Depression Stories

Vice Chancellor David Malik wants me to do an oral history of a program called FACET (Faculty Colloquium for Excellence in Teaching). The idea is that I’d interview a couple people at IU Northwest and then perhaps travel to other campuses. I can’t accept money due to the retirement plan I’m under, but maybe I could get a new computer for the Archives out of the deal. Mine freezes up all the time.

Talked about Gary history in Steve McShane’s class. Because I’ve done it numerous times, I had my spiel all planned out in my head, but there were some fun moments when I thought of things to say spontaneously. The previous week the class had watched an episode from Peter Jennings special series “In Search of America.” It was very negative. Steve asked me what I thought and I quoted from my Centennial History, which I had give out free: “Post-Tribune readers expressed outrage over the program’s one-sidedness. One resident complained, “It portrays Gary as just a slum city with no prosperous, upright citizens.” Why no mention of young people developing their talents at Emerson School for the Performing Arts, Lisa DeNeal wondered. Or the activities of block clubs and community centers. Nate Cain wrote: “To indicate that all the good people have left was extremely disrespectful to the hard-working, tax-paying, family-oriented citizens of this community. For every criminal you show me, I’ll show you 100 solid citizens. For every board-up building, I’ll show you a block of well-maintained, residential homes.”

During a discussion about how safe or unsafe the city was I got to talking about sometimes driving to the university on East Twenty-First Street and passing liquor stores, a housing project, and the old, abandoned factory once owned by Bear Brand Hosiery (a so-called eyesore due for demolition, but I’ll miss it). That got me thinking about how when researching Gary’s history I went through microfilm of old Post-Tribunes day by day. There were hardly any articles about the depression – after all, that wasn’t news and who wanted to read about it. You got hints about the hard times from letters to the editor complaining about people going through their trash cans in the alley or people abandoning their pets, causing packs of wild dogs to form. One day, however, there was a banner headline about Bear Brand Hosiery planning to build a factory in Gary that would employ over a hundred people. That was worth proclaiming.

I mentioned the original purpose of Steel Shavings – to publish family histories. An issue on the 1930s (volume 17, 1988) contained a number of poignant Depression tales, which I repeated to Steve’s students. There was the girl who realized things were bad when instead of a Christmas tree the family brought inside a tree branch to decorate. Another girl wanted a dress for Christmas that was in a department store window. Instead she got an ugly brown one and confided that’s she’s never worn brown since. One family moved into their garage and rented out their house so they could keep up with mortgage payments. A lady lost a five-dollar bill – meal money for the week – and tore up the house in an unsuccessful attempt to find it. A Slovak-American recalled her father and uncles playing cards. After they were too poor to play for money, they used matchsticks.

E. Craig Turpin interviewed a guy named Zeb who recalled: “We’d go behind the butcher shop and pick orange peels out of the garbage. We were so hungry one time that when my father brought home a bag of flour, we ripped it open and just ate it like that.” Larry Luchene’s father had a 1915 Studebaker truck, which he had obtained in a trade for a shotgun. He once took 23 people to file for relief. The truck did not have enough power to start normally, so to get it running they had to jack up the back wheels and kick them. Dad bought the cheapest gas possible and then put mothballs in the tank to give it some “zip.”

There were several former students in Steve's class, including Sarah Lewis and Donny Hollandsworth, whom I hadn't seen in ten years. Donny’s journal was the highlight of my Nineties issue. He wrote about his part-time job at Shoe Carnival, playing softball, watching wrestling, mourning the deaths of Walter “Sweetness” Peyton and golfer Payne Stewart, breaking up with a girl, dealing with diabetes, and struggling with classes. If not for the splendid journal, he wouldn’t have pulled a “C.” On 11/7/99 he wrote: “With Sweetness looking down, the Bears beat the hated Green Bay Packers 14-13. The Bears blocked an easy field goal to end the game. Walter was with them today.” His last entry mentioned talking to a girl after class who was in his Speech course: “She had to go but said she’d talk to me more on Wednesday. I will get her number then. I needed something good to happen to me, and something did.”

Bowled about my average but the Engineers won two games thanks in part to Clark Metz, who got a turkey (three strikes in a row) to finish up the third game. In the seventh frame we both had five seven splits and picked them up.
Bear brand HHosiery,