Oral
History Project 
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Freda Hanson's Interview How old were
you during the Depression? In
my twenty’s. I was twenty when I
got married. What is your most memorable experience during the Great Depression? What was one thing that stands out in your mind? I
know the lesson I got from it. You
think it’s the end of the world, but you never give up.
No matter how bad anything gets, don’t ever let anything get you down.
Keep trying, and go forward and don’t think about what you could have
had. Just have a goal, a goal to
reach. What was your
goal? After
the depression, my goal was to get my degree in education.
When I graduated, parents couldn’t send their kids to college.
We had a county college. All
you had to go for was one year. Then
you could teach country school, and that’s what I did before I was married. Then later I boarded the country school teacher, so I knew
all what it was like in the depression. After I raised four children, then I went back to
school. By that time, they needed
country school- teachers real bad. I
had it handy. I walked to County
Normal. You had to have two years
now. You could teach seven years
with that degree. Then you had to
go on campus in La Crosse, thirty- five miles away.
I wanted to keep on teaching and working on my degree. I went to summer
school, and I went to night school. They
had a class once a week in our town. I went to that class. I went to Saturday school.
I got my degree when I was 55. Then
my advisor said, “Freda, you’re just foolish if you don’t keep on.”
I had extra credits that I had taken.
I got my Masters when I was 60 years old.
I went to school all my life, just about.
We were never hungry but a lot of people were.
In the cities, well, even some farmers, they committed suicide.
People would invest, and then they lost all their money.
The banks closed. It was very real. My dad lost his money in the farmers’ bank.
The doors just closed, and nobody could get in or get any money.
Then the farms started to be foreclosed on.
I happened to be up to my folks when their neighbor came, and he was
crying. He said, “They’re going
to foreclose on me.” Then he got
a loan from a lawyer, but later, the lawyer got the farm.
The same thing happened in my husband’s family.
His older brother’s farm was foreclosed on. My husband’s dad loaned him money, and as a result, all the
children in the family were affected. It
was very bad. When we got married, it hadn’t hit everybody yet.
It was just getting bad. We lived on his home place with an administrator that
was very good to us. We had a great
big garden. This was a big farm and
we worked very hard. It was a big
change from what it had been. Here
we were, high school kids, before, and then, his dad bought him a new car.
My dad bought me an old car so I didn’t have to walk to school.
We had it pretty good, and when the depression came, change.
My dad and mother fed people from the city. It’s very real to me what they went through. Both my husband and my dad hired men who had had real good jobs for fifty cents a day. We had lots of food because we had a big garden. We had a big orchard and a lot of apple trees. We had raspberries and a strawberry patch. We went berry picking in the woods, blackberry and other berries and gooseberries, and we canned all this food. I had to learn to bake bread, ten loaves at a time. You couldn’t buy anything in the store. You didn’t have money. You’d better stay home and work. We fed the people. This one man who worked for my dad, his family had to live at the next- door neighbor, which was his sister. She fed them canned tomatoes and peanut butter because she was a widow lady, and she didn’t have much money. My dad was able to keep his farm. We had an old garage up by the barn. I’d go up there often. He had cubbyholes in the wall where you put all kinds of things. We never knew it, but he saved his money in that garage. Nobody trusted anybody. You couldn’t buy anything on credit. He was a farmer, and he also was a mechanic. He worked for the Buick garage. He saved his money, and we never knew that he had enough money to pay off his loan at the end. One day, he came out with this big flashlight that he had in one of those cubbyholes. He showed us where he’d hid it. People were stealing in those days too. So he was saving money in this old garage that nobody would ever know was there. He had roles of bills in there. As I remember, it was a thousand dollars he had saved to pay off the farm. Our oldest daughter was five years old when Catherine was born. Before Catherine was born, times were getting better. We had $35 saved up to pay the medical expenses. We hid it in a book. My husband put it in the bookcase along with other books. We put that one book in there and thought that nobody would ever look there until the doctor came to deliver her. All the children except Lois were born at home. We didn’t have a hospital. The doctor came with the nurse to our house, and we gave him the $35. When he left our house that day, we were so proud. Then my husband made homemade wine, just a treat. Dandelion wine it was. He wanted our doctor to have some. The doctor said, “Oh no, I can’t drink that because I have to go to the next one.” He was busy delivering babies! He said, “I don’t dare drink anything now!” In those days, you never went to town unless you had
to go. We would make our own ice
cream for parties. We always had
the relatives come for birthdays. First,
my husband would go to town, and he’d get a big hunk of ice at the icehouse.
He’d bring it home, and he’d take the tobacco ax or the big ax and
crush the ice in a gunnysack. That’s
how we could make ice cream. We had
all kinds of milk and cream, whipped cream.
We had lots of eggs; we had a big chicken house. Did you have a
dairy farm? We
had a diversified farm. We raised
tobacco too. We milked 25 cows
alone sometimes, and the two of us did it by hand.
We got a milking machine after the second child was born.
We were probably the only ones in the neighborhood with a milking
machine. Sometimes it would be ten
o’clock at night by the time we got done with chores in the summertime.
The farmers exchanged work for corn shredding and different things.
If he came home late, then we would have to milk the cows.
We had a little tiny radio. You
didn’t sit around for entertainment. By
the time you were through working, and it was time to go to bed.
You asked what I remember the most. Well the storm of 1933 was in the
depression days. The tornado only hit a small area.
We could have been killed. We
were just lucky. Five of us were in
the milk house. We couldn’t keep
the door entirely shut. Both sheds
went and landed on the door of the milk house.
We couldn’t get out until afterward.
There was a big two by four that went right above our heads.
We didn’t know it until afterward.
Five of us standing there could have been hit. This is when Marylyn was a baby.
My husband had wanted me to take the baby to the house.
I had to take the baby along to milk cows, and while she was small
enough, I put her into a bushel basket.
As she grew, we brought the big washtub to put her in.
I wouldn’t go to the house with her.
When the storm started, we didn’t have time to go anyplace.
It just all went black. Later after the storm, when we got to the house, all
the windows were out on the north side. There
was hail embedded in the siding of the house.
The hail and the ice just went right through.
Even upstairs in the bedrooms there was hail. Our baby’s bed was full
of ice because her bed was in our bedroom and it was by the window.
A lot of times I had left her there sleeping while I went to the barn
milking. We were lucky that time.
The men took these great big shovels from the barn, and just shoveled up
all this water and ice. We went to my folks’ house near town.
They didn’t even know there had been a tornado.
They said we looked like drowned rats.
We were soaked. We
couldn’t even sleep in our house. All of our crops were beat right into the
ground. I thought the world had
come to an end. We just lost
everything. To start rebuilding, we had to get the crops planted.
This was July first. Now
this is the depression days, 1933. So,
the Fourth of July, I just thought, “oh, I just can’t.”
We always went on a picnic for ourselves.
I was going to prepare fried potatoes for the workers planting the corn
and at noon, here came a car. My
mother came with fried chicken and pie and everything. After they got the corn
planted, we had to drive probably twenty miles to find new tobacco plants.
They had extra tobacco plants because all the tobacco planting had been
done, and they had not been hit by the storm. So, we had to milk the cows by
hand in the morning and go way over there, pull the plants, and come back.
We got through it. One of
the later years, I would say it probably was 1935, WPA workers were all we could
get for tobacco harvest. They kept
looking at their time because they were working for the government; the
government was helping pay for it. We
had to pay something, and all we got left from the whole tobacco crop that
winter was $150. We had taxes.
WPA workers were something else. There was this man that we hired who came off
the highway looking for work, and he stayed with us six weeks.
One day, he stole our pickup. Two
days before he did that, he tried to call me into the garage.
I had the baby in my arms, and he said, come on in here, come on up in
front of the car. He said, I smell
smoke; I want you to see what it is. I
was smart enough not to go. My
husband was way out in the field. He
kept insisting. Just then, the
neighbor man drove in. He saved the
day. Oh, I was scared.
I didn’t know what to do. This
guy had been real good all the time. He
was too good to be true for six weeks. Two
days later, we were scheduled to go to Madison.
We left for Madison in our big car, and when we came home, our truck was
gone. We got robbed, and we never
saw the hired man again. I have to tell you about the winter.
In the depression years, there was so much snow in the winter and no rain
in the summer. It was just all dry.
In the winter, there was only one snowplow in our township, and the men
worked day and night. Us farmers would stay up if we knew they were coming to
our place in the middle of the night to plow out the town roads. My husband would shovel our driveway, and we had a long
driveway. There was a country store
not too far away from our house, and there was a drunken man who was staying
with his sister. He came walking
home at night on top of all the snow, and the plow hadn’t come through yet and
the snow was hard, real hard. He
came to our driveway and he fell right down because it was shoveled out.
We laughed. He didn’t kill
himself. He didn’t even break a
leg but it sure sobered him up! My husband and I had to walk about a quarter of a
mile to the road to town, which was five miles away. He would carry a case of
twelve-dozen eggs to trade for groceries.
Your milk check wouldn’t buy everything. He also carried Marilyn.
We only had one child then, and she was going on two years old.
He carried all that, and I trotted along beside him. We called my folks
on our country line, where all the neighbors could hear everything you said.
They’d say when they were going to come pick us up and, the cars
weren’t fast and the roads weren’t that good in those days.
Then, we would walk and meet them so we could go to town to get our
groceries. We probably had to leave some and come back because you bought 50
pound sacks of flour at a time and then used the flour sacks for dishtowels or
diapers or whatever you needed them for. In the
grocery store, I would stand there and I would stand there and look at some of
the bananas, and we could never buy bananas.
I longed for bananas. You
only bought what you needed: sugar, flour and coffee. You baked everything. We
never went hungry. We didn’t have
anything, but we weren’t missing it because we didn’t know what it was like.
We hadn’t had it before as young married people anyway. In the city, they had great big bread lines.
I’ve talked to some real nice people who said they helped serve the
people in the bread lines in the cities. Someone
said, “I never knew what a depression was because we never lost money.” There was a man who worked for fifty cents a day for my dad His wife was a seamstress. She made Marilyn a little coat and a little hat to match out of my coat that I couldn’t wear anymore. She made that, and she gave my mother a beautiful plate and ladle. My mother did a lot of things for her too. They became real good friends of ours in later years. He’d had a real good job. It wasn’t in the big city. They had to live with her folks and store their furniture in a big chicken house. It was just awful what people had to do. You were teacher during the Great Depression, how did the Great Depression affect kids coming to school? Marilyn
went to country school in the depression. I boarded the country schoolteacher
and I knew all about that because I’d been a country schoolteacher, and I had
paid for my board and room for a week. We
charged five dollars for the week for board and room. She only got seventy dollars then in the first few years in
the depression but it went way down to fourty-five dollars.
When I was teaching, I got the highest wage; it was ninety dollars a
month. Then everything started
going down, and pretty soon you couldn’t even get a job. Did you listen
to the radio or watch TV? We
didn’t have TV, but before I was married, before the depression, we listened
to the radio every night when I’d come home after walking home from my school,
and we sat at the supper table. Two
men (two brothers who farmed there) they had to turn on their little radio.
It was Amos and Andy. They
couldn’t eat supper without Amos and Andy.
I’m telling you, when I got marred, we didn’t have time for any
radio. My folks didn’t even have
one. After we got married we had a
little radio, but I don’t even remember us turning it on.
You weren’t thought of much if you didn’t work hard six days a week.
I was brought up that way with my folks; you didn’t think much of
anybody if they wanted to go fishing instead of farming.
We had people like that, relatives.
I married into the most wonderful family. They were so jolly. They
were Norwegian. I had a lot of
Norwegian friends. I had to learn
that if you are going to eat and cook, you are going to have to learn their
ways. So I learned to make rolepolse. We
had lutefisk and lefse. This was
our entertainment. We’d go to church and listen to a Norwegian sermon every
other Sunday. Then it would be English on the other Sundays.
I didn’t understand a word of that Norwegian.
After church, we’d have great big meals. We’d either have somebody at
our home for dinner or go to someone else’s house.
It would be long after one o’clock by the time we got back. That was
our entertainment. It really was. You
never spent money for entertainment. On Sunday night I didn’t have to make supper.
That’s the only time I got out of cooking. On Sunday night my husband
and his brother made supper, and it was milk mush.
I never did learn to like it. Of
course, my kids never learned to like molsa, which I learned to like.
I thought I’d die the first time I ate it.
Now I learned to make it. They
would make this milk mush, which takes two to make. You boil the milk in a big kettle; then one person stands and
sifts the flour in. Then, you put
this milk mush on a plate, and then they put lots of good butter in the middle,
then sugar and cinnamon. Then, you
eat it with cold milk in a bowl. Marilyn
just loved it. She was real little
and she grew fat on it. I like
cornmeal mush and corn bread. It
has to be yellow. Then, for the big Christmas gathering, we went to the
relatives’ house. We went between
Christmas and New Years. We
went to the neighbors too. We each
brought something. We had lefse and
lutefisk. Lutefisk is this big long
white fish that’s been treated. We’d
have to buy the Lutefisk. Usually
it came from Minneapolis. Today, it
is nine dollars a pound. It isn’t
worth that really. It’s a
tradition from Norway. Back then;
we could buy it for nine cents a pound. We’d
take a lot of it, and then the men shared in the cost of it.
They’d take out their billfolds to pay for it. You can’t imagine how scarce a dollar bill was.
That’s what my husband had to pay for it.
His older brother is the one that still had money; he’d lost his farm.
He had a five-dollar bill. We
never even saw a five-dollar bill. That
made such an impression on me. The merchants suffered just as much as we did too.
They were really good people in our town.
We wanted to buy an enameled round oak cook stove later when it was
getting a little better, and we knew we were going to come out of the depression
and all. We wanted to buy it on time, and I remember the seller said
he’d love to sell it to us but he couldn’t sell anything on credit.
We had to wait until we got our money.
I got the first refrigerator. We
didn’t even have an ice box those first eight years, but now I got a
refrigerator. It was gas run. Then,
the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) came in, and you had just one
light bulb. You didn’t have
electric appliances yet, but I got my round oak stove, and I got my
refrigerator. That’s when we
moved up to my home place. Then, we
got our own milk route and we got money every day. We didn’t get rich, and we worked just as hard, but we
didn’t have to milk so many cows. Franklin
Roosevelt was a savior to the farmer. There
was one lady who didn’t want to do anything because she was a Republican.
She didn’t even want to take the free food, but she did.
She stood in line for it. Roosevelt
did save the farmers. Our milk
checks got to down thirteen dollars for every two weeks.
Roosevelt fixed it so the farmers could work in our area in a stone
quarry. It wasn’t so many miles
away. All the neighbors would go.
My husband worked hard. He
got all the chores done, and crops weren’t much because we didn’t have any
rain until that tornado. In 1936,
we never had rain until the night Catherine was born.
Then it rained, and then it wouldn’t stop.
My husband worked in the stone quarry.
That would help with the thirteen dollars every two weeks. How did you
feel about President Hoover? Well, you see, this was just before the crash, so I
wasn’t too concerned then. Roosevelt
came in, and as young kids in high school, we should have paid more attention.
I was looking this morning at my daughter’s bedroom where I slept.
I was looking at the nice chest of drawers. That was the only piece of furniture I saved from our first
bedroom set that bedroom set and the davenport we bought on time.
It hadn’t hit yet. Then, we couldn’t pay for it, but they trusted us.
We paid what we could each year on it.
I think one of our girls has the sales slip that I saved.
It took a long long time to pay it off.
It was the same way with our dental bills.
It took many years to pay them off.
Right now I’m worried because there aren’t so many farmers.
They don’t have those great big gardens or berry patches.
I don’t think they would be able to feed the people from the cities if
there were to be another depression.
In 1935, there was the Chicago World’s Fair.
We didn’t have much money, and my husband and I went alone. My folks
took care of Marilyn. The brother
took care of the farm. We took a
picture going into the fair. It
only cost $1.50 to stay all night in a house because there weren’t motels
around then. They gave us breakfast too.
It didn’t cost much to go. We
had a wonderful time. You’ve
probably never heard of Sally Rand. She
was this dancer with big feathers. We’d
heard of her, and we got to see her. At
home, we were used to paying a nickel for a mug of beer, and at the Worlds Fair,
it was a quarter. It was twenty- five cents for a mug of beer.
Do you think that life is easier now or it was easier back in the depression? Was it simpler? Well,
we were all in the same boat, and we worked together. We all had plenty to eat, and we were healthy.
But now, there’s so much depression in people.
Too many are being killed. We
never saw these problems. These
people who are losing their jobs and are used to so much, how are they ever
going to stand it? I think it’s
harder today for people. It’s not
for me because I think I have it the easiest I’ve ever had.
I’ve got four wonderful children who say they’ll do anything for me.
They do too much for me. I
told my husband when I was working, that if I ever get through this, I’ll have
ice cream every day. Sometimes I
have it two or three times a day. I
always have it in my freezer, and I think about how we could only have it at
parties. We’d haul our cream to the creamery in town that
was five miles away, two or three times a week.
We had to separate the milk. There
wasn’t any sale for that good skim milk. Now we buy it. We
would feed the skim milk to the pigs. We also fed it to the chickens and the
calves. What we couldn’t feed, we
poured it right down the barnyard, just waste. What do you
think was the greatest invention? The
greatest thing in the depression was when REA came to town and brought us the
electric light. When I was going
County Normal, I studied by kerosene lamp.
I was like Abe Lincoln. Now,
when the kids come, they turn all the lights on.
If you ever learn any lesson, appreciate what you have.
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