60 years later.
In September 1932, Duval Edwards was looking forward to his senior
year in high school at Alexandria, Louisiana. He knew times were tough
for his family, though didn't realize the difficulty his father was
having in bringing home enough money for them to live on.
“Dad was a Texan, a true longhorn born on the Texas frontier in 1874.
He could barely write his own name, but he developed an exceptional
skill. He could look at a steer or cow and figure its weight with uncanny
accuracy. In good times, he made a fair profit buying and selling cattle,”
Duval wrote in a personal memoir. Before the Depression, his father
owned a slaughterhouse. He'd been forced to close it in l930. He used
his old Model T to haul, buy and sell cattle as an independent, but
as the economy continued to slide, the price of beef on the hoof plummeted
to five cents a pound. Duval remained unaware of his father's struggle,
until the roof fell in.
“I overheard Mother ask Dad for grocery money. I saw him pull out a
single wrinkled and torn dollar bill and hand it to her. He left without
saying a word, grim-faced, his battered cowboy hat on his head. I watched
him get into the old truck, set the hand brake, the spark and gas levers.
He climbed out to turn the crank, then hopped back in and slowly rattled
off. For the first time my eyes opened all the way. The full extent
of our situation dawned on me. It was desperate.”
(C)
2008 Riding the Rails: Teenagers on the Move During the Great Depression
by Errol Lincoln Uys |