The Great Depression

by Pierre Berton

  Thousands of other young children were only vaguely aware of the Depression. Some were shielded from it by their parents or their own naïveté. Eva Lauzon, who was eight in 1933 and lived on Albermarle Street in Toronto, was told later in life by her father that he and her mother had made a conscious decision never to discuss money before their eleven children. Even though he had a job working for Canadian Pacific, it wasn’t easy to bring up such a large family. Young Eva grew up believing that only rich people used toothpaste; she and her siblings used baking soda and salt. Nor could she afford to have her skates sharpened; indeed, she came to believe that skate sharpening was effete – or at least that’s how she rationalized it.

  Donald Radford of Palgrave, Ontario, was another child who had no idea there was a depression because his parents made a point of never mentioning it. He didn’t know that the company his father worked for had gone bankrupt or that the family had been granted a moratorium on rent payments. He didn’t know they couldn’t afford to pay the instalments on the parlour piano or that the piano company had let them keep it because “there’s a Depression on and we couldn’t sell it to anyone else.” He would always remember the Hallowe’en when his friends called for him and his mother insisted he finish his supper before joining them. Supper consisted of a bowl of pea soup; it was years before he learned it was the only food in the house. Yet for Donald Radford, as for so many other Depression children, the thirties were a wonderful decade – “an exciting time to be alive.” The gift of a fifteen-cent Dinky Toy or a second-hand tricycle at Christmas was for him sheer heaven.

  For every child scarred by the Depression there was another to whom the period was a veritable idyll. These were the ones whose fathers had jobs and, therefore, a measure of stability. One was Robert H. Thompson, who, after retiring, moved to Victoria, B.C., and decided to set down for his children and grandchildren his remarkably sunny memories of growing up in Saskatoon in the thirties. He did, of course, remember the symbols of the decade – the jobless men who jumped off the freight at the end of Main before it crossed the railway bridge, where the police were waiting. They wandered up the back lanes, knocking on doors, asking for food and odd jobs. His mother got more than her share because on a fence behind their house somebody had chalked a sign that she was always good for a sandwich. Bob knew that his brother, who was thirteen years older than he, could find only part-time work – no more than two or three days a month – and that his brother’s close friend, a graduate engineer, was reduced to delivering groceries. All the same, young Bob Thompson, who was just ten years old in 1933 and who lived in a big house owned by his grandfather, a lumber dealer, clearly had a wonderful time in a decade that is historically grim.

  The ravages that were visited on the prairies in those years had little meaning for small, active boys. The grasshoppers came in clouds, devastating the fields, but to Bob Thompson they made wonderful bait to catch trout. The dust came, too, dark as night, thick as fog – so dense you didn’t dare venture out of doors. It settled heavily on the furniture, driving housewives to delirium, but oh! the fun of writing your name with your finger or drawing a funny face on the dining-room table.

  Saskatoon lay on the northern edge of the drought area. The long, lazy summers were remarkably hot and dry, but lazy for small boys only – desperate, for farmers praying for rain. Thompson, oblivious of the desolation on the farmland to the south, had a wonderful time picking pinchberries and salmon berries with George Johnson, wheeling down the sidewalks on rollerskates, toasting marshmallows on the river bank, carving whistles out of green willow, and rolling barrel hoops made of lathing. He never forgot the aroma of popcorn, hot from a two-wheeled cart, and all the inventive games of childhood that required no admission price: “Red Light,” “I Spy,” and “Simon Says.”

  Children and adults made their own fun in those days. On Broadway, Bob and the other kids would sit for hours in Storey’s blacksmith shop, watching the smith straighten tires and sharpen discs. Then, when Tony, the fruit man, arrived with his horse-drawn wagon, they’d wangle a small slice of watermelon or a bunch of grapes. More often they would hang around Mylrea’s Garage on Broadway, watching the owner working on the new automobiles – Model A Fords, of course, but also the occasional conversation piece: a Whippet or a Star, an Essex or an Overland. The car was very much a pleasure vehicle in 1933. More sophisticated entertainment had yet to replace the Sunday drive.

  Children’s pastimes were simpler. George Johnson was the most popular kid in the neighbourhood because he owned the only magic lantern. Fifty years later, Bob Thompson could still recall the excitement of the picture shows in the Johnson basement – black-and-white slides of popular cartoon characters projected on a bed sheet. The walkie-talkie was more than a generation away, but the kids communicated, or tried to, by making telephones out of two tin cans and a fifteen-foot length of string.

  There was a rage for stilts, made from six-foot two-by-fours. The footrests were blocks nailed thirty inches from the base, but some kids became so proficient they raised the height to four feet, which meant they had to mount the stilts from a fence or a porch.

  Toys were also less sophisticated then, and being made of wood or metal instead of plastic, they lasted longer. Big items included a popgun with a cork on a string, steel cap pistols, and, of course, the ubiquitous Meccano set that made every boy an engineer. If you could scrape up a dime you could go to the Daylight Theatre – the cheapest of three in Saskatoon – and watch an entire show, which included a sixteen-part serial (John Wayne in The Shadow of the Eagles or Buster Crabbe in Captain Gallant of the Foreign Legion). Bob Thompson made it to the Daylight on a Saturday afternoon by taking the quarter his mother gave him for a haircut, sneaking into the student shop at Mohler’s Barber School for a fifteen-cent cropping, and saving the extra dime for the movie.

  When the Chautauqua travelling tent show came through there was cheap entertainment for all, mixed with culture. And there were medicine shows. To Bob Thompson the most amazing performance was given by an Indian “chief” who burned the palm of his hand with a white-hot iron and then applied a miracle snake oil remedy that appeared to cure it and sold for only a dollar a bottle.

  A dollar was a great deal of money in 1933, almost as much as a week’s pay to some people. Even a cent went a long way. At Turner’s Drug Store and Soda Fountain a penny would buy a set of paraffin wax false teeth, a licorice pipe, a package of sugar-flavoured powder that you sucked through a straw, or a flat packet of bubble gum with a hockey card inside featuring a photograph of an NHL star. Because soda pop cost a nickel, a good many people made their own – ginger beer, root beer, or birch beer from a package bought at Stewart’s Drug Store.

  Cigarettes were cheap, too, and rendered even cheaper because tobacco companies were offering free gifts to steady customers. If a small boy could find an accommodating sixteen-year-old, he could talk him into buying a five-cent package of Turrets or British Consols, choosing a smoke shop whose owner was just getting by and was prepared to overlook the fact that the purchaser’s chin wasn’t much higher than the counter. Bob and his friends prized the Turrets because each package contained miniature reproductions of playing cards that could be collected to make up poker hands that were good for gifts. Just about everyone he knew collected and traded Turret cards; it was one of the great fads of the thirties.

  Most children in Saskatchewan didn’t grow up in the larger centres, as Bob Thompson did. The majority lived on farms, like Doris Dillabaugh, whose father had two hundred acres at Skull Creek. Her family could not be said to have lived in luxury – they had no electricity, running water, or telephone – but compared to thousands of others they were well off in a single-storey frame farmhouse with four bedrooms. They lit kerosene lamps to read by at night and pumped water from a cistern in the basement for washing and from a well for drinking. In Doris’s words, “We lived in that house for eight years and thought it was great because everyone else lived the same wa
y.”

  They didn’t have a car and there was no such thing as a school bus. Doris rode to the one-room prairie schoolhouse on her own horse, Skunk, and those days were among her happiest memories.

  As was true with the city kids, the fickleness of nature that disheartened so many adults had the opposite effect on farm youngsters. Doris and her friends snared marauding gophers for a bounty of one cent a tail and gazed with fascination on the grasshoppers, which could eat a strip of wheat to its roots in a couple of hours, “stopping when they got to the summer fallow and turning around for another feast.”

  In the summer they made canoes out of pea pods and floated them in the horse trough, or searched through the hopper of the combine for green kernels of wheat that made excellent chewing gum, or hunted for the fruit of the small cacti that grew wild on the prairie, or built a raft and pushed it around a slough with poles. In the winter they skated on a community rink made by flooding a boarded-up square of land near the creek. They dug tunnels in the fifteen-foot drifts or made snow forts. Since the roads were never ploughed, they travelled everywhere by sleigh, their feet kept warm by flatirons, heated on the kitchen stove and wrapped in rags.

  In the farm kitchen, the wood stove burned all day. Doris would never forget the simmering kettle of soup made from buttermilk, brown sugar, and butter. Her mother baked six loaves of bread a day from their own grain, ground and sacked at the elevator. They did all their Christmas shopping through Simpson’s mail-order catalogue, and “when the box arrived it was almost as exciting as Santa’s visit.”

  The family made it through the Depression because they had their own eggs and poultry and could slaughter the occasional pig or cow. Prairie farmers on relief received shipments of Ontario apples and cabbages and Nova Scotia salt cod and herring. The cod, after the salt was soaked out, was served creamed, baked, or fried, but few could abide the odour of the herring, which the small boys used to bait their traplines for weasels and the occasional coyote.

  When Doris grew to womanhood she met and married a city boy from Saskatoon. His name, of course, was Bob Thompson. By the time they had children of their own the Depression was behind them, but those days would never be forgotten.

  “You had to be tough to be a farmer,” Doris would tell her children. “The hours were long, the days were hot, the work was demanding. And it was always a gamble. Grasshoppers, hail, drought, frost and rain at the wrong time were your enemies. You were never sure until the grain was in the elevator.”

  Nevertheless for her, as for her future husband, the Depression years were golden ones. “I am quite sure that a kid growing up in the city had more to do and more places to go than we did on the farm,” she told them. “But I can tell you that I wouldn’t have traded all of your candy stores, your movie houses, your parades or your sports events for my ‘Skunk.’ Unless you’ve owned your own horse as a youngster to ride to school, you’ll never know what you’ve missed.”

  4

  Making headlines

  The newspapers in the Depression occupied a position that they have since lost to television and radio. For most Canadians they were the major source of news. Radio news was sketchy; only a minority could afford a newsmagazine; and the newsreels seemed to be concerned mainly with bathing-beauty contests. But the newspapers told Canadians what was going on in their own country and in the world. They were cheap – never more than a nickel and in some cases only two or three cents. They were complete: a big story, such as a court case or a parliamentary debate, was covered almost verbatim and ran to several columns – sometimes several pages – of remarkably small type. Even the smaller cities boasted two newspapers locked in frantic competition; Vancouver had three, Toronto and Halifax four. They ran to as many as five editions, the front pages changing almost hourly as the news poured in.

  The daily press shaped the conventional wisdom of the times. Behind the “objective” copy that reporters were trained to write were certain inherent assumptions: that the Royal Family was sacrosanct, that there was no substitute for the free enterprise system, that the Christian religion was the best of all possible faiths, that without the work ethic the country would sink into sloth, that the male was the dominant member of the species, and that a woman’s place was in the home. In the last months of the twenties, it was the press that had soothed investors into believing stocks would continue to rise. In the first years of the Depression, it was the press that pretended hard times were a temporary aberration.

  By 1933, the newspapers were presenting their readers with a daily load of gloom. In addition to the regular diet of suicides, kidnappings, bank robberies, and murders that has always been grist to the presses, there were tales that hit closer to home: pay cuts, labour disputes, and hunger marches. Stories of global unrest also dominated the front pages: bank failures in the United States, the rise of fascism in Europe, and the Japanese atrocities in China.

  No wonder, then, that editors yearned for lighter fare. It explains why, in those days, the comic strip was king. The major dailies hid their front pages on the weekend by wrapping their entire editions in the comic section. Rival broadsheets vied in proclaiming that they had more strips than the opposition. “72 COMICS!” the Toronto Telegram trumpeted on its cover – a happier line than the ones that predicted a national railway strike or reported on Adolf Hitler’s accession to power.

  Newspaper readers were ripe for tales of adventure – anything to take their minds off their troubles – and in May they got just that. Once again, like a rocket piercing the murk, a new kind of journalistic presence burst from the front pages, wafting Canadians to faraway places with strange-sounding names, where bizarre rituals and unspeakable practices transported them, if only briefly, from the realities of the times.

  The Toronto Star’s Gordon Sinclair was off once more, this time on a voyage to the south seas – to New Guinea, which he described, with lip-smacking relish, as the “home of the fiercest and most treacherous people living today. An unknown, unexplored, and unmapped jungle hell where bone-crushing savages live as they lived in the stone age with neither clothes nor tools nor laws nor fear. Where wives come by conquest and seizure; where men are slaves and cannibals. Where tribal warfare, black magic and sacrificial rites reap a grim harvest of human skulls.…”

  What newspaper could resist the lure of Sinclair’s heated prose? He had already made his name during a tour of India in 1932, with tales of tom-toms, nautch girls, black scorpions, and vipers. Rival publications in most cities now scrambled to buy syndication rights to the newest Sinclair adventures. The stories, which arrived in Canada two months after he wrote them (there were as yet no Pan American Clippers to speed them across the Pacific), were made to order for the times.

  The Depression made Sinclair a national figure. His gaudy copy was read by millions. The books that he produced from his adventures were phenomenal best-sellers. He peered cockily from the front pages in his jaunty pith helmet and breeches, his broken nose giving his features a slightly battered and therefore exciting look. He arrived at the right time, in the right place, and on the right paper. The Toronto Star, with its legendary expense accounts and its aggressive coverage, had no intention of losing its position as the country’s largest English-speaking daily. Sinclair was given his head.

  Travel to foreign lands was slow, difficult, and expensive. The occasional student was able to work his way to Europe on a cattle boat – Hugh MacLennan, the future novelist, was one – but most people, sunk in the abyss of the Depression, could scarcely scrape up streetcar fare. Movies like Flying Down to Rio and King Kong and popular songs such as “The Isle of Capri” had provided a touch of the exotic in a drab world. But Sinclair provided Escape from the humdrum, day after day.

  “I’ll tell you nothing of trade, commerce or the profound yammerings which go to make up a modern business world,” he wrote, undoubtedly to the relief of his readers. “But I’m going to learn how they stuff those skulls. I’m going to hunt the cuscuss. I�
�m going to sleep among the vampire bats where you have to wear your shoes to save your blood. I’ll give you the low down on slavery and the weird rites of the longhouse. I hope to get where few whites have been before.…”

  That must have been a welcome contrast to a typically gloomy news story that appeared that same day from Quebec City: “Evicted from his home because he was unable to pay rent, Arthur Drouin, 80, was obliged to live in a dilapidated shed with his sick wife until last night because he could not get near district relief officers to plead his case. It took physical injury to have his case brought to the attention of civic officials, the injuries coming as a result of being trampled on by a crowd of younger men when he tried to get near the relief office in city hall.”

  When front-page headlines reported on the destitution and near starvation of settlers sent to Northern Ontario, Sinclair enthralled his readers with a tale of “two million gaudy butterflies … drowned in the Pacific … as a monsoon boomed seaward from Papua and swept them helplessly into an enraged ocean.”

  On May 9, the Star’s readers could wallow in a whole series of disturbing headlines: “DREAD OF BEING DEPORTED DRIVES LAD ACROSS CANADA”; “GANDHI GROWS WEAK IN 2nd DAY OF FAST”; “TWO EXECUTED BY AXE IN PRUSSIA”; “KIDNAP THREATS BRING YOUTH, 19, FOUR YEAR TERM”; “COMPROMISE FAILED UPON DISARMAMENT.” But no Depression headline could compete with the ones that Sinclair was making: