Lumpy Dick
The dictionary gives this definition of a depression: A severe decline in business, accompanied by increasing unemployment, falling prices, etc. And so on and so on and on and on.
Being born in 1932 in the midst of the greatest depression this country has ever had was not so bad, because everyone else was in the same boat and if there was no depression of love in a home, a child did not know there was a depression. It's the way things were. But looking back I do have a few memories to pass on.
LUMPY DICK
Lumpy Dick
I will only pass on the recipe for Lumpy Dick if you promise never, never to feed it to your children, unless of course there is another depression. First you have to have a cow to milk. Then you fill a sauce pan with milk and while it is heating stir in flour until it is thick and lumpy. Serve this with additional milk and a little sugar, if you have any.
This is best eaten when your father is away from home and your mother is desperate for something to feed the family.
HONEYMOON COTTAGE
[Nope. Not Bill's house. This one is probably much fancier. But it was the only picture I could find.]
If to a child the depression was matter of fact, to grownups it was a seemingly hopeless, endless agonizing time. The following is a quote from my father's personal life story.
"Later in the winter, (Jan 1930) Ordell and I were married. We lived with my folks until after June was born. This was depression time. The crops were poor and worthless. There was no work to be found. When winter came, I went down to the ice plant at Great Falls and got a few days of work. I earned $75.00 and came home and bought a little house about three miles from home for $45.00 and the boys helped me move it home. All of the inside partitions had been stolen, so I went out to some other little old homestead houses scattered around the flats, and pilfered enough material to put in a ceiling and partitions to make a two room house. Ordell and I moved in. We were able to scrounge up enough furniture from our folks and her folks so that we had a bed, a table and a stove and four chairs, and a little old wooden rocking chair. All of the furniture was broken down, so I had to rebuild it. I was real proud of it. Della was born there." (from my father's memories)
SQUARE BUTTE AND RATTLESNAKES
Montana rattlesnake
My first recollections, as a child, begin on the Geibel place. Paul Geibel was my father's uncle and he rented him this waterless, dry, treeless place on the east side of Square Butte. We were close enough to the Butte to be in its shadow when evening fell. Ours was the last house on the road from Sun River to Cascade before the land became too broken with coulees and alkali to farm, fit only for coyotes, rattlesnakes, and wild horses.
Square Butte was, as it's name suggests, a square butte of considerable size. Actually it was rectangle, the long sides running north and south. It was ringed at the top with a wall of rock many feet high. The only access to the flat top was at the southern end, where there was a foot trail used at times by sheepherders, or to climb step by step through the rock cliffs. The top contained many acres with fine grass, but there was no water, and so it was virtually useless.
The one thing that Square Butte produced in abundance was rattlesnakes. The high cliffs provided a wonderful habitat for them, with little in nature to harm or bother them. Rattlesnake heaven. Of course, they meandered down off the butte in search of food and whatever makes a snake happy.
If the snakes were happy, the farmers who lived below the butte were not happy to have their company. Especially young mothers with young children to protect. In the spring, when the snakes were coming out of hibernation, the men in the community would go up on the butte for a snake hunt. The idea was to kill the snakes before they laid their eggs.
When my dad went out to work in the mornings, he would carefully look over all the farm machinery to make sure a snake had not found a resting place there.
My mother became very adept at killing snakes, her favorite tool being a shovel, which she kept handy by the house. Out on the tractor one day, and encountering a big snake she threw every tool in the tool box and finally killed it with a wrench.. She said she had to learn to kill snakes to protect her children.
We had a police type dog named Dudgeon who followed us children wherever we went. He set up a howling and barking that you would not forget if we chanced upon a snake. Our constant admonition when we were outside was, "Watch out for snakes!". Dudgeon was a great relief to my mother.
One day my sisters and I and some cousins were playing house in the granary. Dudgeon started barking and putting up an awful fuss. Sure enough, right outside the only door of the granary lay a huge rattlesnake coiled up and ready to strike. Scream as we might, we were held prisoners of the snake for we could not jump over the monster nor go round it to get out of the granary.
My mother was in the house with her head in the wash basin shampooing her hair when she heard Dudgeon barking. Her first thought was of her children and she came flying out of the house with soap streaming behind her. By the time she got her shovel and got to the granary, she saw only the tail of the snake as it crawled underneath the granary. She rescued her children but was vigilant all day for that snake could reappear at any time and any place.
Dudgeon would not leave his post by the granary and waited until late in the afternoon for the snake to emerge from its cool sanctuary. Unable to kill the rattler himself, he gave his usual howling, barking signal to bring my mother on the run with shovel in hand, where she made short work of the nasty reptile. She was crying as she entered the house and again we heard, "You have got to watch out for snakes. Keep one eye on the ground all the time. And always take
Another time we were playing in the corral when a snake passed through. Betty was up on the pole fence and jumped over the snake on her way to the house. We were home with our Dad, and I will never forget how carefully he examined her tiny legs, looking for signs of snakebite.
My cousin, Maxine called us outside one day to look at the cute little worm she had found. It was a baby rattlesnake as deadly as its parents.
There was a dirt cellar under our house. To get into it you had to go outside and pull up a cellar door that covered the dirt steps down into the cellar. I was told to go get an onion out of a box in the cellar. I pulled up the cellar door, went down the dirt steps, put my hand in the onion box and froze. In a hole in the wall directly above the box, I could see the head of a rattlesnake protruding and hissing at me. It was not more than six inches from my hand. I wasn't froze for long but went screaming for help.
As an older child, on the Hockersmith place, I was helping to shock bundles of oats. As I picked up a bundle, I found myself staring into the face of a snake coiled beneath it, again just inches away. Fortunately, none of us were ever bitten, though my dad came home with venom on his boot. Twenty-six snakes were killed on our farm one year. I have never killed a rattler. We were forbidden to try, but it became our duty, when we were out playing, if we chanced upon a snake, to have one of us stay and watch the snake while the others ran and got someone to kill it.
That is the way it was and you lived with it. So was the depression. You made do with what you had and were ever so excited and grateful when a box of old clothes came in the mail or a grandparent brought a special treat. Or upon riding to town with your dad, to haul a load of drinking water, he found a penny in his pocket for a piece of candy.
My mother became the best seamstress in the whole world. Relatives, or relatives of relatives, on hearing our plight would send us their old clothes, from which my mother kept us in high style. I never had a "boughten" dress until I was in high school.
My dad did odd jobs, sometimes going off to work on President Roosevelt's projects, calculated to get the country going again.
The thing, that I learned most from the depression was that money cannot buy happiness.
Then came along the second world war looming on the horizon. We moved to Great Falls as I was about to start the sixth grade.
The war was on!