Growing Up During the Depression (synopsis of an interview of Verla Hendrickson Daniels Breinholt)

Growing Up During the Depression

Based on an interview of Verla Hendrickson Daniels Breinholt
by Cicily Breinholt on December 8, 1997

Milking the cows, gathering the eggs, and tromping the hay were the memories Verla Breinholt recalls as a teen during the Great Depression. The national crisis did not really affect her or her family negatively. She remembers only the fun and happy times of her teenage years.

I was born May 7, 1919. They say I was born in Richfield. Home was a cabin out in the field. The kitchen was in Central and the bedroom was in Richfield and the county line went right through the cabin. I guess that means I was born in the bedroom. The crash of the stock market didn't affect my family very much, because we raised our food out on the farm. We had a big garden. Mother canned 1400 quarts of fruit and vegetables. We had a potato pit and it had potatoes, cabbage, carrots, and more vegetables to store in the pit, under the ground. At the beginning of the depression I was nine or ten. My family farmed for a living. There were no boys yet, so we girls had to do the work with our step dad. I milked four cows every morning and helped feed the chickens and gather the eggs. I fed the pigs and helped carry in the wood and the coal for the stove. We had coal and wood stoves at that time; that was our heat.

Everybody had rationing stamps. They were given out depending on how many were in the family. You would get a little booklet of stamps and when they were gone you couldn't buy any more gas or sugar. They were a little bit smaller than a postage stamp and you had to use them for that you bought. Most everything was rationed, especially gas and sugar. Gasoline was purchased with one of these little stamps and dad always had a car. It wasn't expensive for it only cost 25 cents a gallon, but the ration slips only lasted so long. You could only buy so much gas. For sugar, we girls had to work in the fields, too. We had to thin beets and in the fall we cut the top from each beet. Then put them down each row. Later we loaded them onto a wagon and took them to the sugar factory to be made into sugar. During haying season, my step-dad threw the hay on the wagon. We girls had to tromp it down. I remember one day, someone threw a blow snake on the wagon and I scurried to the front of the wagon and climbed up the ladder. That was the end of my hay tromping that load. We also drove the cows to the pasture; sometimes we had a horse and sometimes we didn't. We had to drive them to the pasture every morning and bring them home at night. We raised our own wheat for flour, then we'd take it to the mill in Glenwood and have it ground. We were fortunate to live on a farm so we could raise our own food.

I had four changes of clothes and four dresses I wore to high school and I had to keep them clean. Underclothes consisted of two changes. We'd wash them out every night and hang them up on the line in the bathroom. My clothes were mostly made over from my older stepsisters'. Mother would alter them to fit me. Sometimes, they wouldn't last long because the material was thin from my older sister's wearing. I had one good pair of shoes. Some could afford two once in a while. My sister wore hers out quicker than me, so the folks bought her a pair of boy shoes. Boy, did she scuff them up.

I didn't have a store boughten coat until I was sixteen. I remember my first coats made by my Grandma Tuttle, my mother's mother, and her sister Georgia Powell. They would take my older stepsisters' coats apart, press 'em and turn 'em wrong side out. Next, cut a pattern of a smaller coat and pin, fit and sew. They'd have to do a lot of cleaning, brushing, and pressing. The new coats looked pretty good when they got through. How pleased I was when I got my first boughten coat. We sent to Montgomery Ward for it.

We would have parties and we'd say, you're invited to a party at my place; bring a cup of sugar. Mother would make candy, such as a batch of fudge, a batch of divinity, or a batch of taffy. Then we'd have popped corn and play games. We'd play musical chairs and others, but I can't remember the names we called them. We had a lot a fun. We were not aware that we were poor. Everybody was in the same boat. They didn't have anymore than we did. Like I said, the parties were just candy and popcorn and we played games. We had a Victrola that we played and we'd let them dance on our front porch. My girlfriends have never forgot the parties we had when we danced on our porch.

My friends and I always took a trip every summer on the Cove Mountain. We had to saddle and bridle our own horse and also hobble it. I had one named Frisky. It was small so I could handle the horse. The girls were supposed to keep it a secret when they were going camping, but somehow the boys always found out. On the mountain, they'd stay over to Deep Lake and we'd stay at Anderson's cabin. It wasn't finished. I remember a roof and floor, but the sides hadn't been closed-in completely. Camping trips were one of the fun times with friends. When we went on dates, we'd take one car because of the gas prices. One fellow would drive his car. We'd put two couples in the back and two in the front. We'd go to Monroe to the dances and the movies. My favorite actresses were Nancy Carol and Clara Bow. The actors were Tom Mix, Clark Gable, and Gary Cooper.

The dancing and the porch reminds me of our house. The porch went halfway around the house. We had to remodel the house later to make a bedroom and we extended the dining room. When I was in my teens, we finally got the upstairs finished. We had four bedrooms upstairs instead of one. Later we made the one into a bathroom. We had indoor plumbing in our house. We were about the only ones in Annabella that had a bathtub, washbasin, and a toilet in the house.

DeLynn and I slept in a bed upstairs. We had a candle holder because we didn't have electricity on the way up the stairs. Also, it wasn't finished and there was only boards to walk on. Little by little they got the upstairs finished, but it took years.

When I was five or six, Santa Claus bought DeLynn and I a little red table which we shared, and we each had a little red chair. We had a toy telephone that you put on the wall, like they had in those days. We were so tickled. Every Christmas we got a doll and I remember my oldest sister Lillian talking me out of my doll because it had ringlets. She wouldn't trade it back to me. I remember how broken-hearted I was. She was pretty clever the way she talked me out of that doll.

I went to school in Annabella. We didn't have kindergarten then; we had first grade. In the second grade, I was lifting coal in the school stove and I dropped this heavy piece of coal. It mashed my hand and broke my thumb. I have a crooked thumb today from that mashed hand. We went to the sixth grade in Annabella and then to the junior high and high school in Monroe. My family also owned a store during the depression. My mother worked during the day and when I got off work at Forsey's, I'd work till sometimes ten at night. It just depended on when customers came. We had canned stuff and bread. The store did well. We also had bolts of material and house-dresses. Gasoline, which we pumped by hand, was sold. I have to tell you about Jay Staker. He lived up in the south of town, the last house up the hill. He'd push his car down to the store to fill it up and he was too tight to put in more than one gallon of gas. Soon he'd be out and then somebody would have to push him up to the tank and he'd buy one gallon. This would get him to Richfield and back again.

Living through the Great Depression has caused me to be tight. I don't ever want to throw anything away. My old coats, dresses and pant suits hang in the closet; well, we might need to use them again. I guess I'm not so bad that way now, but I used to be. My advice for the future: don't splurge; be economical with everything.

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