TODAY’S ECONOMIC PROBLEMS
compared with the Great Depression
Perception is a relative thing – at least that is one of my opinions. Way back in January of 1970 a member of the amateur printing association of which I was a member for over 25 years printed something I simply found unbelievable. This amateur printing-publisher claimed that the national debt of the United exceeded $300,000,000,000 (300 BILLION) back in 1970. If that is the truth, WHY weren’t citizens and our leaders up in arms about that? With just this itsy bitsy bit of data I found another bit of relative information about HOW BAD things are TODAY compared to HOW BAD things were IN THE 1930′S.
We are citizens of OHIO, and according to the stats published by our legislators, Ohio HAS TO MEET ITS BUDGET OR ELSE, and they stated our Federal Government simply does not “work that way”–citizens shake their heads in bewilderment. MILLIONS, BILLIONS and now our government talks in TRILLIONS — will it ever end? In a nation of fantastic technology shouldn’t we come to a point where “things” can “come down” instead of always “raising in expenses”?
Parker W. Snapp, in Los Osos, California, who just turned 100, December 27, 2011, published the following story, “The Great Depression” in a a unique booklet published by another dedicated amateur printer’s publication, THE GATOR GROWL. Thanks to both Leland M. Hawes, Jr., compiler of THE GATOR GROWL, and Parker M. Snapp, for telling the story about the really tough times our nation experienced in the 1930′s. We are re-publishing this for rumination about economic problems – are they really bad or is this just another one of the relative issues that have a way of resurfacing? THE WORDWRIGHT
THE GREAT DEPRESSION
by Parker W. Snapp
I was still in grade school, in the little northern Idaho town of Sandpoint, when the Great Depression first hit the financial centers of the East, but we were for a time unaware of local troubles. Sandpoint’s economy then was based on lumber, and the Humbird Mill and Planer was the big employer of the town. Before long, everybody knew of someone in the mill or the logging camps who had been laid off, but we and our neighbors felt no panic.
We didn’t sense an unwelcome rise in the cost of necessities because our life style was simple and our expectations were modest. Dad had a job as a pharmacist, and a second job as the band leader for the Town Band.
Our food was cheap. My mother went to nearby farmers for vegetables and to the nearest dairyman who kept a clean cow shed for milk. When the corn was plentiful in season, she bought two gunny sacks full, boiled the the corn briefly, then scraped off the kernels into trays which were set out in the sun, under cheesecloth to protect from flies, to dry and “can” in jars. She canned plums and prunes also, for winter use. In the winter time, the canned fruit and vegetables became part of our diet, and sun dried sweet corn had a delicious taste.
We had two apple trees, one “Yellow Transparent” for eating, and the other “Delicious” — a kind that I never see now in the market, with four distinctive humps on the end opposite the stem. We picked them when they had just come ripe, folded each in tissue paper, and set them away in the root cellar, a semi basement that was just a hole in the earth under the back porch.
I remember that, again in season, a Chinese gardener with horse and wagon came through the neighborhood selling garden produce. In an errant moment, I tossed a clod at the horse. The driver got down, went to the front door, knocked, and informed my mother that she had a very naughty kid. I got a thorough scolding, and that was the end of that nonsense.
The only “big ticket” items in the house were a prized “White Rotary” sewing machine (guaranteed not to jam) and an equally prized Easy washer (which washed only). Washed clothes were squeezed through a wringer twice – once into a rinsing tub and the second time ready for hanging on the extensive clothes line in the back yard. In winter time, washing might be confined mostly to undergarments, which were hung on racks around the parlor heater to dry.
For heat, we burned wood, which was plentiful, in a kitchen range ( that also provided hot water) and there was also the parlor heater. Bedrooms were unheated and climbing under the cold blankets in the winter time was an ordeal. A comforter made all cozy in a few moments. Occasionally there was a new comforter under construction in the big dining room. The lower layer was inexpensive cotton sheeting, and the upper layer was a colorful mosaic of fragments from the rag bag, sewed together in no particular pattern on the sewing machine to make the large square outline.
Four long wooden slats, each with a doubled ribbon of cloth tacked along its length, were arranged in a big square, supported on the backs of four chairs, and held together with “C” clamps. The lower layer of cloth was pinned to the slats and held taut while cotton was distributed equally on the surface. Then the top sheet was pinned in place. The slat of one side could be loosened and rolled up to allow access to a half at a time for the “sewing” with a large-eyed needle, using doubled yarn to make a stitch down and up, spaced every four (or was it six?) inches. The yarn of each stitch was clipped a few inches above the cloth and the plume of yarn was then tied in a knot, reasonably tight to hold the two layers close, but with room for the cotton. The excess yarn was clipped an inch above the knot. The comforter was finished by sewing on a border all the way around.
We moved to “Bandon-By-The-Sea” in Oregon for my last year of high school. Dad had been promised that the pharmacy job included leadership of the Bandon Town Band, but the band retained its leader. So he looked elsewhere and went to a drug store at Prineville, Oregon, while the rest of the family moved to Eugene, and then to Corvallis, Oregon, where I enrolled in Oregon State College (now OSU).
College expenses were ridiculously small, compared to the cost of a college education today. I think the country was by then recovering from the Depression, but a historian, Lawrence Reed, in his book “Great Myths of the Great Depression,” wrote that the tariff and taxing policies of presidents Herbert Hoover and Franklin Delano Roosevelt prolonged rather than eased the Depression, and its effects were felt for an additional decade.
The WPA (Works Progress Administration) inadvertently terminated my first after college job as an engineering draftsman for the Forest Service Radio Lab out of Portland. The WPA workers removed weeds and planted a beautiful lawn around the laboratory building, but when the grass grew high, it was discovered that there was no money in the fixed budget for a power mower. A body had to go to make the money available. I was the body.
Jobs were scarce. Blame the Depression. A welcome job opened at the Naval shipyard in Bremerton Washington. I retired, 34 years later, as head of Electrical, Electronics Design, and Test Engineering.
In summary: I think we in the small towns didn’t suffer appreciable from the Great Depression, as compared to the unfortunates in the cities. We just didn’t know any better than to be content with what we had.
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THANKS PARKER, your article gives us hope that whatever kind of problems we go through are not unfamiliar to Americans and how we work through them makes the big difference.
THE WORDWRIGHT, Bill Venrick