Comfort to Spare (VIII)

Both my parents could tell Depression stories. They were kids in the 1930s, but they remember the immediacy of the suffering from kitchen-table stories. Through the years I've referenced those stories occasionally because they are my own links to the difficulties of the era. Those stories have made the Depression something more than what's in the textbook; they feature my family.

Oddly enough, those stories happened across the street from each other. My mother grew up downtown Oostburg, where her parents' house and her father's business stood at the heart of the community.  Just across the street and a few hundred feet east stood the old Christian Reformed Church, a church with two front stairways. The parsonage right next door was where my dad spent his teenage years after Grandpa Schaap accepted Oostburg's call in the early thirties. 

When Dad would talk about the Depression, it was always about hoboes. He claimed that his mother's largesse used to draw crowds. Back then, men would hop trains that ran a half block away, but somehow those men would know which houses were most beneficent. My Grandma Schaap, Dad said, couldn't say no to a hungry man or woman, which meant that their place, the church parsonage, right downtown, drew vagrants with a stubborn consistency, or so it seemed to him.

He used to say that in the worst of times back then, there was no money, which meant for Grandpa Schaap, the Reverend, there was no salary. The Schaaps were a large family, although some older kids were already out of the house. Sometimes, Dad claimed, he'd go to the door and find a box of vegetables or even meat. Farmers, and there were many in the congregation, "paid" the preacher in good food from their gardens. That foodstuff salary, he didn't need to say, was wonderful.  

Mom's Depression story was tougher. She said she remembered, not fondly, her dad crying at supper some nights because there simply wasn't any money, nor was there much food. Living as they were right just across the street, downtown, they had no garden out back, and his penniless customers, those same farmers who dropped off potatoes across the street at the parsonage, needed their horses shod and their plowshares sharpened if, in fact, they were going to get in a crop. If Grandpa Dirkse were to turn them down, Mom would say, those farmers would go belly-up. For the community's sake, Grandpa had to work, which meant non-existent cash flow. There was no money. What Mom remembered best is her dad sitting there at the table with, head in his hands, crying. 

Both stories have become the means by which I understand American history. My grandparents' suffering during the Thirties paled when contrasted with the Okies who, lean and beaten, people the photographs of Dorthea Lange. My grandparents made it, but neither of my parents ever forgot tough times in downtown Oostburg.

Grandpa Dirkse crying at the supper table is an image I would love to pass along to my children, because I think it's healthy for them to have a sense themselves of how their people, their own great-grandparents lived through the troubled times of what will soon be a century ago. 

But Grandpa Dirkse's story also says something about him because while it's safe to assume that other local businessmen found themselves buried deeply in the hard times of the 30s, not all of them sat down to a bowl of pea soup and cried in front of their kids. Grandpa Dirkse did, but then, by all accounts, Grandpa Dirkse cried more often than most people do. He was, by all accounts, decidedly delicate emotionally. Dad didn't remember supper-time tears.

The Reverend John Piersma, who, with his wife, gave Comfort to Spare to my grandparents a month or so after Aunt Gertie's accident and death, told me, years ago, that when Grandpa Dirkse died in 1954, he said to Gordie Veldboom, a pillar in the community who may not have been as pious as my grandfather, that they should have believed Grandpa when he told them how sick he was. What Piersma told me was meant as a joke. He must have assumed--and he wasn't wrong--that I knew Grandpa Dirkse may have been more than a little neurotic.

Oostburg, Wisconsin, was, back then, a very small town--population no more than a few hundred--and almost exclusively Dutch-American, which is to say Dutch Reformed or Dutch Calvinist. Not all Dutch Calvinists are created equal, of course; but the temperament Grandpa Dirkse may have exhibited found its source in a peculiar emotional faith that was, back then, very much a part of the Dutch Calvinist ethos many immigrants packed with them when they the Netherlands and came to America. 

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More tomorrow.