Iowa Then...

Note from Greetings: "As I remembered it, too."

by Mildred Armstrong Kalish, NY Times
January 3, 2008
Op-Ed Contributor
Cupertino, Calif.

LIKE many Americans, I’ve been tuned into the nonstop coverage of the Iowa caucuses. Unlike many Americans, I’m an actual Iowan, having grown up there in the 1930s. As I watch and listen from the promised land of California, where I moved long ago, I can’t help but keep returning to a twin observation: Yes, this is really different from the Iowa of my childhood — but it’s also kind of the same.

The difference is obvious and inescapable. The hypersaturated media and political attention we take for granted today depends on a system of communication that is fast, reliable and far-reaching. In my time such a system did not exist.

In the small town of Garrison, where I grew up, most houses had just a telephone, a big wooden boxy affair that was attached to the wall in the kitchen. A telephone switchboard installed in the front of one of the two gasoline filling stations on Main Street, which was all of four blocks long, was efficiently operated by Gesena Gross, an old maid. (That’s what we callously called unmarried females in those days.) She was known as “Central.” Her official hours were from about 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. She also had a switchboard in her home where one could call after hours in an emergency.

The farms had to share telephone lines; each family was assigned different rings so you could know whom the call was for. For instance, the Irwins would have one long ring and two short ones; the Burkeys would be assigned three short rings; the Boldts would have one long, one short, one long and one short and so on.

The problem arose when people on the same line would listen in on someone else’s call and thus drain the power. The exasperated original callers could barely hear each other and there would ensue a request to the unwelcome eavesdroppers, incremental in intensity. “Will one or two of you please hang up your receivers?” and ending with “Get off the damn line!”

As for other forms of communication, Garrison had no newspaper and no mail delivery. Residents daily walked to a post office on the town square. I do recall that there was mail delivery to the surrounding farm houses; the job was not highly paid but it was coveted because it came, on retirement, with a federal pension.

And radios? Most people owned simple devices that were powered by a battery or a small wind generator on the roof. Electrification came with the New Deal a few years later.

So where are the similarities?

Though Iowa has been holding caucuses since the mid-1800s, the rest of the country didn’t pay attention to them until recently, and I don’t even remember them from my childhood. What I do remember, though, are the passionate political gatherings that regularly took place on my grandfather’s front porch. It occurs to me that these were not so different in spirit from the caucuses we are enduring now.

I recall the scenes from early in the ’30s. In early evening, after supper, about a half a dozen of the older men from the area would gather to chew the fat. After discussing local matters, the talk quite often turned to the who, why and how of political preferences.

Grandpa was a slight man, constructed mostly of bone, muscle and gristle. He liked to sit or stand quietly with his hands loosely clasped inside and just above the top of the bib of his denim overalls. He seldom raised his voice and he spoke softly and thoughtfully. He sounded authoritative.

Some of the men I remember: Ed Meece and Cap Gross were assertive Republicans; they were Herbert Hoover supporters. So was A. J. Donald, our neighbor and a banker. These gentlemen didn’t think government should intervene in public affairs to fix the economy. They were certain that Franklin Roosevelt would ruin America.

Alex Irwin, Clarence Barkdoll and Ed Baldwin (our only druggist) — and Grandpa were dedicated Democrats who derisively pointed out “Hoover villages” made of cardboard and flimsy lumber. (They called newspapers “Hoover blankets.”)

Grandpa was the only one of the group who was a farmer. And he understood that Roosevelt’s programs would help the rural areas. In particular, I remember him talking about Roosevelt’s promise to create “Farm to Market” roads that would put crushed rock mined from local limestone quarries on top of the dirt roads that storms turned into impassable mud paths, a monumental plague of the farm communities.

My grandfather’s mini-caucuses and passions weren’t just reserved for adults, though. Most mornings, before we trotted off to school, he would assemble my three other siblings and me. Generally, he’d read us a few cogent Bible verses while we stood there, all gussied up in our clean school clothes, dinner pails in hand, champing to be off to see our classmates.

One morning, just as the Roosevelt-Hoover race was heating up, Grandpa glanced up during his reading and noticed a large pin on my older brother Jack’s shoulder. (Jack was probably 12 at the time.) The button, with bold black letters on a white background, read “Hoover.”

Grandpa froze; his face took on a grim, stony look; he gritted his teeth. Without seeming to look at the Bible, he finished his reading abruptly. Staring directly at Jack, he tapped his own shoulder and then pointed to the basket of corn cobs that fed the kitchen stove. In a split second, Jack plucked the offending emblem from his shoulder and flung it into the corn cobs. We went merrily off to school. Roosevelt won that election.

Mildred Armstrong Kalish is the author of “Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression.”