TWO CALAMITIES IN 1932

By Dr. Robert E. Plucker 

 

This story took place so long ago that I am not sure that I remember everything exactly.  I was not quite five years old at that time, but I remember the things in this story because they were terrible calamities in my mind and I had no idea that anything like this could happen.  Five-year-olds don’t have a lot of experience with calamities, usually.  It was Election Day, 1932.

A President of the United States is elected only once every four years, and my Dad and mother believed that it was important to vote for the man who was to be the leader of the nation for the next four years.  My Dad was a Republican all his life and believed in voting for the Republican, no matter what else he was.  Mom wasn’t so sure that the Republicans always had the better man as their candidate.

We lived on a farm five miles from the town where Dad and Mom were to vote.  So on Election Day we all piled into the old 1924 Dodge car – Dad, Mom, my sister, Dots and I.  We had some eggs in a big thirty-dozen case and some chickens in an old twine sack in the car too, stuffed into the back seat with Dots and me.  The chickens and eggs were for trading at the store for groceries, as we had very little money, but we did have the chickens and the eggs.  All the farmers did that in those days.

We were also going to stop at Grandpa’s house to get the old 1921 Model T Ford truck that Grandpa and Dad shared for hauling grain and different odd jobs.  Dad was going to drive the truck home and Mom was to take the car, with us two kids and the groceries that we got for the chickens and eggs.  (Someday, perhaps, I’ll write a story about going out to the chicken house on a cold dark night with Dad, a flashlight, a chicken hook, and a sack or two.  The chickens would be asleep and Dad would hook them with his long wire hook around one leg and drag the sack open so he could stuff in the chicken.  And then it was my job to hold it shut so the chicken would have to stay in the sack.  The trick was to keep the first chickens in the sack while holding it open for each of the rest of the chickens.)

It had been half-decent weather when we left home, but while we were in town the thin clouds got thicker, it got colder, and it started to rain and snow at the same time.  By the time the voting, the grocery-trading and the stopping at Grandpa’s to get the truck were all done, it was muddy, slippery and cold; ice started to form in the puddles.  The roads were all soft, sticky mud, no gravel on them except in town, and certainly no concrete or asphalt the way roads are made today.  It was scary to think about driving through all that mud and freezing rain and snow on a slippery dirt road that had deep, deep ditches on both sides full of water in the low places.

The first calamity happened in the car on the way to Grandpa’s.  Dad asked Mom who she had voted for, thinking that of course she would have voted for Mr. Hoover, the Republican candidate.  Because, of course he had voted for Hoover.  But horrors, no, Mom said she had voted for Mr. Roosevelt, the Democrat.

“What?” bellowed Dad, “you voted for that Democrat?”

He said “Democrat” as if it were a dirty word, because for him it was a dirty word.  He was outraged and told her so in a loud voice that scared me and my sister.  We had never heard Mom and Dad fight before, and didn’t know that it was possible for any Mom and Dad to even disagree, much less actually yell at each other.  We were horrified, and, of course, we added to the general distress by yelling and crying ourselves.  Dad, already very short on temper, was thinking about spanking all of us, but as he could hardly have done so to Mom, he got control of his feelings and only grumped the rest of the way to Grandpa’s house.

Herbert Hoover,
Republican

Franklin Roosevelt,
Democrat

Hoover congratulates Roosevelt after the election.

 The second calamity came on the way home.  Mom was driving the car with the kids and groceries, slipping and sliding through the rain, mud, ice and snow.  Dad was quite a distance behind in the Model T truck.  Mom got safely out of town where there was at least some gravel on the roads, but she was no more than half a mile onto the country dirt road when the front wheels of the car got into a rut that was rather crosswise on the road.  This threw the car out of what little control she had over it even at the low speed she was traveling.  Slip, slide, kerplunk, BASH!!  Into the deep ditch we went.  You should have heard the yelling and crying and screaming that my sister and I carried on!  Anyone who had happened to come past would have thought we had broken all our arms and legs and maybe a rib or two.             

Poor Mom’s nerves must have been terribly frazzled after having had the fight with Dad, then to be all nervous about driving home in all the mud, ice and snow, and finally to have these two hysterical kids having a fit in the back seat of the car.  She’d have been a good bit better off if she had left us at the grocery store and taken the chickens back with her.

But here’s the happy ending.  Dad came along soon with the truck.  The truck had chains on the driving wheels, but the car did not, and so when he saw that the car was in the ditch and couldn’t be driven out, he got out his towing chain, hooked on to the front of the car and yanked it out of the ditch with the truck.  It didn’t take long at all and was not that much trouble, especially after he got us kids quieted down.  Of course, by this time we were yelling just because it seemed like the thing to do; we weren’t hurt or anything like that.  Dad gave us one of his famous looks, and we knew right away that we had better keep quiet and out of the way.  He and Mom must have made up their fight, because I remember him kissing Mom, but he still wasn’t at all pleased with the way my sister and I had made such a fuss.

 

 

 

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