It occurred to me that history is lost, when it is not repeated. Allow me to repeat a snippet of Americana.
I’m pushing 60, and I suppose that no one, except a couple of family members, knows about my family history. I’ll bet they still believe the myth. No matter. Most Americans have in their character a large or small memory of past times, more of a truth than whatever their family tells them. You might not know it, but a lot of the Southern Conservatism comes not merely from the Civil War, but from the Scots-Irish clan mentality of the immigrants back in the 1770s. I would know. I’m Scots-Irish, with a mix of English and Cherokee. I feel every bone of my ancestors. Weird, I know.
Anyway, before my father died, I had the wit to ask him about the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression, and took notes.
Until that interview, I believed in the common myth in my family, that because we came from Oklahoma in the early 1930s, we were surely the salt of the earth and rolled into California naked, caked with dust. Now, before I tell you the real story, let me tell you that the Great Depression left such a skid mark on everyone, and my family, that I have become my father, who became his father: I save water now; I recycle anything; I look at a wild rabbit like it was food at the end of my .22; I save pennies. When I was younger, I couldn’t fathom why Dad was such a miser. I love to spend my money on the good stuff, and yet, here I go, trying not to use up too much toilet paper.
And THAT is how history is preserved. Why, you youngsters might ask, does Dad or Mom turn the thermostat down in the winter? It’s because they learned it from their parents.
Why were you surprised that Occupy Wall Street was so easy to spring up? That was a rhetorical question. Hint: The banks fucked over your grandparents.
When my father passed away easy, I was the executor of the state, a duty which I fulfilled without paying an attorney. We Scots-Irish. My late father had a stash of old photos and documents. I had glimpses of it before, but not this. I once asked him about a photo, of a young man in a roadster by Seal Beach. He didn’t admit it was him, a well-to-do young strapping man in his hot-rod on prime real estate.
Anyway, all the hints came together: My family didn’t roll into California poor. Grandfather, oh, he didn’t make his way up from shoveling gravel for 25 cents a day for Standard Oil. Not by the company wide-film print with him next to the big-wigs. So Gramps, “J.P.” as he was called, wasn’t no poor Okie. Another pic showed him golfing in Oklahoma in the 1920s. I guess the sand traps got a bit too much, what with the Dust Bowl coming up.
I guess I should have known better, what with the huge volume of photographs in our family. But as a kid, I figured that B&W film had to be dirt cheap. But the story of our family poverty was not untrue. Shortly after J.B. went to California, the mother of my father and uncle kidnapped them back to Oklahoma, during the fucking Dust Bowl. Must have been the only car driving east out of Cali-for-ni-a, because, damn, girl. I got picture of her, with Dad and Uncle Jim, the little tykes next to mother in a shitty Oklahoma trailer or whatever they had back then.
Well, J.B. hired some of those Standard Oil gumshoes and tracked down his boys. They got sent to boarding school, as in military. Not sure about what happened to Wanda, though I know she’s buried somewhere in Westminister, Calif., which means she came looking for her boys. Dad never talked about her, nor did my uncle. So, big mystery.
Continuing. How did we get poor, when we were rich in the Great Depression?
My family had beachfront property at Long Beach, Calif., and a place on Signal Hill. Now, if you know Southern California, that’s golden real estate. Gramps was a Seal Beach councilman. His business was as a collector of bad debts, a debt collector. I found his old files on the deadbeats, as they were called.
Well, J.P. died, but not before marrying again. He left his business to Uncle Jim, and all Jim had to do was enforce the debt obligations. My dad was already making salary in the SoCal defense industry. So when J.P. died, two things unfolded. First, Uncle Jim let most of the debtors skate. But more importantly, J.P.’s second wife re-married … a scoundrel. I should have known, even as a kid, why my family was so poorly, yet had remnants of wealth. We lost two pieces of real estate, one right at the shore in Long Beach, and another in Signal Hill. By the time I grew up, I had no idea we were once sitting pretty. Except for an exquisite men’s diamond ring Dad gave me from J.P., and a rare rosewood hutch from the 1940s. I must have been about stupid to think my poor family just happened upon a class-A ring and now-embargoed Brazilian rosewood hutch.
Until I interviewed Dad about the Great Depression. He was a kid, then, after he got snatched back from Oklahoma, and he told me that his step-mom would set out pies on the sill for hobos, if they wanted to do yard work. Or otherwise pay the down-and-out for some gardening. Dad was a humble man, to a fault, but he never told me the real story, or the myth, or that it was he in that roadster in Seal Beach. But even coming from a family that escaped the worst of the depression, it left skid marks enough on Dad, and then on me. I use the other side of my paper. I know how to build a hobo fire. I can trap a rabbit and skin it.
As for Mom, well, she is still alive. And judging by the old photos from the ‘40s, she was hot. Her family was a thing, too, already second-generation California. Claim to fame was Maj. Whittlesey of “The Lost Battalion” in the Argonne Forest WWI. I still have his original diary, among other artifacts on Mom’s side. Dad and pal Glenn needled her, saying that Whittlesey got lost because he drank all the alcohol out of his compass. Typical low blow.
So the next time you hear one of us former or present Southerners say shit, know that we’ve been doing it since St. Paddy drove the snakes off the island.
And don’t worry about Bernie Sanders. He ain’t Irish. Not even English. Fee, fie, foe, fum. I smell the blood of and English-mon.
Wasabe. ;-)