Childhood During the Great Depression

Jay and Arvilla 1938
Jay and Arvilla in 1938
We had very few toys during my pre-school years (1933-1939). The world was still suffering the effects of the Great Depression. We made do with the few things we had. I do remember having a wooden Kiddy Car when I was 4 years old. I would guess Daddy made it for me. One day I must have left it in the driveway and my dad backed over it with the car. It was smashed. He hid it under the porch so I would not find it. I must have found it during the day because I recall my mother scolding Daddy for hiding it. That is one of the few times I ever heard her criticize him. I think it was broken beyond repair because I don't recall ever riding it again.

Sometime later he brought home a second-hand pedal car. I think he got it cheap at a public sale. It was very rusty and he painted it and fixed it up. It never did peddle easily. Well, for one thing, we had no sidewalks. I played with it in the stone driveway and in the yard. When it no longer was usable, he used the wheels and the steering mechanism and mounted them on a piece of plywood. I would make it go by putting my knee on the bed and push with the right leg. I guess the steering wheel was broken because he mounted the handle from an old wringer washer to steer it. My sister and I played with that for a number of years.

Most of the time, my sister Arvilla and I played made-up games. The family had a copy of Egermeier's Bible Story Book and my mother would read us all those wonderful bible stories. Arvilla and I would act them out. One of the games we played on the dining room table. We would get up there and pretend that we were God and Jesus up in heaven. We pretended to make it rain and snow. She complains to this day that I would never let her be God. She always had to be Jesus because I was the oldest and we knew that God was older than Jesus. Therefore it was natural that I would be God if Jesus was God's son. Evidently the gender difference was not important to us.

Another bible story game we played was the stoning of Stephen. We had no idea what stoning was. However, we knew there were stones in the driveway, and we knew that the stoning killed Stephen. We also knew that people were sometimes killed by cars. So we came to the conclusion that Stephen must have been lying on the stones and a car ran over him. My sister had a little doll carriage. I would make her lie down in the driveway and I would push the baby buggy over her. She was Stephen and I was the person who stoned her. It all seems kind of weird now, but it seemed to make sense then.

Then there was the raising of Lazarus. There was a wooden bench on the back porch. We turned that upside down for a tomb. Then Arvilla would play the part of Lazarus and lie down in the tomb. This time I would be Jesus. I would stand beside the tomb and say, "Lazarus, come forth." She would then sit up and be raised from the dead.

A game that I liked to play by myself involved the use of a mirror. I would hold the mirror pointed to the ceiling. Then I would walk around the house, pretending that I could walk on the ceiling. When I came to a doorway, I would have to step over the part of the wall above the door opening. That was a lot of fun. One thing that I did one day was not fun. Mama had a mop hanging on a nail in the cellar stairs. It was hanging on the nail with a piece of yarn. I thought it would be fun to grab hold of the mop and swing out over the open space above the steps. Of course, the string broke and I went tumbling down the steps onto the concrete basement floor. I remember running up the steps crying, "Mama, I broke my face." Of course, I hadn't, but it sure hurt a lot.

Around that same time Mama, Arvilla, and I had walked up the road to visit my dad's cousin Harry Sensenig's family. They had a trellis on their front porch that went up one post, across the top, and down the other post. I thought I would climb up one post, hang by my hands to cross over to the other one and come back down. Of course I couldn't hold on and fell down on the edge of the porch. I guess I didn't learn very easily. Mama took me home on Sensenig's coaster wagon. That evening, they took me to a doctor. He said that I had a fractured leg, and he put a cast on. Six weeks later we went to get the cast off, and he couldn't find his cast cutters. He used a saw, a screw driver, and a monkey wrench to cut off that cast. I thought he was going to cut my leg off.

The last act of play that I wanted to mention occurred one day when the Minnich boys visited our place. Herbie and Abie and I were playing with an old broom that had the handle cut short. We turned it upside down and pretended it was a crutch. My mother was very upset. She said to me, "Don't pretend you're crippled, someday you might get crippled." Several years later at the age of seven, I did get Polio Myelitis. As a child, I sometimes wondered if that pretend game might have caused me to become crippled. I was pretty sure that was not what caused the Polio, but I did wonder about it.

After I was no longer quarantined, we got a lot of visitors. Many of them brought toys for me to play with. It sure helped to wile away the hours since I was not able to walk for over six months, and I could not go to school that year. However, I still didn't have as many toys as some of my cousins. It was always exciting to go visit my cousins not only to play with their toys, but we didn't have any children in our neighborhood and it was fun to have playmates. One does not need a lot of material things when they have friends.

- The Old Professor Copyright © Jay D Weaver - January 2, 2009

Return to Archives Index