Down And Out In America-With Stephen Foster’s Hard Times Come Again No More
In Mind.
“We used to eat white bread with a little cheapjack Karo syrup on it to
ease the hungers,” said Grandpa Eaton to his youngest grandson Sam, “and that
stuff was supposed to be used in baking stuff with not as a topping spread for
a sandwich. But by Jesus it did cut the hungers for a few hours. I don’t think
I have had any since unless it was hidden in some ingredient your grandmother
used to make her lovely desserts. Ah, I can still taste those cherry tarts and
banana crème pies, bless her soul.” All this faux culinary talk by Grandpa was
in response to a question Sam had about what it was like back in the Great
Depression of the 1930s to try to get along with very little in most households.
That was certainly the case with the Eaton family whose livelihood for a
few generations including Grandpa, his father and Sam’s own father< Prescott,
was conditioned by life in the bogs, the cranberry bogs for which the town of
Carver was then famous. But in a depression, or hell in any serious economic
downturn nobody but Mayfair swells, and there were never enough of them, bothers
with the luxury of cranberry sauce, not when the Thanksgiving dinner was going
to be something like a few slices of fatty bacon and maybe a poached egg
(poached to get the most yolk protein out of the damn egg). So Grandpa and his
family, including Sam’s father when the time came did what Grandpa called “the
best they could.” Grandpa continued, “We used to send your father and your
uncle Jason out after the coal trucks when they were out making their
deliveries around town early in the morning and you know those old trucks would
rattle around on the old streets before they were fully paved with asphalt in
the early 1950s and they would drop a few pieces of coal which the kids would
scoop up and bring home to keep us warm for a minute. Here is where your father
was a knucklehead though. He decided that such labor should be recognized and
so in school he bragged about how he and Jason got the coal. The next morning
there were about fifty young kids out trying to outdo each other, including punches,
to get a few rotten pieces of coal. Yeah, times were bad.”
Sam had to laugh as he saw the image of his father fighting off some big
hooligan for the measly coal but he also had a twinge of conscious about how he
had been ashamed to mention to anyone his father’s profession as a bogger, at
the low end of the town social structure just above the poor people who lived
on the county farm. He resolved to think better of his father who after all had
to leave school and go into the bogs before he graduated in order to help out
the family and he never went back because World War II came around and he
enlisted right after Pearl Harbor. So his father never got any real benefit out
of the GI Bill that lots of fathers did although he did try to go to some electronics
school in Boston but he was either too tired to pursue his studies with five growing
kids, Sam and four daughters, or just not smart enough to pick up what the
instructors were trying to teach him. Yeah, he would think better of the man
from here on in.
Grandpa Eaton said he was getting tired but he did have one more story to
tell. Tell about those terrible times. Not about the hard times since his story
about the Karo syrup and the fight for coal told even a running nose kid like
Sam that times were tough but about the time that he got some of the boggers
together and had a big dinner and dance out at Fred Brown’s old run down red
barn over by Route 3. He started, “It was around Thanksgiving time in 1939,
maybe around the 15th, before Congress proclaimed the specific day on
the fourth Thursday of November in 1941 and I was talking to some other boggers
who like me were only working part time since demand was down and rather than
each family having something like tuna fish sandwiches if they were lucky or
peanut butter if times were really tough we decided to all pool whatever we had,
which wasn’t much and have a shindig at Fred’s old barn. And we did, although
even with the resources of some twenty families we wound up having ham instead
of the prized turkey the swells were having. I don’t think I had turkey at all in
the 1930s and probably not until the war started but that was neither here nor
there since it wasn’t the meal that made the day special.
Different guys around town had instruments, you know, fiddles, guitars, a
bass, no drums that I recall and so after dinner as the sun went down and we men
had had a couple of shots of cheapjack Johnny Walker whiskey the assembled
make-shift band started playing. Your father was one of them on a kazoo or something,
don’t laugh. Then he got up in front of the crowd and started singing, at first
Brother, Can You Spare a Dime, always
a hit despite the hard times it portrays, a couple of Irving Berlin tunes I
forget which ones, Bing Crosby stuff which was real popular too but the one I remember
because Grandma welled up and maybe I did too was a new song, If I Didn’t Care which kind of capped
the evening. I was proud of Prescott that night. The next day we were back to
Karo syrup or some such thing but that was life back then that was our lives.”
Sam thought, thought hard for a sixteen year old kid, that yes indeed those
where hard times, and hard times come again no more.
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