100 years of history by Carol Pelosi
Some grandparents like to pass on stories of the good old days when they were young. For this week, let us imagine ourselves as 84-year-olds transporting themselves and their 14-year-old grandchildren back in time by 70 years to 1933 when they were 14.
Just to set the stage, “An Encyclopedia of American History” says the major events in that year were the beginning of the New Deal after President Franklin D. Roosevelt assumed office in March, and lynchings in the South claimed 42 lives. The average life expectancy had increased from 49 to 59 since 1900, although clearly not for all social groups. A law passed that year by the New York legislature setting a minimum wage for women laundry workers was soon invalidated by the U.S. Supreme Court. The summer before, General Douglas A. MacArthur, under orders from President Herbert Hoover, had driven the last of the Bonus Army out of Washington, D.C.
Topsoil loosened by the wartime plowing – as much as 300 million tons – was blowing eastward to the Atlantic from Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Colorado, and the Arkies and the Okies were wending their sad way to California.
Prohibition was still in effect, although states had begun to decide whether to repeal it. In the town of Wake Forest, prohibition had little effect, but college boys were said to travel down the Raleigh road to Forestville Heights and fill up with both kinds of fuel.
The year began with states declaring bank holidays in which they could regroup to face the depositors demanding their money. As soon as he was sworn in, Roosevelt declared a national bank holiday and embargoed gold exports.
In May, the Tennessee Valley Authority was created. Families were to be forced from their farms as the river was dammed, but the authority and its electricity was a force that changed the face of this nation.
But in 1933, that change was still 12 to 14 years in the future for the Wake Forest area. If a granddaddy was a town boy, his family would have had electricity for the lights, radio and refrigerator and water and sewer for the bathrooms and washing machine.
Out in the country, though, Carolina Power & Light refused to run its lines along the dirt roads to reach the farms and homes. The agricultural extension agents were helping farm families change from raising cotton – which had depleted the soil – and begin raising chickens. Chickens were profitable, but they needed a lot of water which all had to be pumped and carried by hand on most farms.
It would be 1935 before the national Rural Electrification Administration was established, and 1940 before the first meeting was held in Wake Forest to form Wake Electric Membership Cooperative. Despite the hard times – “Everybody was living in poverty except the bootleggers,” one farmer said – people found $5 for a deposit, $2 for the minimum monthly bill.
The lights would not go on until after the war.
In 1933 and up through the late 1940s, most meals were cooked on a wood stove, which also heated the water for the baths and the washing. When our grandpa was 14, meals were made from scratch, too, and Sunday’s roast chicken had been pecking around the back door on Saturday.
While some women worked as teachers or secretaries, most women provided the unpaid labor for the homes and farms. They wore housedresses made at home; some dresses were made from the printed cotton chicken feed bags. There was always a good Sunday dress, and they always wore a hat to church and every other formal occasion.
In Wake Forest and other towns and cities, the wives of faculty members and businessmen had at least one Black maid who came in daily to cook, clean and care for children while the household laundry went to the Black area of town where it was washed and ironed. Families also had Black yard men who tended the lawn and a large vegetable garden and perhaps strawberry beds and grapevines.
Businessmen went to work in suits, ties and hats. Wake Forest business was centered on serving the young men who were Wake Forest College students – lots of restaurants – and the farm families around the town.
There were two movie theaters – the Collegiate and the Forest – showing first-run films, most of them still in black and white, and newsreels. Newsreels were an important source of information, ranking right up there with radios and newspapers. Both theaters were segregated with Black patrons in the balcony.
There was a student newspaper, The Old Gold and Black, but no local paper. People had to subscribe to one of the Raleigh newspapers.
Most roads were still dirt, the color choice for cars was black or black and mules provided most of the muscle power on farms. There was still a cotton gin or maybe two in town, and there was still a foundry to make the plow points and other farm implements. Three and four trains a day stopped at the train station. Women who wanted to shop in Raleigh took the train and spent the day.
Yes, the world was a very different place when grandpa was 14.
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