December 3, 1942

Dec. 3, 1942

425 S Cabrillo Ave

San Pedro Calif

Dear father, mother and the folks at home,

According to the newspaper its just 19 shopping days until Christmas (and I have [not] got around to do any Christmas shopping at all). It hardly seems 3½ months since I left home and yet it seems like an awful long time. Iowa weather had undergone a considerable change since I left but here, except for about a 25 or 30°F drop all around the clock from a summer temperature profile, the weather is essentially the same. A little less cloudy on the average in the morning but really foggy when it decides to get foggy.

I don’t hardly think that I will do much Christmas shopping but let you do your own as Uncle Carl does. I had the bright idea once (before gas rationing) of buying 5 gallons of gasoline and sending it home, but I suppose it wouldn’t be allowed. Lately I have found out, via the newspaper, that it violates city ordinance to have more than 2 gallons stored above ground except in a car or approved container. At any rate I didn’t do it.

By the way, how are you coming out in this matter? Will you get extra gasoline? I’m glad that I do not have a car to worry about. I saw in the newspaper this morning that after Christmas, many things are going to be rationed, clothes, milk, eggs, cheese etc etc. All I can say is, its the city dweller that’s getting knocked in most of this stuff. You can have to eat what you want and all you want of it on the farm (except for such things as coffee which probably aren’t necessary).

To me, the farm is the place where you can have the greatest freedom in what you do regardless of what regulations & conventions are extant elsewhere. I’m not exactly unhappy where I am now but I’d rather freeze, sweat, toil, ache in the back, grow blisters on my hands, get all disgusted with cows, wish I’d never seen a potato in my life, grow bunions on my nether portions bouncing over a crossed corn field, chase the pigs when they get out etc etc than be a chemical engineer. Perhaps I’ll change my tune someday because all this doesn’t seem logical, but then many things in life aren’t in the least logical when you think about them. How did [I] get started into this anyway? I’ll guess I’ll leave off and start in on another tack.

I have got some pictures finished, not by me, but by the Thrifty Drug Store. Since we started working six days a week I don’t have very much spare time especially at night when I would have to do the developing. I guess my ventures into photographic chemistry will have to wait awhile. I am enclosing them in this letter. Please send them on to Aunt Laurine. If you don’t mind I’d like to have them back eventually. I hope that you still have the map I once sent you because it will be easier to recognize from where these pictures were taken. The descriptions are written on the back of them.

This month (or, that is, last November) I kept track of all that I spent and it was more than I thought it would be. Altogether it was $90.02 if I forget about the $13.13 which I paid for an electric razor by check. Anyway the $90.02 represents current, ordinary expenditure. This seems like an awful lot but most of it had to be spent, more or less. I spent $29.41 for food or about $1 per day which it would have been if I hadn’t had that Thanksgiving dinner(s) I wrote about. This is about a workable minimum I think.

After work I have breakfast at the Shell Cafe before I get on the P.E. which costs usually 31¢ and consists of two eggs, coffee, toast and potatoes. After I have come home and slept awhile (till two usually or 12:30 like today) I go down to Thrifty’s or Sontag’s and have dinner or supper or whatever you want to call it for 55 to 60¢. This consists usually of soup, salad, potatoes, vegetable, meat (except on Tuesday), milk, rolls, dessert (usually pie). Then I have an apple perhaps when I am walking home. Going to work at 11:15 I usually get something to eat (a bar, etc) at the magazine stand near the P.E. station. And that’s the program 6 days a week now.

On Sunday it is the same except for breakfast which occurs at Sontag’s and includes orange juice in addition to the above breakfast for 40¢. This diet seems to include a reasonable amount of all the essentials, altho perhaps a bit weak on cereals. But you don’t get much bread to eat at restaurant meals anyway so that can’t be helped. In addition to the amount I spent for food, I spent $36.73 for what I call essentials — that is rent, laundry, church dues etc. Then I spent $4.60 to get to and from work on the P.E. which I suppose should be included in the essential column. About $1.64 accumulated in my 1¢, 5¢, and 10¢ coin collections, leaving $17.46 which I spent more or less needlessly on magazines, paper, newspaper, movies etc. I have however a couple of books to show for it. It also includes the $5 Look subscription so perhaps it isn’t too much.

If you have been keeping track so far you find that this amounts to only about $89.44 I don’t know what happened to the difference. I probably lost some and forgot to include some expenditures. On two days I came out ahead of myself — that is, I have more left over than I should. Where it came from is beyond me. My estimated expenditures for Dec are $83.40 because I think that working 6 days a week I will have less time to get wangled into buying things. However, yesterday I wandered into the book-store and bought some books so that I wonder if my budget will contain itself. I had thought originally that I could get along on less than $85 or $90 a month but I sort of think its impossible now — especially if I can’t keep out of the book store. My latest was for two books — the works of Gilbert & Sullivan and the “Maltese Falcon” by Dashiell Hammitt [sic]. This last is a detective story that has almost become a classic so far as detective stories go. Well, what do you think of my spending? Please write and tell me.

I am getting hungry so I guess I will go downtown and have some dinner.

With love

C.P.

P.S. Thank you, mother, father & Vincent your very welcome letters.

P.S. I am enclosing a clipping that was amusing I thought. Also a bond.

Uncle Carl: Potatoes

The major part of this description of Uncle Carl’s life has to do with my experiences and recollections of my life on the Peterson farm from 1933–1942 and from 1951 to his death in 1968. During these later years, I returned to farm on my dad’s farm. The years from 1942–1948, I was in the army and in college. I then worked in Des Moines, Iowa, from 1948–1951.

In order to orient oneself to those earlier years on the Peterson farm, a description of the farm is appropriate. The farm consisted of 200 acres of good Iowa soil purchased by Grandfather Peterson while raising a family of ten children. One child died early in life. The home ’80 was the original purchase on which my grandparents started farming. As the years progressed, an east ’40, south ’40, and a north ’40 were added. The building site was rather large for the size of the farm. It consisted of about eight acres. The large rambling house that we moved into in 1933 was located on a knoll close to the road. Out-building consisted of a granary, barn, chicken house, tool shed, hog house, machine shed, corn crib, and threshing machine shed. At the time that the Strand family moved onto the farm, the farmstead was scattered with a variety of usable and obsolete farm machinery belonging to Uncle Carl. There were assorted garden patches, fruit trees, and on the northwest corner of the farm place was a windbreak of closely planted walnut trees, presumably planted by Uncle Carl.

Onto this rather extensive and fascinating environment, the Clarence Strand family of eight descended, and into our lives came Uncle Carl with all of his personality traits. Having been raised as the first of eleven children in a very meager life style, he was the very personification of a WASP (white Anglo-Saxon Protestant) with a work ethic that was ingrained in him from childhood. As I worked for him and with him, there was no time for idle hands or speech. The job was to be done with as little fanfare as possible.

One of the first activities that I became involved in (with him) was on one of his “jerry-rigged” potato planters. My sister Vivian and I were chosen to ride on a modified two row corn planter, each of us sitting on a seat over a row. Our duty was to, at regular intervals, drop a potato seed piece down a section of rain-spout to the opening made by the corn planter runner. It did not take long for Uncle Carl to see that we were not qualified to do this job, so our dad and a neighbor, Will Lines, took over for us. A year lated the planter was modified with a moving, flighted chain as that there was no mistaking the correct interval. Vivian and I got our jobs back!

Potatoes were very important to Uncle Carl, and I imagine that he saw in the Strand “brood” plenty of unused labor. Through our growing-up years, the numerous jobs associated with the potato crop were assigned to us, from sorting, de-sprouting, cutting for planting, the actual planting, and then the harvest season. At harvest time, we were instructed many evenings after school to use pails and pick up the potatoes after the potato digger, and then dump them into the horse drawn lumber wagon. In the evening, it was to scoop them into a basement room, rolling them down a steel roofing sheet formed as a trough. My brother Verner reminds us often of the rumble of potatoes down the trough.

One of the places that potatoes were planted was in a drained peat pond rented from the neighbors. The peat might have been good for potatoes, but not for a pleasant environment. After picking potatoes at harvest time, the peat dust caused a lot of itching. As I have noted, Uncle Carl was not the conventional farmer with cattle, hogs, and chickens. He was the only one in the neighborhood that raised field potatoes. One thing for sure, the Strand clan would never go hungry with a room full of Early Ohios or Rural New Yorkers in the basement! Much of Uncle Carl’s winter activity went to the sale and distribution of this crop.