Clarence's Employment

I digressed back on page 30 [midway through the posting of April 25, 2010—LS] from transcribing what I had written about my life to a discussion of my mother’s family. I shall now return to that activity. But first I want to comment that I think the Petersons, though intelligent and diligent people, were psychologically disturbed because of the extreme religious tenor of their lives. This was I think the result of the influence of my grandmother, sweet person that she was but like steel below the surface. I think she warped the lives of at least half her offspring and colored the personalities of the rest of them.

I continue: My recollections of Verner and Marold as hunters of eggs stems of course from a time shortly after our move out to the Peterson farm, when they were quite young. The move to the farm was in response to the economic condition our family found itself in as a result of the Depression of the 1930s, and took place in the early summer of 1933. Although the Depression started with the stock market crash of 1929, it didn’t affect us in the bank where my father was employed (although doubtless the fundamentals for the local bank’s difficulty was already existing).

At any rate, my father’s salary was reduced stepwise from the $125/month he had been receiving to $50/month and finally he was let go entirely. I guess his duties as bookkeeper were taken over by the two brothers Art and Frank Lindquist who owned and also worked in the bank. Frank, the elder, was president of the bank and Art functioned as the teller. They had inherited the bank from their father Nils Lindquist, a pioneer banker in Gowrie. The bank, known at the time as the First National Bank of Gowrie, survived the Depressions (after the injection of some new capital by one of the better-off farmers in the area — one Warner Larson who actually resided about a mile north and a little west of the Peterson farmstead).

The second bank in Gowrie, known as the State bank, failed. The father of one of my boyhood pals in Gowrie worked in the other bank and he of course lost his job also.

To meet the economic difficulty of the family the decision was made to move the family to the house on the Peterson farm — the house being vacant at the time but still in usable condition. Here the family lived rent-free (the house in Gowrie being rented out to one of the local high school teachers for $15/month). Prior to the move my father worked for a time in one or another of the emergency work programs of the early FDR years and after the move to the farm he worked several summers for my uncle Carl, who at that time was farming the Peterson acres. He also spent some time working for the nearby farmers and I recall his picking corn for Carl Telleen one fall.

The money my father made picking corn for Carl Telleen during those depression years was just sufficient to pay the yearly contribution that my parents made to the church we attended. I think this was a mark of the commitment my parents had to the church and the Christian religion. Doubtless there would have been many places the money could have been used for family expenses during those lean years. One way or another the family made it through the Depression — we were never hungry or without shelter or in need of clothes. There was little or nothing for non-essentials but the basic needs were met.

Within a few years my father secured work during a few months of the year during the car licensing period at the county treasurer’s office (generally from December through February or March) and this developed fairly soon to full-time employment (certainly by the middle of 1936 and perhaps somewhat sooner). These years of the mid-thirties were pretty stressful years for my parents, but the family, in one way or another, was always clothed, housed and fed which was more than for some families during the period.