Words From The Wise

Amelia Menke, 99, was born in a farm house near Sten-nett, and lives now at Good Samaritan Society in Red Oak.

Biggest changes: It used to be that the elderly, an aunt or a grandmother, would live with the family when she was old. She’d be given a nice rocking chair and a nice bed and others would listen to her and the rest of the family would learn by listening.

Great Depression: We had settled in northwest Iowa and I was a teacher. My family was English and German and I fell in love with the son of a German family. But the son was in the military and we secretly married and he went off to his military duties in Hawaii for a couple years. I had to secretly marry because otherwise you lost your job when you married. My father had a garden so we had food.

Advice: Children are raised differently now, but we were raised that the first thing you did when you woke up was go to the bathroom, brush your teeth and wash your face, and then you had breakfast. When something doesn’t go quite right, cause a ruckus. Also, ‘It’s the squeaky wheel that gets the grease.’ You learned that from early childhood. And become inventive to keep things going and do as much for yourself as you can.

Emery Johnson, 100, grew up in Wisconsin and lived in Arkansas before coming to Red Oak about seven years ago.

Biggest changes: I grew up knowing poverty as a child. We’re headed headfirst into poverty again.

Memories of the Great Depression: I quit high school and worked for 30 cents and hour in a steel factory making metal camp-stoves. I worked 10 hours for five days a week and worked nine hours on Saturday. It was rough. My uncle said, and that’d be now someone who lived 150 years ago, “A dollar’s a hard thing to earn.”

I was single and lived with my folks who had a big garden. We canned our garden and even meat. Those in towns or apartments had it worse because they had no place to grow a garden. People could live on very little if they had to. Pancakes and cornbread and beans, especially cornbread and beans, are healthy products for a person. That’s why the ole’ prospectors had that bag of dried beans and made cornbread. Times have changed, but this (coming economic situation) will be a blow to today’s people that don’t have a taste for it yet. We start with the homeless, but there will be many more homeless and without food. I’ve been through it. I remember those days. One time, people got into boxcars to travel if they wanted to travel, I saw a father with a seven or eight-year-old in a boxcar, and he broke off a piece of a roll and gave it to the son for food. The railroads were kind. Even women traveled in the boxcars, but they didn’t travel alone, they’d travel with a group of men to be protected. I remember that where I was working at Christmastime, they gave me a $5 gold piece as my Christmas gift. There was kindness and understanding. Green Bay and West-ern Railroad was near our town and it set off a boxcar and put benches in it, and a stove so there’d be some heat for the people some called “bums,” those who were traveling. The grocery store was nearby and the travelers would go to the store and ask for something and the store gave two slices of bread with the cheap meat, bologna, on it.

Advice: Next time you vote for a president, you better look at his background. See how people lived during Hoover days. They didn’t go throw $50 around, they looked before spending a dollar.