During the “hungry 30’s,” as they were known, it took any means possible to just get by and the boarding house that Grandma Wimer ran was necessary just to survive. Of the many characters that came to board at their home the scariest was that of a man who had a number of the family sit around the dinning room table with their hands on the table. With everyone following his commands the table rose off the floor. At the time my mom did not realize the enormity of the situation.
My mother liked to tell me of her past history when her ancestors came across from the “Old County” that being Germany. My mom’s story went something like this. It seems that two disinherited sons of a Duke’s or something, had come to seek their fortune in the new world. One owned a factory and when the American Revolution began he converted it into making cannon balls for George Washington. This I think gave my mother a sense of pride and maybe a little bigotry, just to think that she had blue blood somewhere in her veins. I can still hear her reprimanding an acquaintance with these words; “I am Mrs. Betts to you, not Dorothy.” To keep things in prospective it should be said that my great, great, (I’ve lost track of how many greats) grandmother on my mother’s, side smoked a corncob pipe. It seems that once in the new world there was a rapid slide downward. My mother used to tell me how she used to watch the frog legs jump all around in the fry pan when they were being fried up for supper. I think the reality of that and what it meant in terms of status completely escaped my mother. In might be only fair to mention that this all was from her mother’s side of the family. I must admit it does make one feel kind of good to know that there is blue blood somewhere in your veins, on the other hand if we all checked back far enough we probably all have some.
Times have never been tougher then they were in the 30’s and to survive Gervase and Dorothy headed out west to see if there were any jobs for a poor uneducated prairie kid and his pregnant wife of just a few months. They just managed to make it out to BC in an old Chevy and immediately started looking for work in the Fraser Valley. Jobs in the late 30’s were about as limited as finding gold at the end of the rainbow. My Dad did find work up at a place called Suicide Creek where they made cedar bolts and sent them down a flume where they were eventually sawn up into shingles. Most jobs back then paid only $2 a day and in the government relief camps the wages were dropped to 20 cents a day plus meals, bed and work clothes. Jobs were hard to keep but Dad eventually got another job in the valley working for a dairy farmer but having a job didn’t necessarily mean you got paid.
On or about now who should arrive but Robert Elwood Betts their firstborn and what a scrawny wrinkled red thing he appeared to be. He was a fighter and even though he was born 6 weeks premature and they did not think he would make it, he survived in spite of sometimes drastic measures, red hair and all.
What I mean by drastic measure was that on one particularly day after having come down with pneumonia, for he was a sickly baby coming down with one chest congestion after another, they placed him in a galvanized washtub on a small stool to keep his little toes and bottom from the scalding water beneath, and commenced to steam him. Can you imagine the squalling and the chaos that must have gone on? In spite of the scars on the poor babies left arm and side from the scalding water he survived. Who knows it might have been the only reason I’m still here.
Working for a dairy farmer who was a skinflint and even a little crooked meant dad did not always get paid, and it meant they had very little to eat. This brings a story to mind that my mother told me when I was quit small. My Dad after having not been paid for some time was unable to buy any food at all but somehow came upon a sack of carrots. When all you have to eat is carrots you eat carrots. In fact for weeks you eat carrots until you are sick of carrots. That may sound unsettling but when you’re a mother and have a newborn baby just a few months old and are unable to nurse him because your milk has dried up and you can’t feed him anything but carrots it is more then unsettling, it borders on despair. I was not doing very well and my Mom took me to the doctor and the diagnosis was rickets, a bone disease caused by a lack of calcium. When Minerva, Grandma Betts finally found out she just about had a fit and immediately went to the store and bought a bunch of groceries, especially milk for the baby.
