When the New Deal Came to Town by George Melloan

Author:George Melloan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Threshold Editions

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

THE HUCKSTERS

The Sharps

THE SHARPS, LIKE other farmers, had security during hard times not available to nonfarmers. They could live off the land. Whereas an unemployed factory worker in the city might have to seek relief from a soup kitchen, the Salvation Army, or a government agency, the Sharp family could subsist quite comfortably on a small portion of what their farm produced. Carolyn describes how they lived:

“If it wasn’t raised in the garden, we didn’t have it to eat. Mother canned fruits and vegetables. A hog was butchered every year, as well as a beef. [Butchering was often a group effort of several farmers, much like the threshing rings.] The pork that was cured, hams, and bacon hung in what we called the smokehouse. The rest of the pork was cooked in some fashion, generally fried, then placed in tin cans. We had a sealer and when finished they looked like commercially prepared cans. Then they were placed in boilers, covered with water, and placed on the coal range, where the water kept boiling. It was hours, not minutes, that they cooked. I never knew any that spoiled. The grease ‘rendered’ from cooking meat would harden into lard and would be stored for later cooking use in large five-gallon lard cans.

“Mother would cut bacon off the side of pork that had been cured. After a period of time it was possible there would be mold. She cut the mold off and still used the bacon. We often remarked in later years that we got our penicillin early.” (Penicillin, made from a mold, wasn’t produced commercially until World War II. Also during World War II, housewives were urged to donate their bacon fat to the government. The glycerin extracted from it was used to make bombs and munitions.)

Garden produce was also preserved, writes Carolyn. “Sweet potatoes were dug, wrapped individually in paper, and stored in an upstairs closet that was not heated. Irish potatoes were dug and stored in the cellar. We ate well.”

Carolyn’s mother, Marguerite, like mine after we moved to town, would order baby chicks by mail, I’m not sure from what hatchery but probably one not very distant. One morning every spring you could walk into the Whiteland post office and hear a great deal of cheeping. The chicks had arrived! They came by express trains—that made special stops to unload them—in what looked like suit boxes, but divided into four compartments so the chicks wouldn’t bunch up and smother each other.

The owners would claim them, bring them home to a chicken wire enclosure, and put them in an incubator, which was a hooded shelter with a heater fueled by coal oil, with trays for water and chicken feed. There they would mature, grow feathers, be turned out into the chicken yard, and eventually become family Sunday dinners or egg producers.

As Carolyn puts it: “As the chickens grew it became evident which were pullets (female) and which were roosters. The roosters were the ones we ate. In

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