Milly's History of the Depression--Part 1

This is Part 1 of  Milly's history of the depression that she composed for me to use for a college history class. It explains the frugality she and Vake practiced their whole lives: she recycled aluminum foil and string in her kitchen. She stripped worn out clothing of buttons and zippers, which were saved, and the rags became cleaning rags. Food was not to be played with or wasted, and if a kid refused to go to Sunday school, well then, she didn't need Sunday shoes. He saved reusable lumber, metal that could be sold to the scrap man, and little electric motors that could perhaps be fixed or adapted to another use.  Even in her old age, Milly was still saving things, right down to little packets of jam from the dining room of the assisted living facility where she stayed.. She said:
     21 April 1968
      When the Stock Market crashed in 1929, my family (of seven) was living in the big city of Chicago, having moved there two years previously from Canada.
      My folks made the big move from Canada, because my sister was in desperate need of surgery on her mouth, (she was born with a cleft palate) and this operation was being taught to young American Interns by a German doctor at Cook County Hospital, Chicao.  After the successful surgery, she was required to take ultra-violet light treatments to prevent ricketts. This had to be over a long period of time, so my folks decided to settle there permanently to be close to the source of medication.
     In 1929 I was seven years old and attending school about one block removed from the Chicago Union Stock Yards. Edison was 12 years old and Art was 10, Evelyn 5 and Walter 4. At the time the stock market crash just didn't mean a thing to me.  However, it wasn't too long before it began to affect our daily life.  My dad was a piano-finisher by trade; something he had picked up while a growing boy living in Steger, Illinois.  My grandfather worked for the Steger Piano Factory for many years.  Anyway, when finances began to tighten people did not have money for luxury itmes such as pianos (and besides radios were coming in and were strictly tough competition). He lost his job as a piano finisher. After that he worked at dozens of different jobs from digging ditches to working in a large bakery making "Dolly Madison Fruitcakes." To this day he despises fruitcake! While he was working at all these other jobs, he was also working as a substitute in the main post-office in downtown Chicago.  One day while fighting for a place on the streetcar (they ran few and far between and loaded to the gills) he was knocked off of the step and injured his ankle. he had to give up on his extra jobs and concentrate on the post office job. This was not enough income to support our tribe, so my mother decided to try and find work to supplement his income so they would not have to lose the home they were trying to buy. She was fortunate enough to find work in a dry-cleaning establishment, which specialized in cleaning tapestries and draperies for rich people.  The pay must have been extremely low, because when I was in high school in the late thirties she was elated when her pay was raised to 15 dollars a week. Things were mighty poor in our family for a number of years, because neither of my parents worked steadily. The people from whom they were purchasing our house were kind and understanding and when my folks couldn't meet the payments on the house they didn't foreclose. Every time they got a cent ahead, one of us would come down with scarlet feever or measles.  Of course, to take a child to a doctor was unheard of. You suffered through your illnesses and they burned sulfur candles in the house to sterilize the air so that everyone didn't get the bug. When complications set in like mastoiditis it was disastrous financially. Appendectomies were another catastrophe.
     In moving into Chicago we had settled in an Irish-Catholic neighborhood.  They did nothing but give us a bad time when they found out we were of German descent and Lutheran to boot. We fought tooth and nail and they callled us "Heinies" and we called them "worshipers of idols." After fighting reached an impasse we became very good friends...such good friends that when we became quite poverty-stricken and could only afford a 15-cent bucket of coal once in a while, they scouted around with my brothers and me looking for vacant houses from which we stole boards and hid them in the basement of one of our houses, to be used for fuel.  The winters were mighty cold and we closed off all the doors in the house and heated only the kitchen, where we spent most of our time.  When it was time to retire for the night, it was to an ice-cold room and we wore our long underwear and stockings to bed, and yes, sometimes a stocking cap too.  At one time we had oatmeal three times a day and my mother tried to doctor it up for supper with some brown sugar or sorghum and cinnamon to make it appear to be something other than "porridge again." A garbage collector lived across the alley from us. In those days they hauled garbage in huge uncovered wagons, pulled by two large workhorses. My mother bribed the garbage man with homemade bread to save the horse dung for fertilizer for our back yard, so that she could plant a small garden. Once someone gave my brothers some pumpkin seeds to plant and when they grew and produced 16 large punpins we were the envy of the neighborhood kids.
    Our entertainment was extremely simple. We played games called tiddly-winks, dominoes, checkers, mumbley-peg, run-sheep-run,cut out figures of comic-strip characters and pasted them on cardboard for paper dolls. My brothers had harmonicas and jews-harps which they twanged on constantly. We had a wind-up phonograph inherited from my "Aunt Lizzie," an my own Aunt Minnie had given me a player-piano and a box of rolls for my very own.  In the summers we sat on our front steps or on the neighbor's front steps and we learned how to sing all the old Irish songs. The Catholic church seemed to provide for their parishoners a bit better than did the protestant churches. However, these same Irish people provided clothing for our family when they had hand-me-downs that we could use.  My Dad even learned how to be a cobbler. He acquired a shoe last someplace or other and would buy strips of leather to mend our shoes. In those days people did not hire things done for them like they do now. A plumber in our neighborhood would have starved to death. Every kid knew how to quickly remove the lid from the toilet and gently lift up the float to stop a can from running over on to the floor.
     Water was cheap in Chicago....I believe my Dad sid once it ran around $3.50 a year. Sounds slightly fantastic now.  We always had electricity, but were extremely careful about not using too much of it. We had a cookstove with a reservoir alongside to heat water. In the winter we brought a galvanized tub into the kitchen and placed it near the cookstove so that we could bathe in comfort. you were lucky to be one of the older kids, because by the time the bath water was passed on through five kids it got rather murky.
     We had cockroaches, and we had bedbugs which my mother fought to whole time we lived on 43rd Street in Chicago. She swore than they had to travel from house to house. To make things more interesting, every new semester that I entered school I came home with a headful of lice.  Then my mother would become enraged and plunge my head into a basin of naptha until I could hear bells ringing in my ears and she would douse my head with something called "blue ointment.: Just imagine all those odors blending in with the aroma of the stockyards, and the garlic of the Italian kids in school, and the onions from the Jewish kids and the kraut from the German kids...No wonder I am hooked on perfume now!
    We had a number of politicians living on our street.  "Big Billy Lynch," was the Harbormaster of Navy Pier. Once he fired a couple of Italian men from their jobs at the Pier...in retaliation they made a bomb and threw it on his front porch one night. it didn't injure anyone, but it blew in the front of his home, and since we lived directly across the street, it blew all of our front windows out too.  Of course my father was incensed and not only did "Big Billy" have to pay for the damage, from that time on my father demanded favors from him like getting a permit for me to attend an accelerated high school when I was a little older, and getting a traffic ticket fixed for my brother when he was driving a car and knocked down a lamp post on Outer Drive near the Loop. We were all strong Democrats and lived in a Democratic stronghold....the name Hoover was a dirty word. One set of neighbors moved in across the alley from us and everyone sneeringly referred to them as "dirty reds." My parents forbade us tossing rocks on their back porch like the other kids were doing and confined us to the backyard when we disobeyed...we promptly decided to have a water-drinking contest, which for some reason or other vastly irritated my mother and we were blistered and sent to bed without supper. Nerves were wearing thin about that time I guess.
     Teachers were not paid in cash, but were given warrants that would be redeemed when the money became available.  If teachers became desperate for money, there were always some sharpies or what-have-you around to redeem the warrants, to their own special benefit.