The Time Capsule | Roy Marshall
“Feb 8. Blizzard continues. Drifts 8 ft. deep. No water. Pump at well broken. Coal shortage. Bring beds downstairs for kids. Canned 20 qts. of beef and 4 qts. broth.”
The above is from the diary of a southwest Iowa farm wife with four children born between the years 1927 and 1935. She was a young mother during the worst economic crisis this country has known, endured weather more extreme than anyone my age and younger has experienced.
Virginia had no indoor plumbing, no electricity, no iPod, yet I’ve transcribed two years of her diary without finding a single word of complaint. She cheerfully bakes the family’s bread, churns butter, makes clothing on a foot-treadle sewing machine. In one four-day period she cuts, grinds and cans 18 quarts of sausage, fixed meals for a house full of unexpected visitors, tends sick children, hangs laundry on a line stretched across the kitchen, rendered eight quarts of lard, cooked and scraped two hog’s heads, pickled some pig’s feet and mended socks.
By the age of thirty her daily entries have described the Dust Bowl, 14-foot snow drifts, a sky turned dark with grasshoppers. She helped her husband dig trenches around a corn field and fill them with tar to stem an invasion of chinch bugs. From her flock of three or four hundred chickens she derives a few dollars a month in cash income. She rises early, stokes a wood range, fixes breakfast for six and sends her children to school with lunch pails that contain an egg or cheese sandwich and a thermos of milk.
Virginia’s handwriting is crisp, but her abbreviations and shortcuts can be challenging. I’m occasionally interrupted and it took a most of a day to decipher and type January and February of 1936.
Late in the afternoon, I put the diary aside and settled back to read the newspaper. With a lunch pail and egg sandwich in mind, I noticed – and read for the first time – Red Oak’s school menu. Breakfast choices for that week include biscuit and gravy, yogurt, breakfast potatoes, French toast fingers, sausage patty, BBQ riblet, chicken wrap and turkey ranch wrap. Lunch offers made-to-order chicken bowl bar, pepperoni pizza, Philly flatbread, cheesy mashed potatoes, jalapeno chicken calzone, cheese pizza, crispy chicken salad and dinner rolls.
This is good, of course, and I make the comparison only because of the contrast. Virginia’s daughter, now a trim and active 89 years of age, appreciated the love and care her mother put into that school lunch pail.
I don’t know many school kids. Those I do are bright and promising, and I’m sure they appreciate just as much their Italian meatballs, cheesy mashed potatoes and honey mustard ham wrap.
No doubt their history class has taught them about kids of the Great Depression, how they achieved remarkable things in war and peace, on Earth and in outer space, doing so without many of the advantages and opportunities enjoyed today. Even though students are already aware of these things, might they appreciate a reminder in the form of a day when lunch is just an egg sandwich and glass of milk?
This will never happen, of course, and if it did none of us would want to be a school board member when parents got the news.
Tomorrow I’ll start with March 1, 1936. If things go right – if Virginia doesn’t get into the gossip from her Sew & So Club or contrive a new wrinkle in her shorthand – I should get into May.
Roy Marshall is a local historian and columnist for the Red Oak Express. He can be contacted at news@redoak