REFLECTING ON 'HARD TIMES'
By Dean Rea, Eugene, Oregon

People who lived through the Great Depression think differently than those born within the last three or four decades. THE WORDWRIGHT is privileged to have a full-fledged wordwright, Dean Rea, of Eugene, Oregon, as a guest essayist. When Dean writes about his boyhood experiences in Kansas, you can almost feel the grit of the sand seeping under the doors and through cracks in the window frames. With more than 55 years as a practicing journalist and professor of journalism, our guest essayist comes thoroughly equipped to "tell a story" and leave his readers begging for more but his short story style is sure to satisfy anyone who reads his reflections on "hard times."
Bill Venrick

A 5-year-old boy sits quietly on a chair in a Kansas farmhouse at mid-day. Dust whips across the drought-stricken wheat ranch and soon turns day into night.

The boy's mother closes the curtains while his father sprays water across rooms in the house to clear dust as it seeps through door and windows frames.

The boy worries about the watermelon vines that grow along a garden fence. He planted the seed, and he's looking forward to picking the melons when they ripen.

As the dust storm blows away the topsoil in what was to become the Dust Bowl, the last vestige of hope of raising wheat - and watermelons - vanishes.

Dust and the Great Depression drove my family from the farm and from Kansas during the early 1930's. With a grubstake from grandparents, they ended up in the Ozark Hills on a hardscrabble farm covered with rock, weeds and neglect.

The pre-World War II era is often referred to as "hard times." Fortunately, I wasn't old enough to know how difficult it was for my parents to feed a family and to finance a 40-acre farm operation.

As a 10-year-old, I recall racing across a field with my father, the sole of one of my shoes flapping with each step. We laughed about the flapping shoe, and dad repaired it with hammer and nails on a shoe last that evening after the cows were milked.

Maybe times weren't so hard because I was a boy and didn't realize that I was experiencing "hard times." We had food on the table. My mother canned everything we grew in the garden and meat from pigs and cattle that we slaughtered in the fall. We weren't teased about our patched clothing because everyone wore patched clothing.

No one had electricity, and the battery-powered telephone was mounted on a wall. Our ring was two longs and a short, and everyone on the line listened in on everyone's conversation. We packed our lunches and walked to school where we helped keep a stove stoked with wood during the winter.

We took a bath every weekend even though we had to hand pump every ounce we used from a well and had to heat the water on a wood-burning stove. We read books beside oil lamps at night. We wore clean clothing to church, and we looked forward to Saturday night community potluck meals, games and festivities.

We had a form of universal social services in which everyone in the community would help anyone in need. If you were sick, home remedies were shared. Serious sickness might require a doctor but certainly a prayer vigil. Sick or hurt and couldn't work? Neighbors pitched in and plowed fields, cared for livestock, harvested crops.

So, why the concern today about an economy going south? Inflation? High gasoline prices? Job losses? Mortgages in the dump?

While discussing today's "hard times" with a son, who is a pastor, I said: "During the depression many people didn't have much. Today, many people are losing their jobs, their homes, their toys. Maybe, it's more difficult to lose something when you have something than it is when you have little or nothing."

I often think of the 5-year-old boy seated in a darkened Kansas farm house and wonder about children today who are experiencing "hard times": domestic violence, sexual abuse, drug addiction, starvation, slavery, war, genocide.

On reflection, a dust storm and a depression hardly qualify.

#####

THANKS, Dean, perhaps you have struck a chord reminding us that "neighboring" was exactly that and not expecting an invasion of "the government" or help driven by committees and organizations from Washington and some kind of headquarters operating out of territorial jurisdictions. True, our population has grown so much larger since those days of the Great Depression and other calamities caused by Nature itself but the pristine neighborhood assistance from the communities themselves "back then" exemplifies something about which a bureaucracy knows little.

THE WORDWRIGHT