My mother was born at the start of the Roaring Twenties. That means, when the stock market crashed in ’29, she was at the age of peak awareness. My mother was a quintessential child of the Great Depression. As far as I know, her father never lost his job. By 1930, her father was a well-regarded locomotive engineer out of the Maybrook yards. He had four kids and built a nice house on the road to the railyards and it still stands on Houston Street. But by 1932, one out of every three workers was out of a job. The railroads were like a magnet for the unemployed, the transient, and the dispossessed. They used the rail lines to move around the country, to try to stay one step ahead, to seek employment. My mother was surrounded by the passage of these out of work men as they walked down, or up, Houston Street to the clanging of rail cars in the roundhouse and the hookups of cars in the classification bowl. 

 

The fear of a Great Depression child was not of these men themselves, but of becoming like them in their destitution, of losing everything, of having nothing. There were lots of ways a family could lose everything. Before FDIC deposit insurance, bank closures meant the deposits vanished. Around the country, nine thousand banks closed. To his dying day, her father remained skeptical of bankers. Once, driving him to Goshen, he pointed to a big white house on a hill, so prosperous it had its own miniature playhouse, a duplicate of the master’s house, and he said to me, “That’s where the banker lived. He never lost a penny. Took his money out first.”

 

The transient men looking for work were called hobos, not tramps; tramps traveled but didn’t look for work; bums didn’t work and didn’t travel. That was the accepted lingo of the age. There was a clandestine system of communication between the hobos. Some say this method of communication is largely mythological, but my grandfather was a direct witness and said one stone on the mailbox meant the owner would give you a sandwich, while two stones meant you might get a small job around the house, garden, or yard. 

My grandparents, as I mention a few weeks back, grew up near Walker Valley, rural America if ever there was rural, and the farms they worked as kids were about the size of a postage stamps, and rocky, you know, five cow farms with a can of milk every few days. Such a life taught the meaning a scarcity and the importance of preparation. Cooking, canning, and baking were second nature to country life, and these life practices were never considered ‘survivalist” but simply, de rigueur. My mother, a child of the depression, was well versed in all three, and every year, when I was a kid, there came a time when the canner came out of the lower cupboard left of the kitchen sink, the sink with the double window that looked south towards the barn. It was time to can.

 

I spent a lot of time helping her to can. We canned tomatoes and peaches, mostly, and sometimes she made sweet, bread and butter pickles. Pickling was a bigger thing in her youth than in mine, and she pickled the eels Gramp caught in the Hudson off the Newburgh pier, and she pickled whatever they had in excess. Vinegar was an important commodity and its manufacture was widespread on local farms with crab apple cider trees and our dairy farm had remnant crab apple trees, here and there, across the pasture and yard late into the twentieth century, fallen, by then, to unpruned starling nesting sites in the dead limb holes. 

 

My favorite thing to can, was peaches. She would find a bushel of “cling free” peaches somewhere and when I was old enough to drive she sent me with my ’56 Volkswagen to Dolans Orchard to get them; and we made quarts and pints, but mostly quarts, the last of which might still be on the shelf in the cellar cupboard at the bottom of the cellar stairs. What was great about canning peaches was hanging all the trimmings and pits and skins in a cheesecloth sack and letting it drip into a Revereware pot to be boiled down with sugar into peach syrup for the Sunday morning pancakes. Nothing like it. I found some real peach syrup at Soons Orchard once but never opened it. It’s still in the pantry. 

 

Right now, we are in the peak of the harvest season and pickling red onions, canning tomato sauce, canning pickled green beans and peeled garlic. We need vinegar! Sold out. Hannaford sold out. ShopRite sold out. Walmart, nothing. This week we need to pickle those great Hungarian hot peppers. Nancy finally found some vinegar in Pathmark. I haven’t been in a Pathmark since I lived in the Bronx and walked from 196th Street to the Fordham campus under the elevated IRT Third Avenue Line.

 

Vinegar shortage. What’s the world coming to? I guess we’ll find out shortly. Can those tomatoes, keep a bag of potatoes in your cellar! Pickle something! It’s what AI can’t mess with.