The Time of Our Lives (12 page)

CHAPTER 6
 

Church of Thrift

FACT:
In August 2010, total household debt in America equaled 121.7 percent of after-tax income. When the U.S. economy stagnated at the turn of the twenty-first century and job growth slowed, too many families who had gotten used to buying whatever they wanted whenever they wanted began to borrow in record proportions. We had gotten hooked on expensive cars, rooms full of new electronic toys, Las Vegas vacations, cruise lines, dining out, and the biggest buy of all, a house.

Add on the higher cost of health care and the cost of raising a child, not to mention exorbitant credit-card late fees, and it was a formula for washing the middle class in red ink.

QUESTION:
When was the last time you had a family conversation about your short- and long-term financial goals? How much did you save last week? Do you know how much you put on your credit card before you receive the monthly bill?

D
eep in my parents’ closet, tucked away behind their modest wardrobes, was a small locked box with the family birth certificates, their marriage license, insurance policies, the passbooks for their savings account, and a stack of twenty-five-dollar war bonds.

The bonds, which paid a paltry 2.9 percent when cashed at maturity after ten years, helped finance America’s astronomical costs for fighting in World War II. Yet they were phenomenally popular, largely as a result of a mass marketing campaign that featured Hollywood’s biggest stars, including the GIs’ favorite pinup, Rita Hayworth. War heroes were flown home to help with the effort. Three of the Marines who raised the flag on Iwo Jima were ordered by FDR to appear in Washington, D.C., at Major League Baseball games, and at a war bonds rally in Chicago that drew forty-five thousand people to Soldier Field.

By war’s end, more than half the population had bought a war bond and raised almost $186 billion. Remember, the average annual family income at the time was two thousand dollars.

The bonds in my parents’ closet had a kind of sacred quality in our family. They were one of the unspoken lessons of my youth: Save your money and help your country. When the United States went to war in Vietnam and later in Iraq and Afghanistan, there was no unifying financial sacrifice. They were wars financed on a credit card that had a big penalty for a late payment.

I thought about the small stash of Brokaw war bonds when in a White House briefing in early 2011 I heard the chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers say, “We have a national savings rate of less than zero.”

THE PAST

There are so many stories about the calamitous collapse of the American economy in the Great Depression that it would be hard to settle on just one. I’ve heard my family’s accounts of lost farms, dust storms, dime-an-hour jobs, and skimping on everything, always told as a matter-of-fact recitation of the realities. I grew up with those stories, but I cannot remember any anger or whining in their retelling.

A few years ago I was deeply impressed by the details in a book called
The Great Depression: A Diary
, published by the son of a Youngstown, Ohio, lawyer. The lawyer, Benjamin Roth, kept a meticulous journal of the day-to-day developments he witnessed and experienced.

His notes from several days in the fall and early winter of 1932 provide a stark accounting of the desperate times for ordinary Americans.

November 19, 1932

It seems unbelievable but conditions seem to be even worse. The month of October was the worst in my law practice but November is on the way to beat that low record. So far this month I have taken in $19 in cash. In the meanwhile the steel industry operates at 15 percent—bank failures start again last week with four in closing in Pittsburgh and five in Oklahoma.

December 1, 1932

Nothing new to report. Several hundred “hunger” marchers passed through Youngstown on their way to Washington where they will demand food instead of bullets when it [Congress] convenes Monday. I passed about two hundred of them … and they were singing the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

December 5, 1932

A salesman just tried to sell me a small pass-book on the Dollar Bank at 72 cents on the dollar. He states the tenants of the bank are using this means to pay their office rents, notes, mortgages, etc.

December 10, 1932

Business is at an absolute standstill. Merchants are fighting hard for Christmas business but report none is in sight. Last night’s paper states that in Youngstown one out of every four families is being supported by charity.

By the end of the year, Roth noted that steel mills, the great engines of Youngstown’s economy, were operating at just 13 percent of capacity; begging, holdups, and murders were frequent; and bankruptcies and foreclosures were no longer disgraces. The price of corn and wheat was so low—four and five cents a bushel—that farmers were burning their crops for heat rather than selling them for a loss.

Those conditions lasted across the country for most of the decade, imprinting a thrift gene on the people who lived through them. There was a common belief that it could happen again, a conditioning that stayed with this generation, and largely with their children, for the rest of their lives.

That thrift gene from the Depression was built into the bloodlines on all sides of our extended family. It had to be, for survival. The cost of living was not a statistic issued by a government economist. It was a daily reality.

Today, through marriage, we’re the Brokaws, Conleys, Aulds, Harveys, Frys, and Bartfields and Simons. We have in our family albums cooks and butchers, farmers and city girls, garment workers and department store clerks, physicians and ranchers, football coaches and teachers, lawyers and community activists, journalists and businesswomen.

We’re Huguenots, Irish, English, Scottish, Native Americans, and Russian Jews. All but the Simons and the Bartfields are rooted in the broad middle of the country, that swath of prairie and plains unfolding from the old Dakota Territory to the old Oklahoma Territory. The Simons and Bartfields are city folk; they got off the boat at Ellis Island in New York and never left.

We’re a mix of high school graduates, college graduates, and elementary school dropouts. We are both working class and professionals. We’re Republicans, Democrats, and independents, moderate to liberal, but none would be called radical or extreme. Some struck it rich while most stayed in the middle or working class.

The older ones were shaped but not broken by the Great Depression. The enforced economies of that long downturn stayed with them to the end of their days and gave them perspective when trouble emerged again from time to time.

My mother spent the first six years of her life living with her parents on a 160-acre farm in a one-room tar-papered “house.” There was a loft where the hired hand slept surrounded by hams being cured, canned vegetables from the garden, and household tools.

The farm earned enough in the early twenties that the Conleys were able to build a small home with oak floors and two bedrooms but no indoor plumbing. Money ran out before they could paint the exterior.

Mother has only good memories of farm life despite the rustic conditions and absence of even the smallest luxuries. One year her favorite toy was a piece of a fence post she christened Maude and carried around as a make-believe friend.

Her education until the ninth grade took place in a one-room school. A precocious student, she listened in as the teacher worked with the older students and eventually skipped a grade.

A few years ago Mother was seated with Caltech president David Baltimore, a Nobel laureate, at a postgraduation luncheon in a campus garden. At one point I saw Dr. Baltimore listening intently to Mother explaining something. When I asked later what they were talking about, she said, “Well, I noticed in the tree nearby a Baltimore oriole and I pointed it out to him. I said, ‘Look, there’s the bird named after you.’ He didn’t seem to know much about them so I explained how they built a hanging nest.”

In turn, I asked Mother how she knew enough about the Baltimore oriole to be teaching a Nobel laureate. She said, “Oh, we learned all about birds and nature in that one-room school.”

Life on the farm was instructive and rewarding in many ways, but when the boom years of the twenties ended and the twin evils of a great drought and a worldwide financial collapse ushered in the thirties, a hard life became even harder.

When Mother moved to California her wardrobe became more stylish, but she didn’t abandon her South Dakota thriftiness.
(Photo Credit 6.1)

The Conley family lost the farm to the banks in 1931, forcing them to move to town, where my grandfather’s new job at a local granary owned by a friend paid a dime an hour. Mother, a high school graduate at sixteen, gave up her dream of college and a career in journalism. She went to work as a postal clerk for a dollar a day, working nights as a waitress for fifty cents and her evening meal, called “supper” in rural America. She was invited by an aunt and uncle to live with them and try her luck in Minneapolis, where she found a job as a clerk for Fanny Farmer, the popular candy company with stores as ubiquitous in the Twin Cities as Starbucks outlets are now.

Fanny Farmer paid fifteen dollars a week, a tidy jump up from her South Dakota wages, and she had the added advantage of living with generous relatives. When I asked if she felt like the poor little country mouse in the big city, she said, “No, I felt rich. I had a job.” Even with the job, however, she longed to return to northern South Dakota and her enterprising suitor, Anthony “Red” Brokaw, a third-grade dropout who nonetheless became a master operator of heavy construction machinery.

He could find work by racing hundreds of miles across the Midwest from highway jobs in Minnesota to new airports under construction in Kansas during the summer months. After they were married, he took Mother with him in a tiny homemade camping trailer. Occasionally they would rent rooms at boardinghouses. Like almost everyone else of their age they were thrifty by nature and by necessity. They didn’t spend what they didn’t have, and they saved something every week.

Now if I bring Mother the smallest gift during a visit to her comfortable retirement apartment—say, fresh-squeezed orange juice or roasted almonds—she asks how much it cost and then recites the price of every item she serves me for lunch. “Aren’t those tomatoes nice? I got them for just a dollar ninety a pound, can you believe it?”

In an evocative memoir of life in Iowa during the Great Depression, author Mildred Armstrong Kalish writes in
Little Heathens
of the many ways of preparing basic farm food, or what I would call the Great Leftover School of Cooking.

Kalish asks, “What can you do with leftover mashed potatoes? Add beaten eggs, grated onions, and salt, form into patties like thick hamburgers, and fry them in bacon fat or oil until they are crispy and golden brown.”

That was a staple at our family Monday night suppers, the mashed potatoes having been left over from the big Sunday noon dinner. My brothers and I liked to tease my mother by saying, “Oh, we’re getting used potatoes again.” It never failed to touch her off. “They’re not used!” she’d exclaim. “They’re as good as new.”

Used potatoes didn’t stay on my palate in my grown-up years, but I still have leftover guilt. I cannot easily discard still-edible food at the end of a meal, and as a result our refrigerator is a jumble of small containers of odds and ends. Leftovers were really a metaphor for the larger issues of money management and the ever-present fear that another Great Depression was just around the corner.