Chapter 8
Caves and Catfish
Today the acronym "NRA" means something entirely different to what it mean during the Great Depression. It was the National Recovery Administration, a New Deal agency created to bring together industry, labor, and government to prevent cut-throat pricing and help the nation heal from the Depression. It was one of the ingredients in FDR's alphabet soup of agencies that included the BPA, TVA, and the WPA (which my grandfather referred to as Whistle, Piss, and Argue). For children born in the 1920s, the Great Depression was just life.
Back there during
the mid-1930s it seemed as if the great drought and Hard Times would go on
forever. The snow that fell in winter
seemed to just evaporate back into the dry air without leaving much moisture in
the red soil of those Ozark hills.
During the summers the sun was brassy hot every day and the rains simply
did not come.
One old fellow had
a wry joke that he would tell time and again at the store. When someone said, “Shore would like to see
it rain,” the old boy would solemnly say, “Yep.
Don’t keer so much for myself but I shore would like for my boy to see
some rain—he ain’t never seen any.”
There was always
someone who would innocently ask, “How old is he?”
“Seven year,” the
old boy would answer with a perfectly straight face.
Each spring the
Ozark hill farmers kept putting their seed corn and their hopes into the dry
earth. The corn would grow stunted from
the dusty oil and produce nubbins rather than ears of corn. In good years one could sit in the stillness
of the evening and actually hear the corn grow—when there was no breeze from a
nearby cornfield you could hear little rustlings and an occasional tiny squeak
as the corn leaves grew. No so in those
drought years. Instead of hearing the
corn grow, you could sit in the evening and hear the corn sort of crinkle as it
withered.
We were fortunate
that the Missouri and Arkansas hills were not really a part of the Oklahoma/Kansas
Dust Bowl from which the Okies were fleeing to the promised land of
California. There was plenty of dust,
especially when a farmer was working that dry ground with disc or harrow, but
the hills and woodlands kept the wind down and the dust did not move around.
Oh, we got plenty
of dust, especially in the summers of 1933 and 1934. Regular dust storms would move from the west
out of Kansas and Oklahoma. At times the
dust would be so bad that even at high noon the blazing sun would be a dim
brassy ball overhead.
The dust coated
and got into everything. I recall that
in the heat of summer when you absolutely could not sleep without having the
windows wide open to catch any hint of breeze, sometimes the dust was so bad
that Mother would soak extra sheets in water and hang them over the bedroom
windows. They did not keep out much of
the dust and simply made more it more close and sultry in the bedroom.
We children did
not mind too much. We were young enough
that, except for dim memories of better times and living in Kansas City, the
drought and Hard Times were all that we knew.
It was simply our normal way of life.
I overheard Mother and Dad talking about it in the kitchen one evening
after we had gone to bed. She was
bemoaning the fact that we had practically no money and that it was hard on us
boys growing up like that. My usually
taciturn father made, what for hi was quite a little speech.
“Now, don’t you
worry about it, Evy,” he said. “Hard
Times ain’t gonna last forever and things will get better. You’ll see.
I voted Democrat for the first time in my life for that there nephew of
old Teddy Roosevelt, and I still think he’s gonna turn the country around. As for the boys, they ain’t missing something
they don’t remember ever having.
“Them boys are all
right. We always have something to eat
so they don’t go to bed hungry, and you send them off to school in clean
overalls. So what if the overalls are
patched? Everyboyd wears patched
overalls—and I’d be danged if I’ll go on Relief and send ‘em to school in them
brown-dyed Relief overalls. I ain’t ever
gonna take no charity even if our behinds get to hangin’ out!
“Heard a rumor at
the store,” Dad went on, “that they are going to upgrade this here old country
road to a farm-to-market road. Going to
grade it and put on chat with government money.
I’ll get me a job maybe on the rock crusher or a road grader. Aint’ all that much to do on this little old
forty acres and the boys are getting big enough to take care of most of
it. They say they may build new bridges,
too, over the Little Sac over toward Fairplay and over Maz Creek between here
and Dadeville. Don’t know much about
building bridges, but I shore can learn.
“If nothin’ comes
of the road project, I aim to lease us some bottom land down by the Sac River
and plant corn—corn did pretty good down there last year, all things
considered.
“No you just stop
fussin’ about it. Let’s blow out the
light and git to bed. Tomorrow is
another day. The boys will be all
right. Things won’t be this way forever—you
just wait and see.”
It had been a long
dissertation for my normally laconic father.
I lay there in the darkness next to my snoring brother and thought about
it, but not for very long. Our combined
warmth under the quilts got to me and I dropped off to sleep with a few
thoughts of Hard Times, Relief, bridges, and farm-to-market roads running at
random through my mind. They were simply
facts of life and nothing for a twelve-year-old to worry about.
