Daily Excerpt: Forget the Goal, The Journey Counts (Stites) - Absorbing the Twenties (2)
Excerpt from Forget the Goal, the Journey Counts (Stites)
Absorbing the ‘20s! (2)
Around the middle of the 1920s some head-in-the-clouds guy (that’s what Dad called him) put out the slogan “Every Day in Every Way I am Getting Better and Better,” and for a number of years it seemed the whole country stood in front of the bathroom mirror every morning and repeated that saying over and over. Everybody got better and better, and so did the country until they all got so much better that on Tuesday, October 29th in 1929, they all collapsed with being so great. They called it Black Tuesday because a lot of rich people lost a lot of money. Not enough to make the rich people real poor, of course, just poor enough to make them cancel the par ties they had lined up through to New Year’s. But it made the middle-class folks really bad off and the poor people just about done in.
There are few people around who remember when it seemed that almost everybody in the country was poor. It’s hard now to get my mind around the fact that almost everybody I knew had no money, sometimes not even to buy food, but it was real then. It was so real that now they call it great: The Great Depression. The history writers don’t say it that way, but everybody who lived then thought that Hard Times were brought about by rich people. They said the “Great D” happened because of the rich wanting to get richer and not worrying about if things were also getting better for the average Joe out there.
The banks had a run on what they had always considered their money, the stock market went absolutely blooey, and the going–to-be-rich people who went broke jumped out of windows. My father lost his job the day after that Tuesday when he drove to his office in New York and was told that the owner of the company that made wire recorders had shot himself in the head. My father was the General Man ager and had nothing to general-manage because the company never did open up again.
Dad looked around for work in Plainfield and got a job as Manager of the Mack Truck plant because the previous manager had a “… complete and total breakdown” the newspaper wrote, due to having lost all his money in the stock market on that Tuesday. I guess he didn’t invest in Mack Trucks. My father had that job for more than a year until even that solid symbol of manufacturing (Mack was the best truck going then) had to shut down because there were no buyers. The nation slipped into the Great Depression slick as a pig sliding down a greased slaughter chute. Herbert Hoover got the blame because he raised interest rates or something. Dad said that Hoover was a rich Republican who didn’t care a whit about the average man.
I will say for my father: Every single day for the more than two years he was out of work my dad got up, showered and shaved, dressed in suit, white shirt and tie, had a quick breakfast, and got in our Chevrolet Coupe, and drove to New York City to look for a job. He had a degree in mechanical engineering from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, so he had a leg up on most men. In those days, college men weren’t a dime-a-dozen as they were to become later.
Dad always recited the “getting better and better” thing as he shaved. As an eight-year-old, I wondered why he wanted to get better and better in a world that was getting worse and worse all the time. I thought he should have let the whole thing alone and taken his chances. I remember leaning against the tub watching in awe as he slipped the leather strop through his double-edge safety razor, and heard the ssslick, ssslick, ssslick as he passed the razor up and down, the razor flipping over with a slap at the end of each stroke, honing the edges to a keenness that would slice a hair down the middle. He would swirl the badger-hair shaving brush (only the best for my dad) smartly in the soap dish, and then lather up, the hot water making him give out an “Ah!” as he rinsed the razor after each stroke. Double-edge razors were keen, but I always regretted his giving up the straight razor in favor of modern technology. I thought it took a special touch to be able to strop a straight razor to the edge of perfection, making a rapid sshhh, sshhh, sshhh as he sharpened the blade on the leather. I liked to see him reach around to his left side, draw the razor slowly down his cheek, then flick off the soap. It was very artistic with his little finger stuck out.
In the beginning of the depression, we weren’t really poor. Looking back on it, I guess we were part of the solid middle class when the stock market crash came, Dad being an engineer and all. But, by 1932 we started feeling the pinch, and Mother started cutting back on everything. My brothers and I didn’t notice it for a year or more until it got really bad. Then we heard Dad and Mom saying things like “… rear ranging the mortgage to get a breather,” and then a few months later, “… six month’s hold on the payments …,” and finally “… there is nothing in the bank.” My brother George and I sat at the top of the stairs listening in as Dad and Mother talked in the living room. Mom was crying, and Dad was trying to be patient, but I think he was really angry. Dad had been out of work for a long time by then, and Mother went a little nuts and tried to run away. Dad had to drive to the Newark bus station in the middle of the night to pick her up. I guess that they hadn’t saved up much figuring that everything would go along great forever.
We had a nice three-bedroom, one-bath, two-story house on a corner lot on the outskirts of Plainfield. The back yard sloped down to the two-car garage with a rock garden on one side and a flower garden on the other. But the garage was never used for the car. It was really Dad’s workshop, him being an engineer and all. He had a huge workbench with vices and all kinds of tools hanging all over on nails in the wall. There was a canoe lying across the whole garage floor with a big aluminum pontoon sticking out on one side. Dad had invented a canoe with a pontoon so you could add a sail and not tip over. We have pictures of him ocean sailing off Atlantic City, going like the whiz, the pontoon sticking up out of the water on one side, and a huge sail billowing out from a great big wood mast fastened to the front. The canoe hardly leaned over at all! But nobody wanted to invest in tip-less canoe manufacturing, so that invention died a rapid death. We would drive down to Atlantic City on a weekend every now and then and watch Dad sailing his canoe in the ocean. We never once got to sail with him. Mother said it was too dangerous.
Dad was a real inventor. He was always tinkering with some design. Years later, after President Roosevelt started things up again, Dad invented a machine that twisted steel rods that were put in concrete to strengthen it. He had figured out that twisting them made them stronger. I remember Mom, Bud, George and I standing in the front of a crowd of people next to the mayor of New York City and Mr. John D. Rockefeller (the rich man who gave away dimes) because Dad’s twisted steel rods were going to be used in one of the huge buildings in Rockefeller Center and, as the inventor, he was front row center. But we never got rich. Dad always said the company lawyers made sure he got the “short end of the stick,” whatever that meant. Later on, he invented an “upside down table” where you place your feet in a clamp and then you swung upside down. Dad did it every day of his life from 1950 on and never did get sick. Not even a cold. He didn’t get a patent on it though—a dumb lawyer told him he couldn’t—so he just made them for friends. Many decades later some man did patent the design of a frame that would let you hang upside down and sold them up the wazoo.
Dad’s inventing streak didn’t stop with mechanical things, though. Dad was an idea man. He was always thinking and questioning, always figuring something could be better. Always. It also extended to stuff he heard or read about. One night he came home with a bulging sack, and he dropped it onto the kitchen floor. He wouldn’t talk about it until after dinner. Finally, we gathered around as he opened the sack, took a spoon, and dipped out a spoonful of black granules. “Canary roughage!” Dad pro claimed. It was plain black coal, crushed down to grainy, black sand. “And we can eat it, too. It’s clean!” He turned to me, and said “Al, sprinkle a little over your oatmeal tomorrow morning, and it will give you the same roughage as a head of lettuce!”
I wasn’t supposed to swear, but that time I whispered to George, “Hot damn, we get to eat coal.”
I figured Dad had gotten to thinking about all the wasted coal dust in the country and what could be done about it. He had grown up in the coal mine region of Pennsylvania where my grandfather Stites was the doctor in a little mining town called Pottsville; his main practice was treating injured minors. From what I had heard as a kid, mining was a pretty dangerous occupation. I guess Dad had been carrying that coal dust idea around in his head for twenty years and finally figured out what could be done about it.
On Saturday morning, we all went downtown to a pet store in Plainfield, and Dad bought two canaries. Mother protested that buying one would give him the same results, but Dad wouldn’t trust such an important nutritional trial to just one bird. Of course, he had to get a big cage, the right bird seed, and the little water cups that latch on to the side of the cage. The pet store man insisted that the birds needed rock-hard roughage, also, but Dad told the man he had another kind of roughage. Well, one bird died two days later, and the second bird died by the end of the week. Dad always maintained that the man sold him sick birds. Then later he said that maybe they were the “canaries in the coal mine” and told us we didn’t have to eat any more coal. That sack of good, clean coal dust sat in the basement for years.
As sons mostly do, we looked up to our father as being the best in the world. He was tough, though, growing up in the 1890’s when men were strong and sentiment was for women only. In all my life, I never kissed my dad; didn’t hug him, either, because he would not permit it. He always stuck out his hand, and we shook. We learned never to cry because “men don’t cry.” Never, no matter what! Whenever we got hurt, Dad would always say, “Be a man.” Dad being who he was, there was another weird thing in our lives in those wonderful days of the ‘30s. It was living through our sulphur period. Dad had read somewhere that sulphur was an absolutely splendid tonic for warding off sickness, diseases, and maladies of every conceivable kind. This was around 1932 when the Great D had taken a hard hold on the whole country. Dad didn’t have a job yet and had read some medical news that said sulphur would ward off anything short of a stroke. He reasoned that since we didn’t have any money we had better stay healthy, and the yellow smelly liquid didn’t cost hardly anything! Dad had found a chemical plant in Jersey City that sold a sulphur mixture in quart bottles for almost nothing, seeing as how no one else wanted it at the time. One evening he parked the car on the side of the house, opened up the trunk, and lifted out a case of 12 bottles of a sloshing yellow liquid.
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