Like 1938, things aren’t so good

2008 has not been a good year.
Winter was harsh, heating and food bills shot up, and in the spring we flooded.
The Dow fell 6,000 points, major banking and investment firms went under. U.S. auto manufacturers tell us they’re bankrupt, and the government added trillions to the national debt by giving bundles of cash to mismanaged businesses.
About the only good financial news of late is that every time the value of your retirement fund drops a bunch the price of gasoline goes down a little.
But 70 years ago, things weren’t so good either, and this week we’ll take a look at some news from 1938.
In January, a fire The Express called “The most disastrous in the history of Elliott” pretty much wiped out the Green Bay Lumber Co. and Weaver Hardware. It also damaged several other downtown business places.
In February, D.W. Gilmore, a revered old man who was Montgomery County’s last surviving Civil War veteran, passed on.
In March, a group of farmers met in Red Oak to let off steam about low prices and farm foreclosures.
In April, when spring seemed to be at hand, the county was hit by a strong thunderstorm that turned to ice and then heavy snow, dragging down utility lines, interrupting electrical and telephone service and temporarily shutting down the railroad.
May brought a massive hatch of grasshoppers — their numbers so high that a bait station was opened in Red Oak, with a branch near Villisca, and poison by the truckload was dumped on farm fields. Rain washed much of it into streams.
June was a bad month as well.
The Express carried an article on the pending closure of an institution this area had embraced with loving pride since 1881 —the Swedish Evangelical Lutheran Children’s Home.
In July, tears were shed as the last orphan child was sent away. The dormitories and main building, masonry structures then just 20 years old, were closed and would never re-open.
It was also in July that area residents read the strange account of a pilot named Douglas Corrigan (later called Wrong Way), who flew out of New York en route California but landed in Ireland.
In August, just a month after the orphanage closed, Stanton’s Mamrelund Lutheran, the church of the orphans, was struck by lightning and burned to the ground.
September brought news from Germany, where Nazis were torching synagogues, rounding up Jews and threatening Czechoslovakia. President Roosevelt declared the U.S. will absolutely not intervene in European affairs.
In October, our Depression-ravaged businesses braced themselves for even harder times as the first minimum wage law went into effect. Forcing employers to pay 25 cents an hour meant some workers would benefit; others would be laid off.
And in November, on the eve of what was then called Armistice Day, listeners in Montgomery County heard Kate Smith sing, for the first time on her radio program, “God Bless America.”
As if all this wasn’t depressing enough, on the last day of 1938 an inventor named V.K. Zworykin took out a patent on a device his employer, RCA, called an “electronic television.”

Roy Marshall is a local historian. E-mail him at news@redoakexpress.com.

The Red Oak Express

2012 Commerce Drive
P.O. Box 377
Red Oak, IA 51566
Phone: 712-623-2566 Fax: 712-623-2568

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