The Depression Years

By any kind of modern standards life on the farm was really crude--no electricity, no indoor toilet, no central heat or cooling, etc., etc. But then things got worse--no money! During the depression years of the 1930s money was so scarce that everyone had to “get along as best you can and make do with what you’ve got.”

How bad was it? Looking back from today’s fortunate, comfortable lives, it was pretty bad. Today’s privileged kids would be absolutely shocked at the changes a major depression can bring! But at the time we kids seemed to take it pretty well in stride because we had never known luxury times and because everyone else in the community was in the same fix.

In many ways our family was better off than lots of folks in the cities. We raised most of our own food, so there was never any fear of going hungry. We had big gardens, a big orchard and our own milk, eggs and home-raised pork and chickens for eating. We owned the farm, so there was no question as to where to live. But beyond this Dad and Mother had to struggle.

The bottom just fell out of farm prices. Corn prices fell to less than forty cents a bushel, soybeans to less than seventy cents and oats fell to about fifteen cents. No farmer could make a living with crop prices like these. Eggs brought only eight cents a dozen and whole milk sold for thirty cents a gallon. I don’t recall the price for pork--but I do remember when the Roosevelt administration’s “New Deal” subsidized farmers to destroy little pigs at birth in an effort to boost pork prices so farmers could get by.

To make matters worse, we had three crop failures in a row; I think in 1936, 1937 and 1938. One year there was an extreme drought. A huge wave of chinch bugs ate up the crops another year. I can remember Dad putting down a quarter-mile strip of tar (creosote) to try to keep the bugs from coming out of a wheat field and into the corn. He dug a shallow post-hole every few feet that those bugs would fall into--then he’d come along with a blowtorch every couple of days and destroy them. He killed millions of chinch bugs that way, but millions of their brothers took the crops anyway. I don’t remember the cause of that third crop failure, but I do know this: In the sixty-some years since that time the Baird farm has never had in any year another crop failure to compare with those three in a row in the thirties.

A couple of years Dad burned corn as fuel in the heating stove. The corn was poor quality and prices were so low that it was more practical to burn corn than to sell the corn and buy coal. That corn often popped inside the stove--just like popcorn!

Prices in stores were low, too, but nobody had any money. A loaf of bread was a dime and you could sometimes buy a smaller loaf for a nickel. Coke and Pepsi were a nickel a bottle, but I was lucky to get one or two bottles of pop a year. Same with nickel candy bars. The busiest stores in Decatur were the Woolworth and Kresge dime stores. We did a lot of our shopping there. Dress socks were 15 cents a pair; they didn’t last very long, but we didn’t have too many occasions to wear dress socks. As a Dollar Day special Montgomery Ward sold four pairs of undershorts for a dollar.

All my life I have absolutely loved chocolate milkshakes. When I was in high school a wonderful big chocolate shake cost 25¢ at Chuck’s Sandwich Shop in Bethany-- and a little place in Decatur even offered a small ones for a dime--but I was only lucky enough to come up with the money for a milkshake maybe every two or three months. It is just a terrible irony that now that I am an old man and can finally afford the $2.50 cost of a good ol’ milkshake, it is the calories, not the money, that keeps me from those milkshakes I love!!

In 1932 Uncle Walter got into serious financial trouble. He had bought a couple of miniature golf courses in Chicago, just before the miniature golf fad quickly evaporated due to the depression, and needed money to pay his debts. He begged his sisters, Mother and Aunt Emma, to buy his one-third interest in the Garman farm. It was an awkward situation for everyone because the sisters didn’t have the money but wanted to help their brother. Finally the sisters borrowed the money to pay Uncle Walter for his share of the farm--but they never completely forgave him for “forcing” the buyout when they were having such a difficult time themselves. (Mother and Dad never mentioned this episode at the time--or anything else about their finances--to us; I didn’t hear about it until many years later.)

I have much later learned that there were a lot of other problems. Will Lindley couldn’t pay what he owed as the tenant on the Garman farm and, as a result, Mother couldn’t pay the interest on her Scott State Bank notes in Bethany.

I had completely forgotten about this item until I recently re-read Mother’s diary: At about Thanksgiving time in 1931 our Essex car broke down in Shelbyville, so for a couple of months we had only our Model T truck (the taillight was a kerosene lamp that had to be lighted with a match--there was no brake light) for family transportation until the Essex was towed to Warren Patton’s garage in Prairie Home for repair in late January.

In those days our washcloths were squares cut from long underwear. Mother patched our clothes and re-patched them until they were completely worn out. (The exception: we had a few garments from Uncle Sile that were of really top quality. These were handed down from child to child as they were outgrown and the younger kid was delighted to have finally grown into something decent.)

Our school lunches were always homemade grape jelly sandwiches, day after day--grape jelly is still my least favorite sandwich. On his birthday a kid got some needed item of clothing, a pencil, or a 10¢ toy plus the replacement of any dishes he had broken while doing the dishes!

We youngsters knew that these weren’t good times, but we didn’t worry much about bad times. We didn’t really know any better since all of our neighbors were in the same fix. In fact, we were better off than many of our neighbors. Once while we were playing on the swings at East Center school I must have made some comment about hard times, because I remember my playmate, Lynn Burrows, surprised me by responding, “You’uns ain’t poor!” Looking back, as tenants on what is now known as the South Farm, I don’t doubt that the large Burrows family had an even rougher time of it than the Bairds. And our hired man, Charlie Winters, and his wife must have had it even tougher. His pay normally was $30 a month plus a little house to live in and a gallon of milk a day. When the times got really tough Dad couldn’t afford to pay him regularly. Charlie got to stay in the little house and he still got the milk, but his irregular pay was 20¢ an hour whenever Dad really needed him. I don’t know how he made it.