Gaye LeBaron: Tales of the Depression uplifting, not sad

My mother was not a natural storyteller. Her life stories were drawn from her over time, patiently, through the years, although they flowed more freely as she grew older.

Thanksgiving was always a good prompt for storytelling. As we worked together, tearing bread and chopping onions and celery to make her trademark dressing (stuffing, we called it in those days, when we still stuffed a turkey), she would remember past Thanksgivings.

Most of her Thanksgiving stories took place in Redcrest, a small town, “ a wide spot in the road,” she called it, on the new Redwood Highway in Humboldt County in the 1930s and ’40s. It was a time when all of America was poor and many were both homeless and hungry.

Looking back, I find it interesting that her Depression tales were not sad stories, not at all. They were triumphant. People were hungry, but others fed them. People were homeless, but others gave them shelter. People found work for them.

Neighbors - and that included people in nearby communities - shared the bounty of their gardens and their fruit trees.

If my father or my brother caught a salmon (and there were some 40-pounders in the Eel River in those years), it was shared. If a neighbor killed a deer, we had venison.

The “city girl” from Sacramento learned new skills - canning peaches, making prize-winning dill pickles, even mastering the art of venison mincemeat.

She was plainly very proud of her part in this neighborliness, this care not only for one another but for the travelers, (“knights of the road,” she called them) who came walking up the highway, leaving the Bay Area, looking for work in the lumber mills or the woods.

Her favorite tale (and mine) is about the man who showed up one day in a grubby business suit, asking if there was work. My father put him to chopping wood in exchange for dinner. But when it was discovered that he knew how to play pinochle in a town that needed a third player, he stayed for six weeks, doing odd jobs for no pay, living in the shed and “eating around.”

Sonoma County has its own stories of those Depression years, a little more organized than Redcrest’s but as effective.

I learned about the hard times here from people old enough to be my parents. Their stories were shared with the same triumphant tone my mother used. They told me about “Dad” Burchell who set up a soup kitchen in an empty lot. Paul Mancini remembered packing up beef bones, wilting greens, carrots that were going a little limp and potatoes that were starting to sprout at his downtown market as a regular donation for “Dad’s” bottomless kettle in an empty lot on Second Street.

Mancini wasn’t alone. Other grocers did the same and the community soup kettle fed literally hundreds of homeless - transient and resident - through the Depression years.

The Salvation Army established a “woodpile” system offering homeless men a chance to work for a meal. In 1931, the “hobo jungles” along the railroad tracks were invaded by American Legion members who ladled out Mulligan stew for a holiday meal.

That was the year that the newspaper estimated that Santa Rosa’s combined charities had fed 1,221 needy people at Christmas - in a town with a population of 10,700.

Now, on a much wider scale, we do the same thing at holidays, just not so “hands on” as in those lean years. Our charity is more corporate, for want of a better word. But most people still share, still fill bags with groceries, still tuck checks into the envelopes that fill our mailboxes, still toss a lot of dollar bills and bigger into the kettles, still volunteer at the Food Bank or St. Vincent de Paul.

Today’s society requires more organization than in my mother’s time. No longer can we offer a cot in the woodshed to someone who knocks on our door. But there is a network of local churches that take turns sheltering homeless in a program coordinated by the Redwood Gospel Mission.

We have plenty of opportunities to share that sense of nobility claimed by the Depression generation. They grew old and secure in the knowledge that they had faced a crisis and had done the right thing. There are plenty of “right things” still out there waiting to be claimed.

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WHILE WE ARE giving thanks, count me as one who is thankful about the plan to put Old Courthouse Square back together.

The current debate over reunification raises many questions - costs, design, trees, fountains, traffic, take your pick.

One was raised last week in a letter to the editor asking why the square was split in the first place and suggesting that it was a way to move traffic through downtown.

Traffic, which circled the square, was certainly an issue, but not the central one when the decision was made in the late 1960s.

The square split asunder because the city, in the economic doldrums of that decade, decided to sell half of it for development.

Ironically, it was that old Latin devil “vox populi” - the voice of the people - that “saved” the east side of the square.

Original plans called for a four-story building - actually the one that is now 50 Courthouse Square, to be built where there is now lawn and berms and benches and azaleas and a fountain and footpaths.

With the courthouse gone, the street punched through, the plans for the sale being made, and the brick design on the west side already underway, the park department planted grass on the empty east side so it wouldn’t be so unattractive.

Those in favor of the sale were later heard to say that the grass was the big mistake.

Citizens liked having both sides open, began to wish the street wasn’t there, and said so. In meetings, in letters to the editor, in calls to council members. Public opinion came down hard on the side of a complete plaza, albeit one that already had a street through it.

So that’s why we have two sides to pull together. That’s why those two sides don’t match - have nothing to do with each other design-wise. Presumably, that will be rectified.

So, if we want to blame someone for the expense of putting the square back together, blame the people, not the leaders. If things had gone as they planned, there would be a four-story office building there.

Do I want to see it back together? Indeed I do.

We get so few chances to right our wrongs.

Do I wish we could move the freeway to Fulton Road or drag the mall to an open field somewhere and reunite the downtown with Railroad Square? You bet do.

Those things are impossible, of course. A reunified plaza is not. Thankfully.