In every family, there seems to be one member who has a particular interest in the family’s history and the way things were in the past. If you guess that I’m that person in my generation, you would be correct. I love hearing stories from my mother about her childhood, and I even have done some research on our Irish ancestors. Even though I’m in my fifties, I also have a number of older friends who are in their eighties and even nineties. I love to hear their stories about their childhoods and the wisdom they gained over the years.
As I chatted with one of my friends, born in 1941, this week, I thought about the coming Fourth of July celebrations and the current debates in America. I was struck by how valuable his stories were and how they harkened back to some days in which Americans faced challenges with remarkable resiliency. I got his permission to share some of these stories with you, in the hopes that they will inspire you to look back to your own ancestors and the elders in your own communities for lessons on how to be prepared.
Waste Nothing
My friend’s parents lived through the Great Depression and raised ten children. According to him, while he grew up through the 1940’s, it still was the Great Depression, at least in his parents’ minds. He said he felt they never fully recovered from that experience. If you are interested in learning more lessons from the Great Depression, here is an article about hobo culture and a look at a diary from a lawyer living through the Great Depression.
Nothing was wasted in the house. George (I’ll call him) said that his mother saved everything. She had a drawer where bread tags were faithfully stored. The drawer was full! There must have been more than a thousand of them in there. When George asked his mother why she was saving them, she simply replied, “I’ll find a use for them.” (Here are 40 of them, if you’re curious.)
When George was a child, he remembers, his father was trying to sell an old cow that must have been about 15 years old. When he was only offered three dollars for the cow, his father slaughtered her instead. Without proper refrigeration, the family hung her from the center of the high rafters of their barn in October. The carcass was covered with a sheet to keep the pigeons off. The height prevented other animals from getting to the carcass.
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When his mother needed meat for something, George, the youngest, was sent out with an older brother. An improvised ratcheting system for the rope made from a log allowed them to raise and lower the carcass. His brother would cut off some meat, and then back up the carcass would go. George said that, with the winters back then in US Climate Zone 4, the carcass was frozen solid all winter. When spring came and there was still some meat left, George said that his mother promptly canned it. George couldn’t help but smile when he remembered how tasty his mother’s canned beef was.
A Good Day’s Work
I thought my mother, who grew up on a dairy farm, had a great story about how all the children in her family started driving tractor the moment their feet could reach the pedals. Well, George has her beat! His father would attach some wooden blocks to the pedals so that the children could drive tractor even earlier.
As a result, at the age of seven, George was driving a tractor and plowing fields. All ten children began working on the farm at the age of seven. George said that they all did the same work, boy or girl, driving tractor, plowing, milking, throwing bales. George can recall plowing a twenty-acre field by himself at the age of 7 in one day with a set of discs that were only six feet wide.
Before George was even tall enough to harness the horses, he was driving a team of horses to plow fields. His older brother would harness the horses, and then off to the fields George would go. His father owned eight horses, George said. After plowing for several hours in the morning, you would need to take the pair in and give them a good drink of warm water. Then, you had lunch and harnessed up the next pair.
Now, I may be accused of promoting child labour here, but one has to wonder what valuable life lessons were learned from the hard work in those days.
Improvise
When he was just a young teenager, George got an old 1920 Ford Model A and set to work on getting it going. He used it to drive to other farms, where he was working on the weekends. When the bearing went on the entry point of the crankshaft, it was the mid-1950s, and babbit bearings were not available.
George told me he thought about the job of the crescent-shaped bearing, what texture and thickness it needed to be, and how it was in contact with engine oil. He looked around the farm for something that would do the trick, and ended up inserting a piece of oiled horse harness. George said it worked for years.
When his father needed to fix his Ford Model T, he was equally creative. The governors for the fan were too light. George said that his father melted some lead at his brother-in-law’s forge and poured it into an egg carton to shape them. The solution worked, and the Model T was back on the road.
Days of Ingenuity and Hard Work
I find the values of waste nothing, a hard day’s work and improvising are relevant to my own approach to preparedness. Have you heard stories from America’s past that inspire you in your preparations? Do you have a story from an ancestor, someone else, or yourself that you can share with us? Please tell us in the comments section.
About Rowan
Rowan O’Malley is a fourth-generation Irish American who loves all things green: plants (especially shamrocks), trees, herbs, and weeds! She challenges herself daily to live her best life and to be as fit, healthy, and prepared as possible.
13 Responses
I learned also from my grandparents surviving the Great Depression. My grandmother told me the following that I’ve lived by: “ If something breaks or wears out, clean it. If that doesn’t do the job identify what needs to be replaced or repaired. If you cannot repair or replace the damaged part then buy the best new one you can afford with no guilt but you’ll find most of the time that is not necessary.” Also, “Don’t waste food. That animal gave its life for your nourishment. It’s an insult to its life and to God to waste it for whatever reason.” And she taught me a kitchen sink soup recipe that I use weekly to clean out the fridge and use up what is there. I make better soups than my husband now, and he’s a cook! These lessons have created a lot of abundance in my life and made me so adept at DIY. I’d be so much worse off if it weren’t for her advice. I can get around any issue 95% of the time with that ingenuity she taught me.
Thank you for another great article!
The value of work at a young age cannot be overestimated. I grew up in suburbia, but wish now I had grown up on a farm. Nonetheless, my younger brother and I had a paper route (remember them?) and had to be up at 5am 6 days a week. It was a long and hard route. One would go west and the other east. That experience molded me. I am 65 and still get up at 4am.
As an adult, the son of a woman that was friends with my wife came to me one day. His dad had abandonded his mom, him, and 2 sisters. He was 16 and wanted to get a job. He asked my advice. I told him that one of the most formative jobs I had in my youth was a dishwasher. I learned that there are not enough dishes to last all night and there are not enough clean pots and pans either. I had to learn the rhythm of the business to anticipate the needs of the front staff and the back staff. I used that skill in every job I had thereafter.
Unfortunately, he said ‘Mr. X, I don’t want to work that hard’, and got a cubicle job doing customer support.
If you have kids, but no farm, get them a dog (or two!) and teach them to feed, water, and walk them. And clean up their dog dirt.
My parents grew up in the Depression too. My dad saved pieces of string in old coffee cans. I found a broken axe head he kept from his childhood. I don’t think this was a bad habit from those times, especially compared to our ‘throw-away’ culture.
Both of my parents were born in the early 1920’s, so were children during the long depression. Their stories made me understand preparedness all of my life.
The most impactful one was my Mother, age 8 & in charge of her 2 younger hungry sisters, digging for possible forgotten garden potatoes under the cold Illinois snow.
THAT is true hard times. I never forgot that.
My Dad was born a couple months before the great depression started. Even in the late 1960s, we hoarded food and canned food from our large backyard garden. Seemed normal to me but my Mom rolled her eyes at his hoard…until the rustbelt years began and we lived off that hoard for many, many months. My sibs and I learned that lesson and even taught our now adult children. Mine saw use deplete our hoard twice when they were in our house still. Is it prepping or just another insurance policy? Is SHTF a scerio or merely a periodic by-product of life?
I love others stories from different times. My grandmother, 1876 to 1970 . She was the oldest born on the family farm. She did anything asked of her and before her teens she was able to do any job on the farm. At 13, she moved to another farm to run the kitchen at harvest time, cooking for harvest crews and caring for a newborn whose mother had died in childbirth. At 18, she moved back to the farm. She took over most of the household so her mother could do more on the farm, then they fed the harvest crews that worked on several local farms to earn extra money to set aside for family emergencies and her hope chest. She married at 21 (1897), and 1/2 of the saved fund helped the newlyweds buy land and plant hundreds of apple trees. The railroad had extended near them, and they planned to ship apples across New England from their Bucks County, PA, farm. While the trees matured, they built sheds and a smokehouse. Grandma built a stone springhouse to keep milk cold until it was picked up and to store eggs in waterglass for the winter. They raised a few calves each year. Part of them were either butchered and salted or smoked to keep. The rest were sold in town. They also raised a few pigs each year, also, half preserved and half sold. Grandpa worked in town or was hired on for grain and hay harvest crews. Eventually, the apples were producing. He traveled, taking orders for apples, and Grandma kept the farm running. Apples were hauled into town and shipped out in wooden bushel baskets. My mother arrived in 1904, Aunty in 1906, and their brother in 1908. He died in the Spanish Flu Pandemic about 1916. In 1913, Grandpa bought a brand-new Ford car. On the way home, it wouldn’t Woah for him, so Mom, at age 9, figured it out, got out of a ditch and drove them home. She became the family driver to go to church or town.
Grandma, Mom, and Dad all grew up then lived through the Spanish Flu Epidemic when thousands of Americans died, WWI with lean times at home, the Great Depression, and WWII with rationing . We gardened everywhere we lived, so I learned to garden, sun-dry, or pressure can my food. I often walked with Mom to go foraging. I was sewing my school skirts by age 9. I learned to maintain a sewing machine and the family car. By my teens I could repair both. It’s been interesting listening to their tales of life and learning from them.
Whilst attending Men’s Shed (a community workshop where old timers gather to talk and do projects) the other day, I heard the story of old Des who was on his front porch when a tornado tore through in the middle of the night. He regained consciousness to discover the house roof was on the top of a tree and the same tree was now standing in the middle of the living room.
Amazed I asked him what he did. “Well, as a dairy farmer the cows need milking so that morning I went to the dairy to milk the cows.”
Now this is not a depression era story but I am encouraged by the resilience of our frail older neighbours to push through adversity and get on with life.
Likely won’t happen today – very, very few males would attempt manual labor. Think PB Baron Trump would survive an hour out in the field – rhetorical question – google rhetorical if you don’t know the meaning.
I’m welcoming another Great Recession, preferably a Great Depression. I’ll be fine, my family will be fine. Magats, eh likely not.
Core principles of MAGA is strength, independence, self-resilience, good work ethic, delayed gratification, paying cash.
Core Democrat principles is dependency on government, taking the wealth from others work and giving it to those who dont work. Democrats even think being healthy or exercise is a gate way to white supremacy. Heard it on NPR.
As for welcoming another Great Recession and hoping for a Great Depression, what kind of sick person welcomes that? Did you see the jobs report the other day? Did you see where both April and May numbers were revised upward? That never happened during the Biden admin. They were all revised downward. Did you see the UBS report stating they anticipate a construction boom early next year as all those companies who are on-shoring will be building factories or expanding current manufacturing and all the jobs that will go with them. Tell us, what are you going to say if your hopes for a Great Recession or Depression never appears?
Well said.
The Trumps were first and foremost construction workers.
I bet Baron would do just fine for more than an hour.
Hard work is the hallmark of the Trump family.
I too grew up on a farm and my father had me driving a tractor at a young age ….around 8-10, while my brother who was a year older helped my grandfather and father throw bales. This was in the 70’s and where I lived it might as well have been the 40’s. We milked our own cows, churned our own butter, and wasted nothing . I remember my grandmother re-purposing the screen from porch screen door and making fly swatters. We grew our own vegetables, worked in the fields and in huge chicken houses, and grew and processed our own meat. Trips to the store were only for staples like flour and salt and sugar. It was a hard life but I look back on it now and am grateful for how we lived because it taught me resiliency and gratefulness for whatever I have.
My father was born in 1909 and my mother in 1914. Both grew up in houses that were truly off-grid, without the fancy generators and solar panels. They carried water, burned kerosene lamps and their houses were heated with wood stoves and that’s what their mothers used to cook their food on.
Daddy traveled with his brothers all over the country looking for work after his parents died. He ended up in California working in a defense plant, where he met my mother who’d been rendered homeless after the great flood of 1936 in Kentucky. On a trip back to see his family in Oklahoma during the war, they had 5 flats on one Sunday. Daddy just kept fixing the flats. Wartime tires were threadbare and there were no alternatives. My parents always did what they had to do without complaining.
Beautifull…..the bearings, my van is from 1975, made in England and has wool/felt bearing seals in the front hubs….50 years onward they still keep the lubrication in….no modern seal would be doing that….half a million kilometers that can be accounted for and more in the past….
in the last years i have switched to using wool and leather for clothing, and linnen. I have only found advantages and everything can be repaired. In times long gone wool and felt were the stuff clothes were made of, and they would last….
The way people live today is buy and throw away, buy and throw away, buy more on credit and throw away….i was thaught wanting was better than having, so you can guess what came my way…poverty is not a shame, wasting stuff is. You take what you need and leave the rest unless there is a very good reason to take more….found that people that have a lot are very afraid of losing something….their lives become controlled by the fear of losing something of their abundance….and their stash becomes their burden. Great way to evolve in life, applause….