The Great Depression of the 1930s was so much different than today that “it’s hard to get the difference across,” Emerson Lynn said Thursday evening.
His stage was the North Community Building, where about 100 people congregated for a meal of soup and cornbread in an event arranged by Iola Reads and the Allen County Historical Society. Iola Reads’ selection this fall is “Out of the Dust,” based on the depression-era Dust Bowl.
Three other presenters, Vic and Maxine Perkins and Margaret Grant, had similar takes on times when hard labor often fetched $1 a day, if a job could be found. Unemployment at the peak of the depression was 25 percent.
Lynn told how his family moved to Arizona because of pulmonary illness his father, Emerson Sr., suffered and then to California, when tough times squeezed jobs to a minimum at The Register where the elder Lynn had worked.
While in Arizona, the Lynns had advantage of a $60-a-week disability insurance payment, “which was a lot of money in 1932, when printers at the Register were making $1 a day,” Lynn said. Once recovered and in California, family income was much less.
The elder Lynn peddled pianos door-to-door, which “he couldn’t sell because no one wanted to buy,” Lynn said. He had the same experience with Singer sewing machines.
Meanwhile, the younger Emerson delivered newspapers and some months brought home more money than his father.
Even with jobs scarce and income a pittance, Lynn noted that a meeting such as Wednesday evening’s would have found men wearing coats, some with ties, and women in dresses.
“Women never wore pants, or jeans, then,” he said.
Even with the crush of poverty, “We didn’t know we were poor,” Lynn said, a common assessment of those who spoke.
The elder Lynn returned to the Register just ahead of World War II, when times improved, and worked here until his retirement in 1963. Emerson jr. owned newspapers in Humboldt and Bowie, Texas, before buying The Register Jan. 1, 1966. He continues to work daily at age 87.
GRANT grew up at Nowata, Okla., in a three-story house on a 10-acre spread that contained an orchard and big garden.
“We did well with food but money was short,” said Grant, 94.
When she entered Nowata High in 1930, it “showed signs of the depression, some classrooms were empty but we had all the basics,” she said. “Music was important to me and we had a great band instructor.”
“We didn’t have a lot that boys and girls take for granted today,” she added, and daily life was a matter of taking advantage of what was available. “Dad traded milk and cream to a single lady — who took care of her mother — for her to give me music (piano) lessons.”
Grant took music seriously and won second in the state in a piano contest at Oklahoma A&M, now Oklahoma State, but did even better academically, finishing first in Latin.
After graduation, with help of the school’s superintendent, she got a scholarship to Wichita University and lived with a sister. She worked as a baby-sitter and read to a blind boy, who took notes on a Braille machine, to earn money for bus fare to and from the university. Her second year, Grant earned $27.50 a month in a job through WU, working with crippled children at Wesley Hospital.
After two years at WU, Grant was hired to teach kindergarten half a day and music in the afternoon at Medicine Lodge, earning her the princely sum of $60 a month.
By her second year in Wichita, she said effects of the dust storms in western Kansas, Colorado, Oklahoma and Texas were evident: “Buses had headlights on during the day and my sister put wet towels on window sills to keep he dust from seeping through.”
After World War II Grant and her husband moved to Gas. She continued to teach, after earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Emporia State, until her retirement.
VIC PERKINS grew up half a mile east of Iola along U.S. 54. He recalled homeless folks — “We called them tramps then” — walking along the highway, supposedly on their way to California and better times.
“Sometimes they’d stop, knock on the back door and ask if there was any work they could do for food,” Perkins said. “Mom would give them something, sometimes a sandwich, whether she had anything for them to do or not.”
His father worked for Lehigh Cement and was laid off during the winter, which put him to chopping wood in the country. The elder Perkins also did all mechanical and maintenance work on the family’s Model T Ford.
At the start of each school year, young Perkins would get two new pairs of overalls and a pair of galoshes to wear during foul weather. Grooming also was homebound, with “my mother cutting my hair.” Food preservation depended on a real “ice” box, not an electric refrigerator.
“We’d put a sign in the front window that had numbers on either side for the ice man,” Perkins said, with the number indicating how many pounds of ice were wanted.
“I never felt poor,” said Maxine Perkins, “because we all were in the same position.”
She was born in Gary, Ind., and moved to Iola a year later, to be near grandparents and other relatives.
“Dad always had a job and we had food and clothes — my folks were good at stretching a dollar,” Perkins said. “We had a big garden,” with produce preserved for use through the winter and spring until a new crop came on.
A coal-burning stove in their home had “some places hot and others not too warm. I remember how cold the beds were in the winter,” she said. “In the winter we put newspaper under rugs in the house for insulation. In the summer we had an electric fan to move the hot air around. Lots of people would move mattresses onto the front porch to try to keep cool.”
Her school clothes were special and Perkins changed into every-day clothes the minute she got home from school.
“Mom had a tub of rinse water when she did laundry and she’d keep it to water the garden and her flowers,” Perkins recalled.
She and the others noted that youngsters made up the games they played, with no electronics or hardly any store-bought things available, although “we did have a croquet set and the wickets were set up all the time.”
“Games weren’t organized like they are today,” she continued. “We played hop-scotch, hide-and-seek and went to 10-cent movies on Saturdays.”
The Perkiness are 85.
“I HAVE no unhappy memories” of the period, Lynn said in concluding remarks, an observation the others agreed also was their remembrance.
