The Great (personal) Depression

My mother, Elsie (Rathjens) Branscomb, was talking tonight about how when she was a little girl her father, Bill Rathjens, would sing the song "Big Rock Candy Mountain" to her. When she was a little girl she knew all the words, but it has been so long since she had heard it that her memory was fading. I showed her how easy it was to go to Youtube and listen to anything she liked. I went to a Burl Ives rendition of the song. She said "no that's not it, the song was about trains, Hobos, dogs, and soft boiled eggs, and hope for a better life.” So I looked a little further on Youtube and found the version that I also remember Grandpa Bill singing when I was a child. My memory of the song was polluted with all of the modern versions, that are more about Candy Mountains than hope.

I read Hoy Kersh’s book, "Suitcase Full of Dreams" about a black girl growing up in the south. Talking to her really made an impact on me. She said that reading “The Grapes of Wrath” by John Steinbeck really made her realize that the white people also had life-and-death struggles. I thought that up until then that I was the only one that understood that human struggle was not race based, but class based. Poor people are always trodden upon.

If you keep an open mind about history and try not to lay blame or solve anything, a lot about life, and people, will come to you. The dust bowl and the great depression were difficult times for people, many starved to death, and many lost all that they owned.

My Grandfather Bill Rathjens was the manager of a very successful ranch and business enterprise in Laytonville, The “Rancho El Primero”. His uncles owned the ranch. My Grandpa Bill and his two uncles were German emigrants. His uncles came over here before him and started an, also, very successful German sausage company. It was called the Rathjens Sausage Company. When I was going to college in San Francisco, in mid ‘60’s, I was down near Ghirardelli Square taking a much needed break from school. I was walking through a park and I looked up, on a multi-story red brick building was a very big, and very fancy, painted sign. Although faded almost beyond recognition, I could make out the words. The Rathjens Sausage company. I had no idea that the sausage company was that big until then.

The two uncles bought the Rancho El Primero in Laytonville. With the help of My Grandfather Bill, they built a sawmill, dairy, and gas station. All of which my grandfather managed. He ran his own side-business of selling and installing Kohler Light Plants. The Hartsook Inn was one of his Kohler customers.

The depression took all of that away. The two uncles lost everything. My grandfather Bill didn’t loose that much, because he didn’t own that much. But, he found himself having to work for other people after many years of being his own boss. I think that part of his soul broke in the loss of what was important to him, but he had many things left that he felt was important, and he continued on as a partly broken man. He helped my mother as much as he could, and he cared for my sister and I like we were his whole life.
After my mother and father got married, and my sister and I were born. My grandfather built the house that we lived in in Laytonville. My dad worked as a truck driver For the Mast Lumber company in Laytonville. As money would permit he would bring home lumber. My Grandfather Bill built the whole house with a hand saw, a level, a square, and a hammer. I was about five at the time. I remember “helping” him. He would give me a bucket full of nails and a block of wood and I would pound them all into the block. After I finished pounding all of the nails into the wood, he would pull them out and straighten them, then use them on the house, and give me some NEW nails to pound into the block.

After he got the house built, he built himself a little one room cabin with a tin wood stove in it to keep himself warm. When he wasn’t doing anything he would enjoy his habit of listening to the radio, “The Polka Party” and playing solitare. He called it “playing the Chinaman”, because in san Francisco the Chinese would charge you for a deck of cards then give you money back for the cards that you played up. The odds were fairly even, so the Chinaman only made money when you made mistakes. My grandfather said that they would watch you like a hawk. He really liked beating the “Chinaman” by winning.

One thing, that almost anybody that knew him knew, is, he was always whistling, He whistled when he played cards, he whistled while he worked, and he whistled when he walked. If he wasn't talking, eating, or drinking, he was whistling.

Sometimes I would go out to his cabin and visit him, he would get me into a Pedro game. He loved to play Pedro for money, so even playing against a kid kept his playing skills sharp. Sometimes he would let me win, I knew it, but it was still sweet to my young mind. One time he whittled me a wooden boat, he used to make me sleds and wagons. He used to make me “Steamboats”, which was a board with a wind up paddle wheel on the back that he powered with a rubber band. I never lacked for toys. He made me spinner tops. He made my sister and I an ice sled that he would use to push us across a frozen spring in a field. He made me wooden monkeys, that would climb a string. He made yoyo’s, popguns, bows and arrows. He was my constant companion as a child.

I guess that I always knew that my grandfather was somebody special, it’s just that some things are hard to appreciate when you are a kid.

I remember that he had a set of leather leggings, that were like strap on boot tops. He would strap them on and walk four miles to work in a sawmill that my uncle owned. He would work all day then walk home. On payday he would go to town and get drunk as a skunk, as the saying goes. In the evening he would come staggering down the road to our house. When he got there he always had a big grin on his face, and two paper bags in his hand. He would hand my sister Sharon and I each a bag. In Sharon’s bag was a Cherry-a-let and a bag of peanuts, and in my bag was a Butterfinger and a bag of jerky. We got one of those gift bags every payday up until almost the last day of his life.

As I got older, I think probably some time in my teens, when I started to notice the opposite sex. My grandfather getting drunk and staggering home became a great embarrassment to me. I remember avoiding him and wanting to have nothing to do with him. Even as I avoided him I always found my paper bag with The Butterfinger and jerky laying on my bed when I turned back my covers.

Many people took the time to tell me what a great man that my grandfather was.
Just as we see children today that are ashamed of their folks. We want to shake them and say, “Hey you idiot! Here is a person that is a great person in all respects but a few, and they care for you. Stop being a jerk!” We realize that parents, and grandparents, become a lot smarter after we grow up. I grew up to late to really appreciate, or thank, my Grampa Bill for the things that he did for me, or the good things in my life, that he unselfishly provided.

My Grampa Bill had a lifelong drinking habit that he controlled most of the time. But payday was a tradition that he just could not pass up. He spent more money at the bar on his friends than he did himself, so his money didn’t last long, and he was sober again. After he retired and collected social security he lived with my mom and dad. His “paydays” only came once a month, which was good. My mother had more compassion than I, and she cared for him and took fastidious care of him.

My only excuse is I was young, and very, very stupid! But, I do have some wonderful tales about him, that I will probably start telling now.

Until then, I’ll leave you with one of his favorite songs about the depression. By the way “HOBO” actually stands for: Helping Our Brothers Out.
Some say it means HOmeward BOund.

Click on arrow to play.



Photo and article below from Wikipedia.

Portrait shows Florence Thompson with several of her children in a photograph known as "Migrant Mother". The Library of Congress caption reads: "Destitute pea pickers in California. Mother of seven children. Age thirty-two. Nipomo, California." In the 1930s, the FSA employed several photographers to document the effects of the Great Depression on the population of America. Many of the photographs can also be seen as propaganda images to support the U.S. government's policy distributing support to the worst affected, poorer areas of the country. Lange's image of a supposed migrant pea picker, Florence Owens Thompson, and her family has become an icon of resilience in the face of adversity. However, it is not universally accepted that Florence Thompson was a migrant pea picker. In the book Photographing Farmworkers in California (Stanford University Press, 2004), author Richard Steven Street asserts that some scholars believe Lange's description of the print was "either vague or demonstrably inaccurate" and that Thompson was not a farmworker, but a Dust Bowl migrant. Nevertheless, if she was a "Dust Bowl migrant", she would have left a farm as most potential Dust Bowl migrants typically did and then began her life as such. Thus any potential inaccuracy is virtually irrelevant. The child to the viewer's right was Thompson's daughter, Katherine (later Katherine McIntosh, 4 years old (Leonard, Tom, "Woman whose plight defined Great Depression warns tragedy will happen again ", article, The Daily Telegraph, December 4, 2008) Lange took this photograph with a Graflex camera on large format (4"x5") negative film.