Our parents were children during the Great Depression. They learned to waste nothing. Everything that broke was fixed or jerry-rigged and used for years, clothes were mended and handed down to younger siblings or neighbor children, and socks were darned. Food was precious and scarce. Families grew gardens, kept some chicken and other livestock just to try to survive one season, one year at a time.
Houses were small. All the children slept in the same room. A family was lucky to have indoor plumbing. Dan’s father grew up in middle Iowa. They had a well for their water and an outhouse for their bathroom.
Dan’s mother’s family had a nice farm in the area of the Dust Bowl. In this area the land dried up, the wind blew, crops failed, and cattle and livestock died. People starved and died. Her family lost their farm and had to move. This during the same time as the depression. From that time on, they to survive they farmed land that they rented. Mom Graybill taught me to save butter wrappers to use when “buttering “ a baking dish. This is one of the many things that her family did—save and reuse a useful item, to save spending money on waxed wrap.
I have saved and reused my butter wrappers ever since she told of this. I feel that it honors her, all our parents, our grandparents and family….all all those who lived through the Great Depression.
My mother and father were lucky. My father’s dad sold meat for Swift & Co. in the midwest. People needed to eat, so he didn’t loose his job during the depression. But pay was poor and money scarce. My mother’s father was a lawyer in Seattle. He was paid for his services with produce or, if lucky, a chicken.
Both Dan’s and my grandparents scraped together every spare penny, scrimped and saved, so my mother and father and Dan’s mother were able to go to local schools and get a college degree.
Dan’s father worked selling popcorn for the local movie theater in Carson Iowa while in high school, and he continued to work while going to college so he could afford college. World War II interrupted his schooling. He enlisted the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed. After the war, with the help of the G.I. Bill, Dan’s father earned his college degree.
My mother’s grandfather had also been a lawyer, as was her father. But my father and Dan’s mother, father, and his aunt were the first of their family to get a university degree. These were very hard times, during the ten+ years of the depression and World War II. Families were lucky to have enough food to keep them alive. They had nothing frivolous or extra. Just the bare necessities….and that is, if they were lucky. Our grandparents and parents had to sacrifice much to attend and graduate from college. We are very fortunate and so proud that this is our legacy.
Our parents scrimping and saving every penny when we were children has influenced us greatly. We were both told many times as children about the “starving children in China,” and to eat all our food. “Those poor children in China would love to be eating our dinner.”
To us it has always seemed like a crime or morally wrong to waste food. So we scrape our plates and eat our leftovers the next few days. And often I freeze these little bit of leftovers in small containers.
Look at all the food Americans waste!
No comments:
Post a Comment