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It was a kid’s way to cope with the Great Depression
By PROF. GORDON GREB
of TheColumnists.com
Movies are fairy
tales. Hollywood brings them to life on the screen. Looking back
on the l930s, I think it was one of the ways we managed to escape
the harsh reality of those Hard Times.
As those years of poverty, insecurity and
the constant threat of hunger left such a lasting impression
on me, I feel compelled to write a few things about how it looked
to children growing up then in Oakland, California and what we
did to survive.
Maybe it’s for my own children and grandchildren. I’m
hoping they will want to know. It’s one of the sources of
my own empathy for the plight of other people today. Yes, there
were many human beings in other parts of the world worse off
than us. But few of us knew anything about that at the time.
As school children in the Great Depression, 5-12 years old, what
did we know?
The movie theater was a wonderful escape into a fantasy world
and we flocked there at every opportunity to share Hollywood’s
dreams. A dime got us into what seemed like a great Rajah’s
Palace. Once we entered its golden doors, we felt our shoes sink
into its soft carpets and moved bug-eyed through the darkness
to find our seats.
What that 10-cents bought us each Saturday afternoon was a potpourri
of treats: a fast-action main feature (usually a cowboy film),
a brief look at the world in a Fox Movietone newsreel, a laugh-provoking
animated cartoon (like Krazy Kat), an exciting chapter of an
adventure serial (in which the hero had to find the “Secret
Boss” who had kidnapped the farmer’s daughter), and
a chance to go home with a prize if ours was the lucky ticket
number drawn during the raffle at intermission.
Going to the movies is probably my earliest and fondest memory.
After five days of boring school work, we kids begged our parents
for the money to go and we sat there enthralled by what we saw
flashed before our eyes during three happy hours spent staring
at the silver screen.
Because my father, too, was fascinated by the cinema (he often called them “the flickers), he was the person most responsible for exposing an impressive little boy like me to this strong and unanticipated influence. After all I was barely five years old. Often, after work in the l920s, my Dad took me along to our neighborhood Capitol Theater while Mom stayed home to take of Wallace, my baby brother.
I’d run to get in Pop’s car because I loved moving
pictures as much as he did. Silent Hollywood films captivated
us more than any tale of adventure we’d read in history.
A loud piano or organ got us into the right moods. I was fascinated
by the antics of Charlie Chaplin in “The Gold Rush”
thanks to the classical interpretations given his every move
by a creative artist at the keyboard.
During the silent era you held your breath
as American soldier John Gilbert kissed his French sweetheart,
Renee Adoree, goodbye as his unit pulled out of her town in “The
Big Parade” and swashbuckling Douglas Fairbanks fought off
all enemies doing amazing stunts in “Robin Hood” and
“The Thief of Baghdad.”
Hollywood taught everyone, especially us kids, that to be a real
man you always had to fight for the underdog. This theme dominated
westerns starring cowboys like Bronco Billy Anderson, William
S. Hart, Tom Mix, Hoot Gibson, Ken Maynard and Buck Jones. That’s
when I saw lots of knockdown, drag-out fighting in saloon brawls,
which had the effect of engraining the lesson into my little
head that you always had to fight for your rights.
According to my mother, before I was old enough for kindergarten,
I stood on the front porch of our home and asked the kids on
the way to school, “Do you want to fight?”
Fortunately none of them accepted my challenge,
choosing to pass me by, perhaps wondering what was wrong with
that crazy little kid. By the time I learned that tough talk
isn’t the only way to win a fight, I had been in too many
of them.
Years later I learned there could be other ways when Pop was
speeding down Foothill Boulevard in our Graham Page automobile.
Seated beside my dad in the front seat, I easily observed how
the right personality and language can resolve an issue peacefully
as Pop talked his way out of a traffic ticket. He could be like
an Irishman who had kissed the Blarney Stone when he wanted to.
And he could disarm an opponent with persuasion as easily as
with threats of open violence.
Believing that I had to be strong, brave, and ready to do battle
for what was right got me several black eyes and bloody noses.
Half the time I took on kids older, bigger and stronger than
I because the cause seemed right. As a short, skinny kid in need
of glasses for poor eyesight, I ought not have been fighting
at all. One time 10-year old Ray Hutchinson caught me going home
on my roller skates, which must have been funny to watch, because
he easily knocked me down every time I got up. But no matter
which one of us boys won these fist fights, we’d soon forget
about them and be friends again.
The most serious incident in my pugilistic career, however, came
during my last term at Whittier Grammar School. I began arguing
with classmate Clarence Martin over a baseball game at recess,
when he grabbed the bat and shoved me aside, insisting it was
his turn at the plate. The school bell rang, we continued arguing
on our way into the building, and finally came to blows. A male
classroom teacher caught both of us scrapping like a couple of
wildcats in the hallway, grabbed us by our ears, and hauled us
into the principal’s office. Unable to figure out which
of us had started the skirmish, the school’s chief administrator
applied what seemed the most appropriate action and punished
us both.
Marching us into his office individually, he turned each of us
over his knee, and gave our bottoms a good whacking with a leather
strap. The humility was worse than the pain. Also I feared what
would come next. After the principal described my misbehavior
to my parents, I dreaded what my own dad would do to punish me
further and was surprised when he let me go with a stern warning
to think twice before letting it happen again.
Standing by little kids--making sure they weren’t picked upon by the older boys--got me into plenty of scraps as it was the culture I knew growing up during the Great Depression. Kids were imitating what happened to their elders. We were not sheltered from current events, getting dramatic views of events in movie newsreels, and by what adults talked about from the newspapers.
During the summer of l934, all the big
papers printed stories and photos of the police beating up men
on the streets of San Francisco during a great General Strike.
We kids saw it, heard talk about it, and knew that sometimes
using your fists to defend yourself was the right thing to do.
Since most of us didn’t understand the reasons for our poverty
we tried to adapt as best we could. According to Hollywood’s
version of the “Dead End Kids,” we kids on 64th Avenue
should have turned to anti-social behavior by breaking the law.
But as far as I can remember, nobody I knew engaged in shoplifting,
stealing or thievery, which would have gotten them involved with
the police.
With so many parents out of work--one out of four families across
America--it was easy to figure out who were hardest hit. You’d
know by how many of your school pals were scrambling for part-time
jobs, and accepting what was offered no matter how little it
paid. If you could face taking “no” for the answer
or having doors slammed in your face, you’d walk for hours
going house to house, offering to cut lawns, sell magazines,
or run errands for a few nickels or dimes.
Since Mars, Snickers and Milky Way candy bars cost a nickel,
kids' magazines a dime, and a good lunch 25-cents, we had no
money to buy any of this stuff unless we earned it. Some of our
sales pitches worked, others didn’t. Trying to sell old
magazines, bags of marbles, or windup toys to passersby from
a wagon was one of my bright entrepreneurial ideas, but it merely
gave me a chance to watch the world go by without making a single
sale.
The sound that buoyed our hopes on 64th avenue anytime in the
early l930s was hearing--“any rags, bottles, sacks”--sung
out by an old Italian seated on a horse-drawn wagon who was urging
his animal down the street. Since my mother saved everything,
saying, “We may have use for this someday,” our storage
bins were always full of stuff, and she welcomed the ragman as
a rare opportunity to turn it into money right at our doorstep.
So, I’d run out in the street to stop
the wagon, fetch my Mom, and watch how she would sell nearly
everything in the nooks and crannies of the garage--old gunnysacks,
empty bottles, yellowed newspapers and magazines, rusty tools,
broken clocks and old chunks of iron. We didn’t call it
recycling in those days but that’s what it was.
Sometimes, however, my proud and self-reliant family was forced
to sell what we really loved out of sheer necessity. I first
began to notice this happening when things began disappearing
from our house. For example, we had a lovely upright player piano
on which I was trying to learn how to play. My fondest memory
is that of going to our piano keyboard trying to compose a new
song and the disappointment when it didn’t turn out right.
With quiet care, my mother listened to my new composition and
said, “Gordon, doesn’t that sound a lot like 'Mary
Had A Little Lamb?'” I was so frustrated by this discovery
that I ran from the room, blurting out, “I think they’ve
used up all the notes." Everyone laughed. Not me. I had
wanted to become another Irving Berlin and make my fortune on
Broadway.
Owning a piano was quite common in the old days. People knew
how to entertain themselves and I saw pianos in nearly all the
homes we visited when I was growing up in Oakland in the early
l930s. Our solid oak upright instrument was a player piano and
it was there when Pop rehearsed with his hillbilly band for some
of his stage appearances. When my brother and I wanted to make
our own music, we would insert the piano roll containing the
song we wanted. It was easy because the manufacturer, the Aeolian
Company, had made the “pianola” simple to operate.
All a person had to do was select one of the songs on a roll,
insert it into the piano slot, and start pumping the foot pedal
to activate the keyboard and hear the music.
One day, however, I came home from school and saw that our lovely
player piano was gone. It not being there was a terrible shock.
All that was left was a huge empty space in the corner of our
living room. And it was a revelation because it was the beginning
of my introduction to the hardships of the Great Depression.
I knew that something was going terribly wrong when my folks had to sell valuable keepsakes and possessions to raise money to live on--the epitome being reached when my father had to pawn his expensive, gold railroad watch. As a railway man, he couldn’t run a locomotive engine without one. But on being “laid off” months ago by the Southern Pacific Company without an immediate hope of going back soon, it was the only way my Dad knew how to put food on the table to feed his family under the circumstances.
We should have been dispirited but never
were. My parents had an innate spirit to stand firm and never
give up. Where they got this deep, inner strength is another
story but the fact that we children learned it, too, probably
explains why meeting the Great Depression head-on this way enabled
us to prevail over an even greater challenge in World War II.
We Americans call it “a stiff backbone” and the English,
“a stiff upper lip.”
Hollywood pictures helped because they were happy, optimistic
and hopeful. Thanks to these movies we were economically down
but psychologically upbeat. Who cared if the movies showed Americans
being rich and living in a grand style on the screen. It was
just what we needed. We wanted Jimmy Cagney to bounce back and
succeed in producing his spectacular shows in “Footlight
Parade” (l933) and Warner Baxter on “42nd Street”
(1933). Each left you singing and dancing as you left the theater.
So did those cheerful musicals with Busby Berkeley choreography.
Cheerfulness and good fun were in every picture starring Fred
Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Dick Powell and Joan Blondell, and
William Powell and Myrna Loy. The theme of Old Man Depression
had to wait till “Grapes of Wrath” (1940) and then
it was time for Hollywood to help win World War II.
It’s been suggested that seeing Charlie Chaplin’s “The
Gold Rush” (l925) left a lasting impression on me, because
his Little Tramp survived near starvation and it meant my family
would, too. I’m amazed this idea came from someone much
younger who never lived through the Great Depression himself.
Because it’s true, I believe there’s a good chance
that through reading and watching old Turner Classic movies the
same truths will be revealed to generations yet to come.
That Charlie Chaplin had to cook and eat his shoe to keep from
starvation and that my family never came close to doing the same
thing gave me much needed hope that when times got tough we’d
somehow survive.
And with movie theaters playing films like Bing Crosby’s joyful “Going Hollywood” (l933) and all the other upbeat pictures of the time, it’s no wonder more and more of us were soon singing, “Happy Days Are Here Again.”
©2007 by Gordon Greb. This column first posted June 28, 2007.
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