Bob
Coleman was born in 1925 and was four years old when the market crashed. He was
born on a farm but the family moved into Green Bay and that is where he was
raised.
Tell me about yourself
and your experiences during the Great Depression.
My name is Bob Coleman and I was
born in 1925. I had a bunch of
folks in my family and when I was born we lived on a farm. Within months of my
birth, my family lost the farm and moved into the city.
The first thing I can remember is living in a house on 12th
Ave. in Green Bay. I had four older
sisters and six brothers. There
were eleven of us and we lived in a three-bedroom house, a flat, and as you can
imagine, it was a little crowded. When
I was four years old we moved about four blocks away into a big, old,
five-bedroom house. We paid
twenty-five dollars a month rent for a five-bedroom home.
It was huge, but it was not what you would call convenient.
We had one bathroom, no bathtub, no shower, just a bathroom. If we wanted
to bathe, we had to use a washtub, the same washtub that mom did the washing in.
It was a little inconvenient, so later on we learned to bathe in different ways.
Then of course when we went to junior high and high school my brothers and I
were all involved in sports so we showered in school.
We were very, very poor but so was everyone else. My father lost the farm and he was
working in a furniture factory and from time to time worked in the funeral home
that was attached to it. He enjoyed the work but was getting next to nothing in
wages. It is hard to imagine the
amount of money that people were paid. My
first job, just before I went into service, was working in a warehouse and I got
paid forty-five cents an hour. My
father was earning fifteen cents more than my hourly wage. The first job I got
after getting out of the Navy in 1946 was working for a road construction
company and I got paid ninety cents an hour.
The unions were able to make changes in wages.
Explain the work situation at that time.
During the worst part of the Depression, nobody had
anything. Everybody was poor.
Our neighborhood was one square block and there were only two cars. Those
were the only two people who had steady jobs. One man was a railroad engineer
and could only drive his car twice a week.
On Saturday he and his wife went shopping and on Sunday the family went
to church. The car sounded awful
and it stayed in the garage all week except for those two days. The other man
drove his car to work everyday. He was a carpenter and was so good at his trade
that he would never be out of work. Everyone
else did whatever work they could find. In
Green Bay the largest employer was the paper mill and my father worked there for
a little time. My oldest brother also went to work in the paper mill until he
went into the service. My four older brothers and one of my sisters went into
the service, and of course I joined the Navy as soon as I graduated from high
school.
Did your mother stay at home then?
Back in the Depression my mother was an absolute marvel in
the kitchen. She could make
“nothing” taste good and to this day I don’t know how she did it.
She baked bread three to four times a week. We had meat on the table
twice a week and we had leftovers whenever there were any. Sometimes we had
chicken, however, chicken was very expensive at that time; It was considered a
delicacy. We had that at
Thanksgiving, Christmas, and holidays and at Easter we had a ham.
How my mother paid for all this I do not understand.
I do know that after the war, perhaps sometime during the 1950s, my
mother showed us a piece of paper and lit it on fire.
It was a loan that they had taken out from their life insurance and it
had financed us during the worst times of the Depression.
So the money situation was extremely tight?
My father was in a sanitarium with tuberculosis.
Two times he was in there, once for a few months and the second time for
almost a year. We had no extra
income at all. My brothers,
sisters, and I worked. My brothers
and I ran a paper route with about one hundred customers.
My younger brother took over that route when I went into the service.
We all had other jobs too. We
caddied at the golf course and we basically worked wherever we could.
I spent one year ushering in the theater.
That is when theaters were great big theaters and we were ushers who
showed people to their seat. We
wore a red-orange uniform with a little cap and we went around and showed people
their seat. I also set pins in a bowling alley for ten cents a line but almost
everybody did something like that.
How did you afford the essentials?
In terms of food, we had a huge garden. Ours was always the
best because my mother was so good at gardening. She knew when to plant and what
to plant and so we survived out of the garden. We had a food cellar that was twelve by twelve feet square
and that was always full of stuff that was canned, such as tomatoes, beans, and
other stuff. We, of course, worked
in the garden too, and during this time we were subjected to a terrible drought.
You probably heard of the dust bowl in areas such as Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas,
Nebraska, and Iowa. All of those places were suffering from a terrible drought,
including Wisconsin. Literally the soil was being blown away. It was almost as
though there wasn’t enough water to hold the soil together. Many farms were
blown away, so many families migrated to California to pick fruit.
John Steinbeck wrote a novel “The Grapes of Wrath” and it deals with
that period. Not only was there
this terrible Depression, but at the same time we were suffering from a
horrendous drought and farmers were just being blown off their land.
My mother’s garden had cracks so deep that you could put the entire
length of your finger in the ground.
Where did your water supply come from?
My mother had a wringer washer and she would change the
water twice a week. She washed every Monday and we would take the water from the
wash machine with the soap in it. That’s what we used to water the plants.
From the washer the clothes went into two different washtubs.
We took the water from the rinse tubs and watered the plants with that
water as well.
Can you explain an average day at your house?
Breakfast was a time we were all getting ready to go to
school so it was catch as you can. We flew around that place, if you can imagine
one would with only one bathroom. There
was a time that eight of us were in school and to get eight people cleaned up
and ready for school was an interesting chore.
We ate as we could get free to eat and then we ran out. We came home for
lunch because we lived within walking distance from the elementary school.
We were about a mile from the school.
In high school we were only a mile or so from that one. I switched schools at the end of my sophomore year and then I
had about a mile and a half away, and walking home at noon became tougher.
The main meal was in the evening when my dad got home from work. That was
a big deal, a very formal meal, and there were eleven kids at the table plus my
mom and dad. My friends, my brother’s friends, or my sister’s friends liked
to come to our house and eat. We
went to other people’s homes and they had store bought bread, it was like
eating cake for us. At home we had whole wheat bread that was homemade; it was
substantial and heavy by comparison.
How was your family in comparison to other families
in your area?
It must have been terrible for our family because everybody
was poor and we didn’t know it. In
junior high school I realized that some people were not as bad off as we were.
Some people had good clothes. I
got my first pair of new pants when I was being confirmed.
I had two pairs of pants. All the other trousers that I had were handed
down from my older brothers. My
sisters’, were out on their own when I was in junior high.
Later my mother took in borders, not because they could pay but because
they had nowhere else to go. There
was quite a crowd in those bedrooms. My
mother allowed people to move in with us if they were down on their luck.
This was during the worst part of the Depression and there were people
who had nobody or nothing or no place to go.
We had a hobo jungle across the street and in the middle of the next
block. One hobo was a black man who had been an English professor at Georgetown
University. He would sit there at night and we, neighborhood kids, would
congregate there and listen to the hobos talk.
Other people were various kinds of musicians and they were just
delightful people. My mother fed them on a regular basis. When the hobos came
she would sit them at the head of the table in the formal dining room and feed
them there. They rarely came at
meal time, only when they were hungry. She
would feed four to six of them a week and she would fix a separate meal just for
them and she did that right up until one came and took my father’s ring. She
stopped after that. The important
thing to remember is that this terrible period could happen again but is
unlikely. My brothers and sisters knew the condition that we were in
but I didn’t until I was in high school.
I was poor but so was everybody else.
I didn’t realize how tough things were for us until I started paying my
own way.
What did you do for fun?
We would go to the theater for a dime.
We could stay in the theater for the whole day if we wanted.
When the picture was over they would just keep on going. We would stay
there all day and see the same movie two or three times if we wished.
After the movie we would walk down to the ice cream store and we could
buy two double dipped ice cream cones for a nickel. We had a great time for
fifteen cents. Gasoline would sell
seven gallons for a dollar and a quart of oil was fifteen cents.
When I was ten or twelve years old I would go to the grocer with my
little red wagon, with a list for the butcher shop. I would get a six to eight
pound pot roast and a couple rings of sausage and liver and I had a dollar and a
quarter. I always went home with change. I
bought a week’s worth of meat for the family for a little over a dollar.
Oral
History Project 
