Waste Not, Want Not

By Earl M. Weber

Earl Weber lived on a small farm during the Great Depression, a time when the United States experienced severe economic hardships.

	Our family poses in front of the barn after returning from church. My brother and sister stand on a barrel, which will become the support for a seesaw later in the morning.

When I was growing up in the 1930s, the period of the Great Depression, I didn’t think of our family as poor, even though we never seemed to have money. I lived on a small farm in Pennsylvania with my parents, two older sisters, and younger brother. We had an old horse, a cow, a few pigs, a flock of chickens, and a big garden. Food was not a problem. We had our own supply of milk, meat, eggs, fresh vegetables, and Momma’s homemade bread. But money was scarce.

On Sunday mornings, Momma would give each of us two pennies for our Sunday School offerings. Carefully knotting my two cents in the corner of a handkerchief, she would hand it to me and caution me to “be careful not to lose it.” Today, two pennies won’t buy much of anything, but in the 1930s every penny was important.

My younger brother (right) and I model nightgowns that Momma made from feed sacks.

As a boy of nine, I had only a vague idea of what it meant to live during hard times. The weekly newspaper would carry pictures of people standing in line for bread, and the evening newscast on our tabletop Crosley radio would tell about the huge number of jobless people and their hardships. But these reports referred to people in the cities, and we lived in the country. We never went to bed hungry, and we didn’t stand in line for bread.

Although my father was fortunate to have a job at the feed mill, his salary of eighteen dollars a week was barely enough to pay the farm mortgage and the electric bill, and to buy necessities like the flour and yeast Momma needed to bake her bread.

	The four of us dressed up for Sunday School on a spring morning. We had to wear garters, which were a nuisance, to hold up our long stockings.

Momma earned a few dollars baking pies and bread, which she sold at the local market. Twenty cents for a pie and ten cents for a loaf of bread! Sometimes I helped at the market, and if we had a good day, Momma would give me a nickel for an ice-cream cone.

Momma used the market money to buy clothing for the family. With four children and two adults to clothe, she seldom bought anything new. One day when I walked to the mailbox at the end of our lane, I was excited to see a package from Sears, Roebuck and Company. That usually meant new clothing for one of us. As it turned out, I was the lucky one this time, with a brand-new pair of brown tweed knee-length knickers. Although we always went to school looking neat and clean, most of our clothing was patched, darned, or mended. So to me, a new pair of knickers was very special.

Christmas was special, too, because then we got new socks, and for a little while we wouldn’t have to wear socks darned in the toes and heels.

Momma made some of our clothing, using a treadle (foot-powered) sewing machine. To make nightgowns, she used the muslin sacks that our chicken feed came in. I wore a nightgown with “PRATT’S CHICKEN FEED” printed in big black letters on the front. (It wasn’t until years later when my high-school class went on an overnight trip that I got my first store-bought pajamas.) Some companies actually put their feed in sacks made of colorfully patterned calico. Momma liked this material for making aprons and dresses.

Riding our homemade seesaw was thrilling. The barrel rolled and twisted as the plank went up and down.

When a piece of clothing was worn out, it wasn’t thrown away. First, all the buttons were removed, sorted by size and color, and put in cans or glass jars. Then the clothing was examined, and the best parts were cut into strips and saved for making rugs.

Almost nothing in our house was thrown away. Store parcels were generally tied with string. We saved this string by winding it on a ball. One of my jobs was to wash and flatten used tin cans. We nailed these pieces of tin over holes in the barn roof to stop the leaks and over holes in the corncrib to stop the mice and rats from eating the corn.

A wooden crate was considered a real prize. We would take it apart for future projects, being careful not to split the boards. We even straightened the bent nails and stored them in a tin can.

Although we tend to think of recycling as something fairly new, in the 1930s it was part of every-day life. “Waste not, want not” was a familiar and often repeated phrase during those Depression years.

Yesterday and Today In the 1930s, a chocolate bar cost five cents. A single-dip ice-cream cone was also five cents. If that sounds good, consider that children living in the country, if they were lucky enough to have a job, earned only ten cents an hour for farm labor. Kids today pay around a dollar for an ice-cream cone and about the same for a chocolate bar. But some can earn five dollars an hour baby-sitting or mowing lawns.