1937 - 1972 - 2021

Nita and I came through Texas’ ‘Deep Freeze’ of last week, having had to cope with only minor problems, like pouring buckets of water into our commodes to make them flush because the city water system failed in the freezing weather. We were lucky, and hope this was a once-only storm in our lifetimes. Here are three of my favorite images of the Deep Freeze, all pulled off the internet.

Yesterday, I found this image online in a collection of 1930’s photographs taken by Arthur Rothstein, during the Great Depression. It’s a striking portrait of a teenage boy in his ‘bedroom’ next to his mother in the ‘kitchen.’ They are migrant farm workers who followed the harvest season from state to state. You can see the New Mexico license plate and the wooden apple crate from Yakima, Washington. 

That had to be a tough life, beyond anything I can imagine. While my dad was a teenager during the depression, jobs were scarce, but my grandfather had skills enough to find work in pattern shops, even if that meant moving often, chasing the next job.  Money was hard to come by, but still, they lived in houses, not tents and the back of trucks. 

The next photo is me under the homemade wooden camper top on the old pickup truck which was the first ‘car’ Nita and I owned as newlyweds.  We lived in it for a couple of months on our ‘honeymoon’ camping trip to see America in 1972.

There are some similarities in the two photos: The old quilts, the lanterns, pieces of canvas, stuff in boxes.  No bathroom. But the differences are of course much bigger.  We were ‘boomers’ who had been to college, tourists who didn’t have to pick apples or hops along the way to buy groceries and gasoline. We had saved enough money for the trip—barely. We even had our first bank credit card, co-signed by my dad—only to be used in emergencies, he had stressed to me.

All this looking at two photographs to say that Nita and I have been lucky. We were born in a good time, in a good place, to parents who lived on really tight budgets, but still set high expectations for us. (Our long honeymoon camping trip with no jobs waiting for us must have bothered them, but they didn’t try to talk us out of it.)  Even if we camped and were temporarily ‘homeless,’ Nita and I have no clue what life must have been like for those migrant workers living through the ‘30’s.

Look one more time at that teenage boy and his mother, and imagine that setting is your home, with no improvement on the horizon.  Mercy.

Now look to the far left of the 1937 photo. There stands a guitar case. Life may have sucked, but somebody in that family made music anyway. Where there’s music, there’s hope. I like that.