The Great Depression

Living through the Great Depression was a terrible experience. My illness with the infantile paralyses was just one of the bad things that we lived through.

About five years after I was born, Mother gave birth to a nice baby girl and named her Audree. She was a healthy child and did not seem to get sick or into much trouble. After about three more years, Mother gave birth to twins in the same room in which her previous four children were born. Jeanie and Paul were really big for twins. Paul was 7 pounds and Jeanie was 8 pounds. That must have been a difficult pregnancy and delivery.

For a one year period all seemed to be well, but at about that time, Paul became very ill. He had double pneumonia & rickets at the same time. He was terribly sick. He became too weak to even cry. Both of my parents had just about given up hope that Paul would live. A friend of the folks came to visit and suggested that an osteopath they knew in Janesville might be able to help Paul. In desperation they took him there the next morning. Paul was treated and the folks took him home to die. Mother was holding Paul with his head on her shoulder. Paul began to choke real hard and Mother thought this was the end. Up came a lot of pussy looking stuff. Mother frantically cleaned his air passages of the puss, and to her amazement Paul did not die. From that day on he became stronger. He ate from his bottle and improved every day. There had been an abscess in Paul that the osteopath had broke loose and the fluid came out so Paul could get better. Once again it was Mother’s effort and hard work that saved her son.

Paul was never as healthy as Jeanie when they were young and growing up. The whole story sort of climaxed much later in life. Paul became ill and had another abscess; this time on or near his navel. The doctor operated to remove the abscess. When he came to Paul’s room to report the results, he said, “Paul, you were nearly a twin. The growth I took out was the start of a baby that has been in you since birth.”

When Paul told him that he was already a twin, the doctor said that he was nearly triplets. Paul became a healthy man after that operation, and to this day you would never know the problems that Mother and Dad had with both of their boys. My sisters always said that we boys were Mother’s favorites. I guess we were. She nearly lost both of us to disease.

While all of the previously described illness was going on, there was also a Great Depression going on. The folks lost the farm to Dad's parents. Grandpa and Grandma Jennings let them continue living on the farm and to pay rent. I do not know if they were able to pay very much rent. To raise six children on an 80 acre farm during the depression was nearly impossible. We ate a lot of starchy foods that were cheap to buy. We did eat produce from a huge garden. Mother canned just about everything that we did not eat fresh from the garden. We got to eat eggs a lot.

Hardly a Sunday went by that we did not go to Sunday school and church. After church we had chicken pot pie or chicken and dumplings or chicken prepared some way that mother could stretch it out to feed nine mouths.

I said nine mouths and perhaps you thought I was counting wrong. Wrong! I was not. My dad was uptown at Milton one day during the Great Depression. A man came up to him and said he was destitute and hungry and would work for his room and board. Dad felt very sorry for him, so he said, “O.K. You come with me and we will see what we can do to help you out.” Mother also felt sorry for him to be out in the cold with no place to live, so she agreed that he could stay. This was the beginning of Klao Krause in our lives.

Klao was about my dad’s age and chewed snuff. Klao was a good worker and helped my folks do all the work on the farm. During my illness, Klao did a lot of the chores that I had done before becoming ill. He carried in wood and water and helped with anything that he could. Klao was a nice person, and he stayed with us for years until my oldest sister, Marjorie, got married to Raymond Wenham in 1937. Raymond needed more help and had more room than we did, so Klao went to live with them. He still came back to help my folks many times. Klao continued living with Raymond and Marjorie until his death in 1965. He is buried in Milton cemetery near another friend of the folks.

Now if it was not bad enough that the Great Depression was going on, we had a drought. It would not rain. All of our crops in the field shriveled up and died. Dad and Klao hauled a lot of water with the help of Bonnie, my pony, from the well to the garden. They kept the garden growing fairly good, so we could eat and can produce from the garden.

There was hardly any pasture for the cows and horses to eat that hot, dry summer. I helped herd the cows every day so they could eat the grass that grew along side of the road. Oh, what a hot job. I was what they called in those days a “toe head”; meaning a real blond kid. I had a fair complexion and the sun helped to bleach my hair whiter and whiter. The sun was so hot that I got sunburned real bad. This is probably the reason that I have skin cancer today.

On the afternoon of June 20, 1934 the temperature was around 95 degrees. It became very dark and stormy-looking. All of us were sitting at the supper table that was near the window on the west wall of our large kitchen. Dad was very nervous and concerned. We were almost done eating when Dad said, “My God! Get to the basement, quick.” We all jumped up and ran to the basement door which was only about six or eight feet from our table. Dad just got the door shut and was still standing on the top stair landing when the tornado hit our farm.

The tornado hit with a terrible noise. It sounded like a train came crashing into the house. Along with the tornado came a hard rain. It was a downpour. When the wind and rain subsided, we went upstairs. The house was still standing but severely damaged. When we looked outside, there was destruction all over the farm. Every building except the house had been knocked down. The windmill that pumped our water from the well was flat on the ground.

In the backyard, a short distance from the house, was a beautiful American Elm tree. It was twisted up and most of it lay on the ground. I think we all cried more about the elm tree being gone then anything else. That tree had held our swings and provided us with lots of shade those hot summer days. It would take over sixty years to make another tree like that one.

In the front yard we had several big maple trees that were from about 18 to 30 inches in diameter. Most of these trees stayed standing and only lost a few limbs. The wind had hit with such force that there was little pieces of straw sticking out from the trees. The theory was that the wind blew the trees so hard that they opened up small cracks that caught the straw. Anyway, however it happened it was a terrible thing.

The concrete walls and loft floor of the barn were still intact, so none of our livestock that was in the barn or out in the pasture were hurt. We did have a brooder house out in the field just north of the barn which housed 300 chickens that were over half grown. The chickens were laying all over the field, mostly dead. I think they might have even drowned from the heavy rain that followed the storm.

Friends and neighbors came from all around us and helped pick up the lumber and debris. They helped get our house boarded up so we could sleep in it. There was so much glass sticking out of the walls and furniture. The table that we had been sitting at just before the storm hit had glass pieces imbedded in the tabletop. Windows were broken out and there was evidence that timbers from the barn had came in one window and out another window on the opposite side of the house. Two large sections of roof from the barn had slammed into the side of the house. It was real scary trying to sleep in the house until it got fixed back to normal.

Later we learned that the temperature had fallen from 95° at 5:00 to 58° at 7:00. A picture of the destruction at our farm was featured in the Janesville Daily Gazette.

The heavy rain that we got that day helped the pasture and the corn. The corn grew to maybe 3 or 4 feet high and some stalks had little nubbins of corn on them. Dad cut and bundled up the corn. He hauled it and stacked it in or near the repaired barn. These bundles of corn stalks were fed to the cattle and horses to keep them alive. The cows did not produce much milk on this feed, but they lived through the winter. We did get a little snow that winter, and it was enough to make the grass green in the spring and give all of us hope that maybe this next summer was going to be better.

The next summer Dad contracted with a sugar beet company that he would put in 10 acres of sugar beets; and it was good that he did. The contract called for Dad to furnish a place for two Mexican workers to live for the summer who were to work in the beet field. Andy and Joe lived in a building that was used to house pigs and chickens before the drought but it had been cleaned and scrubbed out. They were hard workers. It was very hard to hoe and thin the beets all summer long and then, in the fall, the beets had to be dug and topped. The beets did very well as they did not require as much rain as the other crops. You see, the drought continued for another year. The tops of the beets were piled up to make a sort of silage. We did not have a silo as a lot of farms did. These beet tops were then fed to the cattle along with the corn stalks and, for the second year of the drought, we survived. The next year we did get snow and rain so that things got back to nearly normal. At last the drought had ended. It was a terrible period of our lives.

My mother’s parents immigrated from the orange (northern) part of Ireland. The Orangemen were Protestant and they were bitter enemies of the green (Catholic) part of Ireland. They talked and preached to their children their hatred even after they came to the United States. It was unfortunate they carried this hatred with them for so long; we are all children of God. I was so happy that before my parents died, they had gotten over their hatred of Catholic people. They had many friends and relatives who were Catholic, and they enjoyed every one of them.

Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected President in 1932 and my mother and dad thought it was terrible. To them, at that time, all Democrats were Catholic and the country would go to Hell even though Hoover, a Republican, had not done anything to help the people.

As it turned out, many programs were set up under Roosevelt’s “New Deal” to help the farmers get back on their feet. The Agriculture Adjustment Acts helped boost and stabilize farm prices. Works Progress Administration (WPA - later called Work Projects Administration) programs were set up which put to work many of the unemployed people. There were many good things done with WPA and CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) projects. To name a few of the projects; all of the rural roads were blacktopped in Wisconsin. Several parks were created such as Riverside Park in Janesville and the river walls that line the sides of the river through Janesville. Many state parks were created by CCC workers. For example, a beautiful one is Devils Lake State Park near Baraboo, Wis. A lot of the work was done on many national parks, also.

The Rural Electrification Administration (REA) was also started. It brought electric service to the rural areas. This really helped to improve the life-style of farmers. It gave us a whole new outlook on life. There was newfound hope for better things to come into our lives.

Franklin D. Roosevelt did more for our country than any other president we have ever had. This is probably why I have voted as a Democrat most of my lifetime to this date. My folks would disown me if they only knew. I think that before they died they realized that there were a lot of good people who were Democrats.

The country came out of the Great Depression with the help of this great president.