His uncle had offered him 160 acres.
When he left Canada in 1930, he thought he was too young for settling down and
farming. There would be time to farm. After four years on the road he thought
maybe that time was coming. He arrived in the United States in 1930. Check
things out he thought, then get a job, save some money, go back and buy land.
Now his prospects for a farm seemed as remote as his Ukrainian past.
With twenty-five years and thousands
of miles behind him, he sat broke in Milwaukee, hoping to clean someone's
basement.
Things weren't so bad. He had been
long tempered by hard times. He claimed he had always been had been lucky. He
had gotten out of the Ukraine. No one was getting anymore. Since early 1929,
Russia's borders were closed. He thought of his mother, his stepfather and
brother who remained in the Ukrainian. He should write more often. He wished he
could send money more often.
No, things weren't really bad, not
like the Ukraine. Letters told him of honest hard times. They burned his uncle Emil’s
farm. The event so shocked his grandfather that the 91 year old man succumbed
to either a heart attack or stroke and died. They sent Emil up to Siberia,
where there wasn't much food. He died in the cold. They had taken his mother’s
farm too. At least his mother and Sam were getting by.
Thinking of Russia in 1920, after
running from starvation, not even a great depression seemed too great.
Lockwood, Drake and Nokomis: Three
Saskatchewan towns strung out along railroad branch line from Regina to
Saskatoon, like rosary beads along the Canadian Prairie, this place was home,
but it would wait.
Though born in the Ukraine, Gus’s
arrival to Saskatchewan was a homecoming. His uncle Reinhold had taken a
Canadian homestead in 1911. His uncle Dave and his grandfather had joined
Reinhold in 1927. Gus followed later that year, and was welcomed by relatives
and friends. There had been talk of things getting bad in the Ukraine. Canada
seemed like a promised land. After traveling half way around the world, Gus
felt right at home. Lockwood, Drake and Nokomis might well have been farm towns
spread along a branch line from Zhitomir to Kiev. This piece of the Canadian
prairie was peopled with immigrants out of the Ukraine, a mixture of ethnic
Germans and Ukrainians. There the similarity ends.
Rather than twenty or forty acres and
a team of horses, Reinhold farmed a section and a half, a fairly big farm at
the time. He had as many a thirty horses; four teams with four or six animals,
a pair for transportation and a few young ones. In only a few years, Reinhold
had become a man of almost inconceivable wealth.
The industrial age was making its way
to the Canadian farms. In 1927, big steam tractors were starting to appear. The
farmers who owned them went from farm to farm during harvest. The tractors ran
until almost Christmas. Still, much of the work was done by hand.
Unlike the Ukraine, where people were
regaining lost ground from war, revolution and famine, then only to get slapped
down again by collectivization and Holodamor, Canada was a promised land.
Gus, instead, saw sparkling future. He
had come home. His mother, stepfather, brother, half-brother and half-sister were
ones left behind in a foreign land.
His plans soon included a car and a
farm. He would work and save toward that end. But first there was a new
continent to check out.
Over the years he went back again and
again. Almost fifty years later, the seventy-nine year old returned
Saskatchewan. Again, Gus thought of the place as home. He didn’t think of
retirement communities in Arizona or Florida. It's always Canada.
"Drake is more of a retirement community
now," Gus said and continued. "The whole community is mostly retired
people. I was tempted to go back. There were at least ten people there who I
knew when I was young. I came across with about three of them. Some had come the year before. Two of the
fellows came later. They were my buddies from the old country. Another four or
five came from the same part of the Ukraine.
"Once a month they have a dinner
for all those who've had a birthday. Since Olga just had a birthday, we were
invited.
"They have a big hall, with pool tables
and bowling. There is always someone there. It opens at 8am. You can go there
and have your coffee. You find people there all day long. I really liked
that."
As a practical matter, a retired
fellow is better off in Canada. Better health care, he said, and you can live
cheaper too.
Lockwood, Saskatchewan, remained in
his mind a 'promised land.'
When he arrived in Canada he said: "From
Quebec to Winnipeg took about two days. In Winnipeg I had to borrow five
dollars from a friend to get to Lockwood. Winnipeg to Saskatchewan took another
day. The train went to Regina. From
there, a branch line went to Nokomis, Lockwood and Drake, then on to Saskatoon.
Most of the towns were built along the on the rail line. Highway twenty goes
through there now."
Lockwood was a farming town with two
general stores, a livery, a post office, a hotel and two churches. Not unlike
Sorochen and with the exception of two Englishmen, it was a settlement of
Germans and Ukrainians. Gus stayed with his uncle Reinhold for about a week.
His grandfather, his uncle Dave and another cousin were on Reinhold's farm.
Reinhold didn't need more help so he set Gus up with a job on a railroad line
crew.
The section gang was a mixture of
Ukrainians and Germans.
"I didn't need to speak English
to get along with them," Gus recalled.
The job lasted about six weeks. The whole gang was laid off and Gus went
to work on a farm in Nokomis. In the fall he went to help Reinhold with the
harvest and spent the winter there.
"In the winter we didn't do
anything. We just did chores and didn't earn any money. We read, played cards
and musical instruments. I played my violin. We all stayed in the house. It was
a big house, with five bedrooms upstairs and one down.
"In the spring I went to the next
town, Drake. It was ten miles north. I worked for Zacharias Bartel. His wife
had passed away and he remarried, went on a honeymoon to California.
Zacharias Bartel had a brother-in-Law,
who arrived from Chicago with news of plentiful and good paying jobs. He had
been working as a truck driver and making good money. He unfortunately had an
accident. He hit a child. Before a scheduled court appearance he returned to
Canada. Because he was illegally in the United States, he feared extradition.
Though German, he had been born in Poland and would have been sent back to
Poland.
Bartel’s brother-in-law talked Gus
into going with him to the United States. This time legally. The thought it was
much easier to make money there. They both applied for immigration documents in
January, 1930. News of the October 29, 1929, “Black Tuesday” stock market crash
wasn’t on their radar.
Because Gus was from Russia, he got
his almost immediately. The Russian border was closed. He was accepted under
the Russian quota. At the time immigration visas were highly restricted and
awarded to various nationalities based on existing ethnic mix in the United
States
Bartel, on the other hand, was born in
Poland and the United States was awash in Polish immigrants. He would have to
wait until June for documentation. In the meantime he died.
"Never came over. He was twenty-five
or twenty-six, just got sick and died. Since I had to get out of Canada by May
31, I thought I would visit my aunts. I had one in Kentucky and one in
California. I thought if I couldn't find a job, I would go back to
Canada."
So on May 28th, Gus crossed the
boarder into the United States. Though he didn't speak English, and unknown to
him The Great Depression was picking up steam, he crossed with thoughts of good
paying jobs. In 1929, 40% of the world's manufactured goods were produced in
the United States. He hoped to save enough money to buy a car, travel some and
then return and get a farm.
Wanderlust, the desire to travel and
explore the world was an impulse a young man planted on a new continent a young
single man could give into
While all the traveling of his
childhood certainly tempered whatever travel anxiety lurked in his soul. For
his first twenty-one years he never enjoyed the luxury of staying in one place
for very long. Much of this early travel was forced by circumstance. But now he
was on the move and would not settle for another fifteen years. This was a
matter of choice.
Though, the impulse seemed to have a
genetic component to it. His grandparents had moved from Germany to the Ukraine.
His grandfather on his father's side, moved again as an old man to Canada. His
father's brother had moved from the Ukraine to Canada before the revolution. On
his mother's side, he had two aunts who had emigrated from the Ukraine to the United
States. Aunts who in 1930 he planned to visit. His aunt Millie was settled in Louisville,
Kentucky. His aunt Rose finally landed in Bakersfield, California.
John Steinbeck concluded that the
North American Continent must have an almost unperceivable tilted and raised up
on the East Coast, whereby anyone who is not firmly anchored tumbles and slides
to California. In the 1930s a lot became anchorless. But even before then, California
seems to have attracted people who could not establish roots elsewhere. This
was true for Gus’s aunt Rose.
Millie and Rose, his mother's sisters,
emigrated from the Ukraine in 1892 to Kentucky. Rose and her husband moved on
to South Dakota, where for a while they lived in a sod house and tried to
establish a farm. From South Dakota, they moved on to Wisconsin then Michigan
and finally to California.
Gus figures she only stayed there
because her husband died while there.
His family tree is peopled by ancestors
who moved around quite a bit. And Gus while rooted now still likes to travel.
After his last visit to Calgary, he found his 79 year old body still travelled
well. He wanted to make a swing from Calgary through California on the way
home. Olga wouldn't let him.
The man takes pride in being able to
travel through North and South America, and through Europe without having to
pay for a room. He always stays with relatives. These relatives travel too. Summer
brings guests from foreign shores. These people stay with Gus for awhile, and
then he loads them into his car and is their guide on a tour of North America. Wanderlust
runs in the family.
In 1930, he crossed the Canadian
border. There were relatives on the other side. He stayed in Louisville only a
short while. Louisville had two problems. It was impossible to find a job there
and there wasn't a comfortable German community to settle into.
"In Louisville it was impossible.
In 1930, you couldn't get a job in that city. I went on to California. I got
there Saturday afternoon. My aunt picked me up and then one of her neighbors
came over.
"It was a funny thing. When I
left Canada, my grand-dad told me, that three girls left the Ukraine about the
same time my Uncle Reinhold had. But they
went to the United States and settled in California. He said, well if you go to
California maybe you'll run into these Teamer grills.
"This neighbor had come over and
we got to talking. He was from the Ukraine too. He asked me the town I was from
and I told him. He said his wife was from that town too. She was one of the Teamer
girls who were our neighbors, the youngest of the three.
"He needed a man, so I went to
work for him right away. I worked for a whole year on that farm."
"I really needed the Job. I had a
little money, but it wouldn't have been enough to get back to Canada. When I
got to Bakersfield I was broke.
"My plans were always to go back
to Canada. During my time there, things were always so good. We had such a good time.
"When I got to Saskatchewan, I
was right at home. It wasn't as if I had travelled half way around the world. I
thought I would find German communities in cities in the United States, but I
didn't. The only place like that was Bakersfield. The church had all German
services. There were a lot of Mennonites there. In California, as in Canada, I
attended the Mennonite Church. Mennonite
Brethren are about the same as Baptists"
"Things didn't work out the way I
planned. I wanted to have a little money and a car before I went back. I got
there in June, in September I bought a car. I was making payments and had it
paid for in a year. Then to save money, I dropped the insurance. I had an
accident, totaled the car. I got twenty-five dollars out of it. I had to start
all over to earn enough money to go back to Canada, with a car. I first bought
a '27 Chevy. After that one I bought a '29 Chevy. And when I had that paid for,
I was spending more, wasn't so conservative. I finally went back in 1938. At that time, I had an almost new Plymouth.
It was only a year old.”
Gus had learned to drive in Canada. In
California, he immediately had the use of a small coup that had been converted
into a pickup truck. The back end had been removed and a simple box had been
installed in its place. Though there wasn't much of an exam for a driver's
license, the wagon maker took this exam shortly after his arrival. He took an interpreter
with him to the police station. The officer administering the exam found the
whole situation suspicious, and was fairly convinced the fellow interpreting was
in fact taking the test for this German speaking immigrant. Gus passed the test
easily, but only convinced the officer in charge that he had indeed been
responsible for the answers with great difficulty.
He worked for his first year on a farm
and by 1931 was fairly conversant in English. The following year he worked for
a fellow in the hay bailing business. "I learned the trade, and I guess I
was pretty good at it. They made a little money. There wasn't too much to be
made."
Corporate farming was already a player
in west coast agriculture.
David Lavender wrote in, California: A
Bicentennial History, that already by 1873, 122 men owned farms with more than
20,000 acres each and totaling 11.4 million acres. Another 158 with farms
between 10,000 and 20,000 acres collectively held another 2,670,000 acres. And
lastly, 280 men held “smaller” farms totaling 11.4 million acres.
Miller and Lux was a big outfit, which
Gus claims owned most of the land in California.
He said, their holdings stretched from
Canada to Mexico. They claimed they could drive cattle that distance and be
able to bed the animal down on Miller and Lux land each night.
It wasn’t quite so, but they were a
very large cattle ranching outfit. Large enough to garnish a Wikipedia entry.
It claims they held 1.5 million acres in California, Nevada and Oregon. They
were involved in the early legal battles over California water rights. After Henry Miller died in 1916, The Miller
& Lux Company was ultimately reorganized by his great grandson George
Nickel who became a large farmer and land developer.
When Gus arrived in California, Miller
and Lux was the big customer for contract hay bailing.
By 1933 Gus's cousins Ray and Glen Froelich
had become like his brothers. In 1933, Glen decided that he ought to get into
the hay bailing business. He bid on hay bailing contracts on farms in an area
north of Fresno. These put him in the bailing business.
Outside of the West Coast, drought
began in 1929 in Canada and by 1933 the plains from Texas to Saskatchewan were
a wasteland of dust. Gus’s uncle Reinhold lost his farm.
"The sand was blowing. It just
blew off the crops. They didn't have anything. Very few stayed. Reinhold took
his cattle and horses to Manitoba. He owned a little money on the first farm
yet, so he just let it go. In Manitoba, he bought 3/4 of a section. Those who
stayed, say they never have had anything like the years of the early thirties,
but are now all well to do."
In 1933 because of crop failure wheat
prices rose. The Lux children had inherited
the Miller Lux holdings and had little interest in farming. After bailing hay for a year, Glen rented
land. Gus managed one of the farms. They planted cotton and had mostly black
people working in the cotton fields.
The landscape changed, according to
Gus here’s how it went:
"There were a lot of families
coming from Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas and the south. They stayed where ever
they could. A lot of them built little shacks in junkyards. Just a one room
shack. A family would stay there. They would maybe have a gasoline stove to
cook on. You didn't need much in the summertime.
"At the time cotton farmers
needed a lot of help. Farm labor was all piece work. Except the chopping was 25
cents an hour. The fellows that ran the tractors got a bit more. I think they
got 35 or 40 cents an hour. A good picker could make as much as five dollars a
day. Some made as high as seven. Most made between three and four. I worked by
the month. I got $100 a month, a car and a place to live"
In the crashing economy of the early
1930's, Gus landed safely in Bakersfield, CA. He made himself at home in German
community, and was in the company of family. The immigrants 'social security' system
of family and extended family was intact. Indeed, by whatever degree ethnic community
amplified the social network of family, at the time Gus found himself in a rich
ethnic environment.
California had established ethnic
German communities in places other than Bakersfield. As early as 1901, 100,000
German immigrants and children of German immigrants were settled in San
Francisco. While Europe disintegrated in the first two decades of this century,
the United States blossomed. Between 1900 and 1920 California's population more
than doubled from 1.5 million to 3.55 million. The Nation itself saw its census
increase from 76 million to 122 million.
The Great Depression took all by
surprise. Unemployment stood at a modest 1,550,000 in 1929. At the end of 1930,
roughly 4 million people were looking for work. From then on, the economy dived
until early 1933 where as many as from 13,577,000 to 16,000,000 were
unemployed. The broad margin between these figures is simply because the
Government was neither able nor inclined to keep accurate track of such things.
However, the unemployment rate in the spring of 1933 is conservatively
estimated at a rough 25%. In constant dollars the nation’s gross national
product declined from $104 billion in 1929 to $72.7 billion in 1933. In 1933,
45.1% of farm mortgages were delinquent.
Gus escaped being caught in the
economic avalanche. He says, I 've always been kind of lucky. For the "untenured"
survival often meant a marginal life on the road. California offered advantages: the farms
hadn't been buried in dust and it offered a warm climate for souls uncertain of
where they might sleep.
California population grew by 1.5
million in the 1930's. Many of these were refugees from Oklahoma, Arkansas,
Missouri and North Texas. It wasn’t just drought that drove them from the
farms.
According to an article that appeared
in Harper's, July 1933, by Remley Glass, An incredible boom preceded the collapse
of the farm economy. Men who had homesteaded their land for between $2 and $3
per acre, saw the price of land gradually increase to $100 per acre in 1919.
These farmers built up comfortable fortunes. In 1919 and 1920 land prices
brilliantly ascended to as much as $400 an acre. A speculative frenzy ruled.
Second, third and fourth mortgages were considered as secure as government bonds.
These "wealthy" farmers
sought general improvements in the rural heartland. They consolidated school
districts, with modern and larger brick schools. They paved roads and initiated
ambitious drainage projects. The resulting tax burden became more than was
possible to support. General tax levies, in Iowa on the average, equaled the
interest payments on a $30 per acre mortgage. Conservative lenders were
reluctant to make loans in the more heavily taxed areas.
Between 1925 and 1929 almost all farm
commodities traded on the world market fell. In the early 1930s they crashed. Ironically,
Stalin’s first five year plan which starved millions in Ukraine also brought
the American farm economy to its knees.
In 1929, the Soviet Union exported 1,000,000
tons of wheat. By 1930 that amount rose to 5,400,000 tons as it desperately
sought foreign capital to finance its first Five Year Plan.
Meanwhile, in the North American Bread
Basket, the summer of 1931 was wonderfully rainy. Normal harvests to twenty
bushels an acre ballooned to as much as fifty. There were not enough barns,
elevators or railroad cars to hold it all.
Glass writes: "Prices of farm
products had fallen to almost nothing, oats were ten cents a bushel, corn
twelve cents per bushel, while hogs, the chief cash crop in the Corn Belt, were
selling at less than two and one half cents a pound. In the fall of 1932 a
wagon load of oats would not pay for a pair of shoes; a truck load of hogs,
which in other days would have paid all a tenant's cash rent, did not then pay
the interest on a thousand dollars."
Then came the drought.
Farmers who found they couldn't meet
interest and tax obligations were briefly able to hold on with chattel mortgages
and hope. Many found themselves renters of the land they once owned, but they
were at least able to make a living once unburdened from interest payments and
taxes. But by 1933, the dust storms made even subsistence farming impossible.
Between 1934 and 1940, 365,000 of these refugees arrived in California and were
not particularly well received. A sign in the Bakersfield movie house directed
Okies and Negroes to balcony seating.
Bakersfield had its own Hoover Ville, a small area on the east side of
town, across the tracks from where the blacks lived. Even in misfortune, segregation
remained.
A migratory-casual worker might have
earned as much as $1350 a year. However, most were unable to earn more than
$250. An employment record of one such laborer outlined in a WPA research
Monograph, by John Webb, shows a typical experience.
July, August and September, picked
figs, in Fresno, CA., at 10 cents a box and earned about $40 a month.
October and November, cut grapes near
Fresno, 25 cents an hour, earning about $40 a month.
December and January, on the
road.
February, picked peas, in the Imperial
Valley, one cent a pound, earned $30. Also worked as wagon-man in lettuce
field. Paid 60 cents to one dollar a day. On account of weather, was fortunate
to break even. Was paying 50 cents a day room and board.
March, April, Left for Chicago
returned to California two month later.
May, odd-jobs in Fresno.
June, picked figs near Fresno, 10cents
a box...
Gus escaped the routine of
California's later broke arrivals. He was tenured, and the early thirties
proved prosperous. California farms didn't suffer as the farms else where.
The land wasn't leveraged. Dust
doesn't blow off the Pacific. Declining agricultural prices were offset by an
abundance of hungry labor. Those established in the California economy prior to
fall 1930 did not suffer adversely from the depression. In California as
elsewhere people with secure jobs enjoyed a rising standard of living. Even though
wages declined by 18%, the decline was not as great as the 25% decline in the
cost of living.
Gus enjoyed steady farm employment in
planting growing and harvest season and during the off months he practiced a
trade learned in the Ukraine. He moved big stuff. From Ukraine to California he
unwittingly embarked on an unconventional career path that would establish him
in trade and serve him well – millwright.
"In the winter I worked for this
house mover. We even moved a motel once. It was just from one corner to the
next, we had to roll it. We even moved a brick school house.
"He had some big equipment, a
White truck with a winch and sixteen speed transmission.
"Another fellow and I went after
this house. It was a two bedroom house with a kitchen and living room. It
measured about 24 by 40 feet. The truck had a thirty-two foot bed and the house
was sticking over. We moved the house from Taft, over forty miles, into
Bakersfield. We loaded it in the morning and set it back down in the
same day.
"I moved houses pretty near every
winter when there was nothing else to do. We worked a lot for the oil
companies, moving equipment."
His position in California offered
sufficient security to allow the young man an indefinite vacation, a sabbatical.
The opportunity to check out more of the United States presented itself. Wanderlust.
One of the fellows with whom he
worked, thought it would be a good idea to check out the Chicago World's Fair.
Planning for the Fair, called Century
of Progress, began in 1928 before the Wall Street crash and the following
economic depression. Initially it was scheduled to run until the November 12,
1933. The broad theme of the fair was “Science Finds, Industry Applies, Man
Adapts.” Despite the Depression, it was a huge success it was reopened in 1934 and
was the first international fair held in America to pay for itself. It
attracted almost 40 million visitors.
In some ways the fair was eerily
prophetic of things to come. One of the highlights was a very brief visit by
the Graf Zeppelin. The sight of Zeppelin triggered dissention in Chicago,
particularly among Chicago’s large German-American population for whom it was a
visible reminder of Hitler’s assent to power in 1933.
Graf Zeppelins aside, if you were able a fair like that couldn't be missed.
"He talked me into it.” It
probably didn’t take much of sales job. He went on, “I sold my car. I must have
had five hundred dollars or so. I sent it ahead to Chicago, addressed general
delivery to myself. I kept ten dollars, and with the ten dollars got from
California to Chicago.
"The fellow I went with said, he
rode the freights. Never bought a train ticket in his life.
"Mostly we rode fruit
trains."
The depression allowed young men who
were free of social responsibilities a chance for a little adventure, with freight
trains as preferred mode of travel. By 1934, railroads typically considered the
freeloaders as unwelcome visitors. Some absolutely looked the other way, not
even ordering the transients from their trains.
In an account times, The Great Depression, edited by David A.
Shannon: R.S. Mitchell, chief special agent for the Missouri Pacific Railroad, testified
before a Senate Subcommittee, that prior to 1929 the policy of most railroads
had been to rid the trains of trespassers, arresting them in some instances.
13,875 trespassers were found on Missouri Pacific trains in 1929. By 1931 the
number had increased to 186,028.
Among the hobos before 1929, there
were a considerable number of hardened criminals. But in the following years according to
Mitchell, "in the summer time we find younger people, the majority of
these people can not be called "bums."
“They are not that sort of people ... There
is one big feature that has not been touched on. These tender persons who get
into the jungles with the old "bums" and too often, hardened
criminals, get a bad influence in a way that eventually will be serious to this
country."
Gus had a guide for his rail adventure
to the World’s Fair. They plotted a non-direct course, much like sailors taking
advantage of the wind. They caught trains heading in a general easterly
direction and followed a roundabout path to Chicago. The first ride took them
into Kansas. From there they hitched a ride on freight heading north into Cheyenne.
Gus' travel guide and companion
strongly advised abandoning the train before it rolled into Cheyenne. The
school for railroad cops was located in Cheyenne. Cheyenne’s yards were a convenient
training ground.
The riders jumped train about a mile
before entering the City. They were non-the-less greeted by police, rounded up and
hauled off to jail. One of the arresting officers assured them, "Boys,
you're not going to ride out of here. No one rides out of here. You'll spend
the night in jail and leave in the morning, by foot."
The vagrants were taken into town and
fed. They were free to go out and look the town over, but were to return to the
Jail for the night. It seems that jails also served as youth hostiles in the
1930's.
The next morning, Gus and his guide
cautiously made their way to the freight yard. The found an open reefer and
crawled in. They didn't know where the train was going. But they didn't care to
walk out of town.
"We took anything just to get out
of town. A little after midnight, the train pulled out. We got into North
Platte, about five or six AM. There, they stocked it with ice. While they iced the train, we went to a
restaurant and got something to eat.
“After we ate, we went back, got on a
boxcar but had to ride on top. This train pulled straight south. Iced up it
just kept going.
“It finally stopped to take on water
for the locomotive. This one guy, a black guy, went to the store and picked up
a loaf of bread. It was about three in the afternoon and we hadn't eaten since
breakfast. We divided the loaf of bread and rode until the train stopped, about
midnight somewhere in Kansas. We got off, looked around. We went to a place for
a bath and shower."
From there they found a train heading
to Austin, MN. The fellow he traveled with had a brother who worked as a
station agent there. They were set up on passenger train to Chicago, riding
right behind the engine. After arriving in Chicago Gus still had money a room
and a meal. The next day he went to the post office to collect the cash he had
mailed to himself. He took about twenty-five dollars for the week's stay.
"You could get by pretty cheap. I
think we paid 75cents for a room. You could get a meal for a nickel or a
dime."
After a week in Chicago, he headed to Milwaukee
to visit friends. It turned out to be an extended stay. Milwaukee didn't offer
many job opportunities. Things weren't great, but he got by.
The Depression hit Germany and the
United States the hardest. While it has become the measure for economic hard
times, the hard times here were nothing compared to what the people in the
Ukraine experienced. Gus received letters from his family still in the
Ukraine. On his measure for hard luck
the Great Depression was no benchmark. It barely registered.
The talk of things getting bad had
proved to be an understatement. His emigration from the Ukraine was a timely
escape from the Soviet Union. Landing in Milwaukee without a job, in 1934, didn't
qualify as hard times.
Ironically, Western Scholars and
intellectuals saw in Russia's five year plan a model for the economic future,
an answer to what appeared as a failed economy.
John Garraty writes, in The Great Depression, that a planned
economy enjoyed broad appeal. Charles A. Beard, who edited a collection of
essays on the subject, concluded, "Throughout the whole world of economic
operations runs the imperative necessity of planning, of rationality in the
engineering sense."
American journalist, William Allen
White wrote to his friend Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, "Russia
is the most interesting place on the planet. There experiment is
colossal."
Intellectuals held a views unsupported
by truth known to a Ukrainian peasant. The admiration of Russian experiment
wasn't limited to intellectuals.
Business Week reported, in the October 7, 1931 issue, that over 100,000
applicants replied to a Russian call for 6000 skilled workers.
According to the report, "three
principal reasons are advanced for wanting the position: (1) unemployment; (2)
disgust with conditions here; (3) interest in the Soviet experiment."
Gus had no interest in this Soviet
experiment, even though upon arriving in Milwaukee it wasn't easy finding work.
He knew of the harsher reality in Soviet Ukraine.
Gus said, "at first I was going
from house to house selling different things: lemon extract, all kinds of stuff;
pills; whatever people needed. If I sold three dollars worth, I got half. There
was only one day when I sold three dollars worth. Mostly it was just enough that you could get
by."
"Once, another fellow came. He
wanted someone who could fix his cellar door, an iron man. They had doors on
the sidewalk for dumping coal into the cellar. I had nothing to loose, said I
could fix it. I looked the job over. The thing was sprung, kind of sticking up.
People walking there would stumble on it, sometimes fall down. I looked around.
He had some wire down there. I pulled the door down and tied, took a hammer and
pounded on it. I didn't do anything but make a lot of noise. Finally, I went
up. Said it was done. He went outside and took a look. It was nice and level.
All I'd done was strap some wire around it and tied it to a pipe. He paid me
two dollars. It was easy."
Gus finally took a job with a dairy
farm. Was paid $15 a month plus room and board. He had been with the man for
three weeks, when he broke through some ice while chopping wood. By the time he
walked back to the farmhouse, his feet were severely frostbitten. The farmer
took him into the hospital. His feet were fine after a couple of days. Then the
hospital hired him to wash pots and pans. They fed him and paid him $50 a
month, a good wage. Gus and another
fellow rented a room across the street for $3 a week. They ate and had there
laundry washed at the hospital. They were able to live for almost nothing.
The letters from his mother and
brother in the Ukraine stopped coming in 1935.
But another came from his cousin Glen, prospering in
California, wrote in 1936. It said he had been buying land and wanted Gus to return and
run one of his farms.
"He was raising a lot of alfalfa
and cotton. He offered me a hundred dollars a month, board and a car. It was a good deal.
"I saw an ad in the paper for
drivers, to drive cars to California. I signed up in Racine, WI. I drove a new
Nash, free transportation. After we got
to California, we got ten dollars yet. They paid for motels and one meal a day.
"It took exactly a week. The
first day we left kind of late and drove to Moline. We drove at only twenty-five
miles an hour. The next day we drove between thirty and thirty-five miles per
hour. Each day we increased it.
"Twenty-five cars and thirty
three drivers, each car had a number. I was driving number nineteen. You had to
keep in line. There was one fellow right behind me, a kid. Boy I tell you, he
really had that car broken in. In Wisconsin yet, all of a sudden I couldn't see
this guy. Then he came. Had the car opened up to full speed. He was trying it
out, and he did that every once in a while. That car had pep. He even tried it
out on salt flats in Utah. He would get off the road, held back and then open
it up. That car was broken in nicely.
"We had to take a roundabout way.
Some states required a license on the cars. We couldn't drive through them.
"It was in March. Going through
Kansas was just like driving through a snow storm. The dust was blowing. You
had to have the lights on. It was just like a heavy fog.
“In east Kansas, we were in a college
town. Another guy and I picked up a couple of gals. We were out pretty near all
night. We couldn't drive the cars, but we had the keys and took them to the
cars. That next day was the only day I needed a relief driver.
“They paid our last night in San
Francisco. We each got Ten dollars, and were on our own.”
When he returned to California he
worked a summer for his cousin and then went into the hay bailing business and
did well.
“I had two bailers and two crews. Even
at that time, in the 30's, I had three automobiles: one for each crew, and one
that I had. All I did was get the jobs and collected the money. When they were
through with the field, I moved the bailer.“
He left Canada in 1930 with the idea
of checking things out in the US.
“See my uncle, he didn't want me to
go. He told me that if I stayed, he had 160 acres that he was renting. He said,
I could have that land, just work for him, and use his equipment to farm that
160 acres on my own. I wasn't thinking about farming too much at that time. I was
too young yet --wanderlust.
By 1933 the worst of the dust bowl was
over. By ‘38 Grate Plain’s agriculture had nearly recovered. He had some money
and a car. These were the preconditions he set for returning to Canada when he
left. Eight years later they were met.
“I finally went back in 1938. At the time I had an almost new Plymouth. It
was only a year old. I had a little money. In order to get back there, another
fellow and I made the harvest. We started in June in California and went on to
Oregon and Washington. He went back and I went into Canada. I worked the
harvest in Canada yet. I got by cheap.
“When we came from California to Oregon,
we pulled into a town. It was near
Pendleton. It was kind of wheat
country. We were going to stay at a
park, we found a place. A fellow came
along, we just then were going to go to restaurant and get something to eat. He
says, you fellows looking for a job.
“We said we just got in.
“He gave us directions and to a place
and said to tell the cook to fix us something to eat. And then start work in
the morning.
“Once you were there, you went from
one place to another. Once you were through harvesting at one place, you
already had a job at the next place. You always stayed at the place where you
were working. They had bunkhouses. The smaller places had something like
construction trailers with beds. Most of them had bunk houses. You met some
nice families that you worked for. Most of the farm laborers were single
fellows.
“I went back, but didn't like it any
more. A lot of the people had left their farms. So then I was satisfied, and
went back to California to stay.”
It didn’t work out that way.
