Hard Times (3 page)

Penny Lernoux concludes, “It could lead to a situation that would make 1929 look like a birthday party.”

Yet other voices, mostly frequently heard, tell us the outlook is not at all that bleak, no matter what parallels may be drawn between Then and Now. James Nathenson, past president of the Chicago Homebuilders Association, sees as glowing a future as the present President of the United States. Mr. Nathenson is a devout Chicago Bears fan and a season ticket holder. “I see everything that’s happening with the Bears as a positive thing for Chicago housing—if they win.” His reference was to the upcoming Superbowl game. (The Bears won, of course.)

Fortunate is the city—and the society—that is blessed with the legs of Walter Payton, the arm of Jim McMahan, and the .heft of William Perry. Never mind the smokeless chimneys and boarded-up stores of South Chicago. Never mind two hundred young lining up for five jobs. Never mind history. Mr. Nathenson’s euphoria is undiminished: “In Chicago, once we become winners, we begin to think like winners in our pursuits in life. If we’re losers, we have that loser syndrome permeating our attitude.”
⁷
Ronald Reagan couldn’t have said it any better.

In the following pages, testimony is offered by scores who thought “like winners” until they suddenly, astonishingly, wound up losers. “It was like a thunder clap,” Sidney Weinberg recalled. Have our weathervanes been dismantled? No storm signals at all? Or have lessons been learned from an experienced trauma that to some seems only yesterday, to others centuries ago. A young woman, on being told of the Great Depression by her grandparents, says, “It seemed like a fairy tale to me, something of a bedtime story.”

Lessons learned? As with the drunk before the judge, when asked whether his plea be guilty or not guilty, the reply is: I stands mute.

Ours, the richest country in the world, may be the poorest in memory. Perhaps the remembrances of survivors of a time past may serve as a reminder to others. Or to themselves.

This being a book about Time as well as a time; for some the bell has tolled. Heroes and dragons of a long-gone day were old men, some vigorous, some weary, when I last saw them. Some have died.

See, I never heard that word “depression” before. They would all just say hard times to me. It still is.

A Depression might be interesting today. It could
really
be something. To be on the bum, and have nobody say: “Look, I’ll give you $10,000 if you’d just come back and go to school.” We have a choice today. What would it be like if we had no choice?

 

This I remember. Some people put this out of their minds and forget it. I don’t want to forget it. I don’t want it to take the best of me, but I want to be there because it happened. This is the truth, you know. History.

 

They loved us who had passed away.

They forgot all our errors. Our names were mixed.

The story was long.

The young people danced. They brought down new boughs for the flame. They said, Go on with the story now. What happened next?

For us there was silence….

(
and parenthetical comment
)

 

 

 

 

 

THIS is
a memory book, rather than one of hard fact and precise statistic. In recalling an epoch, some thirty, forty, years ago, my colleagues experienced pain, in some instances; exhilaration, in others. Often it was a fusing of both. A hesitancy, at first, was followed by a flow of memories: long-ago hurts and small triumphs. Honors and humiliations. There was laughter, too.

 

I myself don’t remember the bleak October day, 1929. Nor do I recall with anything like a camera eye the events that shaped the Thirties. Rather, a blur of images comes to mind. Faces, voices and, occasionally, a rueful remembrance or a delightful flash. Or the astonishing innocence of a time past. Yet a feeling persists….

Even now, when on the highway, seeing in faint neon, VACANCY, outside a modest motel, I am reminded of my mother’s enterprise, The Wells-Grand. I ask myself, with unreasonable anxiety, perhaps, “Will it survive? Will this place be here next year?”

 

 

In the mid-Twenties, all fifty rooms of The Wells-Grand were occupied. There was often a waiting list. Our guests were men of varied skills and some sense of permanence. The only transients were the wayward couple who couldn’t afford a more de luxe rendezvous. Mysteriously, there was always room at the inn, even for sinners. Ours were the winking Gospels.

On Saturdays, most of our guests paid their weekly rent. On those evenings, I walked at a certain pace to the deposit window of the neighborhood bank. All the guests, with the exception of a few retired boomers and an ancient coppersmith (made idle by the Volstead Act), had steady jobs. It was a euphoric time.

The weekly magazines,
Judge
and
Life
(pre-Luce), were exciting with George Jean Nathan and Pare Lorentz critiques and Jefferson Machamer girls.
Liberty
carried sports pieces by Westbrook Pegler—the most memorable, a tribute to Battling Siki, the childlike, noble savage destroyed by civilization.
Literary Digest
was still around and solvent, having not yet
forecast Alf Landon’s triumph some years later. On the high school debating team, we resolved that the United States should or should not grant independence to the Philippines, should or should not join the World Court, should or should not recognize the Soviet Union. We took either side. It was a casual time.

Perhaps it was the best of times. Or was it the worst? Scott Nearing inveighed against dollar diplomacy. Bob La Follette and George Norris took to the hustings as well as the Senate floor in Horatio-like stands against the Big Money. Yet two faces appear and reappear in my mind’s eye: Vice Presidents Charles G. Dawes and Charles Curtis; the first, of the responsible banker’s jaw, clamped determinedly to an underslung pipe; the other, a genial ex-jockey, of the Throttlebottom look. There was an innocence, perhaps. But it was not quite Eden’s.

As for the Crash itself, there is nothing I personally remember, other than the gradual, at first, hardly noticeable, diminishing in the roster of our guests. It was as though they were carted away, unprotesting and unseen, unlike Edward Albee’s grandma. At the entrance, we posted a placard: VACANCY.

The presence of our remaining guests was felt more and more, daily, in the lobby. Hitherto, we had seen them only evenings and on weekends. The decks of cards were wearing out more quickly. The black and red squares of the checkerboard were becoming indistinguishable. Cribbage pegs were being more frequently lost… . Tempers were getting shorter. Sudden fights broke out for seemingly unaccountable reasons.

 

 

We were carrying the regulars on the books, but the fate of others was daily debated as my mother, my brother and I scanned the more and more indecipherable ledger. At times, the issue was joined, with a great deal of heat, as my brother and I sought to convince our mother that somehow we and our guests shall overcome. In reply, her finger pointed to the undeniable scrawl: the debts were mounting.

With more frequency, we visited our landlord. (We had signed a long-term
lease in happier days.) He was a turn-of-the-century man, who had no telephone and signed all his documents longhand. His was a bold and flowing penmanship. There was no mistaking the terms. His adjustments, in view of this strange turn of events, were eminently fair. A man of absolute certainties, who had voted the straight ticket from McKinley to Hoover, he seemed more at sea than I had imagined possible. I was astonished by his sudden fumbling, his bewilderment.

 

 

As for our guests, who now half-occupied the hotel, many proferred relief checks as rent rather than the accustomed cash. It was no longer a high-spirited Saturday night moment.

There was less talk of the girls in the Orleans street cribs and a marked increase in daily drinking. There was, interestingly enough, an upswing in playing the horses: half dollar bets, six bits; a more desperate examination of
The Racing Form. Bert E. Collyer’s Eye
, and a scratch sheet, passed from hand to hand. While lost blacks played the numbers, lost whites played the nags.

Of my three years at the University of Chicago Law School, little need be said. I remember hardly anything, other than the presence of one black in my class, an African prince, whose land was a British—or was it a French?—possession. Only one case do I remember: it concerned statutory rape. The fault lay not in the professors, who were good and learned men, but in my studied somnolence. Why, I don’t know. Even to this day. Was it a feeling, without my being aware, at the time, of the irrelevance of standard procedure to the circumstances of the day? Or is this a rationalization, ex post facto, of a lazy student? It was a hard case all around.

Yet those years, ‘31 to ’34, at the University, did lead to an education of sorts. On my way from The Wells-Grand to the campus, I traveled through the Black Belt. Was it to escape Torts and Real Property that I sought out the blues? I don’t know.

I do know that in those gallimaufry shops I discovered treasures: “race records,” they were called by men with dollar signs for eyes. The artists,
Big Bill, Memphis Minnie, Tampa Red, Big Maceo, among those I remember, informed me there was more to the stuff of life—and Battling Siki and Senegal, for that matter—than even Westbrook Pegler imagined. Or my professors.