FINANCES

Birren #3

May 26, 2006

Roaring Twenties! Flaming Youth! Too Much Money! Mother took flying lessons, and Father drove a Duesenburg!

These are the stories I grew up with. But I was born in 1927, and the Crash of '29 changed all of that, and I grew up in the Great Depression. So money was always a topic of conversation - though never personal.

My grandfather, William C. Feindt, was a bricklayer, and worked steadily. He and his wife, Minnie, owned the home on South Street where my mother was born and grew up. A brick building, there were two small apartments on the second floor which were rented out. Minnie's brother, Henry Frisch, a police sergeant assigned to the mayor's office, lived just across the street with his family including his son, Harry, and daughter, Dora, who became Will's second wife. Many years later I found that the property was in Minnie's name, and after her death Will had a lifetime interest in the estate, and after his death, the "children of her daughter's body" had an interest for ten years, after which the property was to be sold and the proceeds divided between them and the Red Cross. Obviously someone had to have a certain knowledge of the law to produce a document so detailed.

After Minnie's death in 1924, Will married Dora, and in 1927 they built a large duplex in a new subdivision (Harvard Terrace), again with the idea of an income resulting from this new property. Will, who was a brickmason, built a frame house because brick would have cost an additional $1,000, a large sum at the time, and he regretted it for the rest of his life. But I never heard of a mortgage, and when the Crash came in 1929, the family home was secure.

Will was the oldest of ten children (nine boys and the youngest, a girl), so there were loads of aunts, uncles, cousins, etc. Although definitely middle class, Will was

the patriarch of the family and certainly the most financially secure. During the Depression, the old home on South Street was rented out: the large ground floor apartment was $25 per month, and the two upstairs apartments went for $11 and $9 each. Tenants were mostly members of St. Lucas Lutheran Church, and if the rent was not paid, no action was usually taken. For a while, the wife of the ground floor tenant did our family laundry in part payment.

When Mother became a Social Service worker she occasionally took me on her rounds so I became very aware of large families living in garages, rooms with no heat or plumbing, and the general malaise of the time. Her income, though not

large to begin with, was steady, and increased as she was promoted; her second

husband was a successful salesman, and provided the ability to have some of the luxuries such as vacations and antique collecting.

The apartment on Princeton provided a good income, and I remember tenants like Mrs. Altar, sister of the Roman Catholic Bishop of Toledo, and the writer, James Warner Bellah, among them.

Dad was one of the few in the family who had an automobile, and usually bought a new Dodge every other year. When the big dinners, Thanksgiving, Christmas, etc.

came along they were almost always held in our house which could seat 15 or more (very crowded) in the dining room.

When I went to summer camp, Dad paid to have an older cousin go to camp as well to look out for me (though I was unaware of the arrangement at the time). When Dad had a heart attack, and was advised to go to Florida for the winter, we sublet our flat and took off without concern.

In Florida one year Dad and a man from Saginaw, Michigan, whom we had met on our first winter in Dania (The Tomato Center of Florida), decided that they would rent an acre of land and grow tomatoes. Dad was a bricklayer, and Mr. Kerr was a retail grocer, but their lack of experience did not deter them. Twice someone came in and cleaned out the tomatoes the night before they were to be picked, so at the end of the season each of the men had lost about fifty dollars; their wives considered it a good investment since it kept them busy and out of the house.

Thus, while my classmates at Harvard Grade School were generally from more up-scale social backgrounds (business and professional men) I never felt that I would be unable to keep up.

The Great Depression dominated American Life for more than a decade of my early childhood, yet my family was able to give me a sense of security for which I am truly grateful.

rwtf