Growing Up in Richmond
By Cliff Fuglestad
An open letter to his grandchildren
I was born in Oakland, Calif. in 1923 and grew up in Richmond, Calif., a blue collar town located on San Francisco Bay. Both my parents had left their homes in Norway while still in their teens, and had been among the millions of immigrants who had landed on our eastern shores during the early 1900's; Papa, your great grandfather (Sophus), in 1903 at the age of 15 and Mama, your great grandmother (Helena), in 1910 at the age of 18. While serving in the US Navy during World War 1 Papa had been posted to the West Coast, and after the Armistice had decided to settle down in California.
Having followed the Sea early in his life, both in Norway and on the East Coast, he quickly found employment in the ferry boats and tug boats that plied the Bay and began to raise his family of three boys (Henry, Stan, and myself) and one daughter (Marilyn) in a nice comfortable home. But then the Great Depression hit, and as Papa began to find less and less work, he lost the deposit on our home and soon we were moving from house to house, each one cheaper than the last, and finally ending up in a cold water flat on the south side of Richmond. It was at the age of 10 in 1933 that I finally became aware that Papa had lost his job on the ferry, and that we were poor.
How poor? Well one night a few days before Christmas Eve, the door bell rang and when we opened the door, there was a box containing both food and second-hand toys left by the members of the Lutheran Church who were aware of our plight, one that was shared by many other families in Richmond as the unemployment rate climbed steadily towards 25%.
Working conditions, and the lowering of wages on the waterfront, became so bad that the union called a general strike. What an ugly event that turned out to be. At that time we had no car, and being unable to pay the bus fare, Papa had to walk the 3 miles each day to and from the ferry dock to take his place on the picket line. That strike left a lot of bitter memories that require little effort to revive, even today over half a century later.
For the unemployed during the Great Depression, life became pretty grim. There was no social security, and with the Hoover administration's failure to take action, soup kitchens became a standard fixture in the cities. I remember how we boys did what we could to help our parents, going down to the Bay to look for discarded bait boxes which we would turn in for 2 cents each, or scouring the ground beneath the power lines, looking for scrap copper wire that we would sell to the itinerant scrap dealer. How we watched those scales to see how much we were going to make! A haul of 25 cents was a big day.
We helped Papa gather driftwood down at the Bay with which to heat our house during the cool winter months, sawing it up in short lengths with a cross-cut saw that was longer than my height, splitting it, stacking it, continuing a practice he carried over from Norway. We raised chickens and had a garden, and at the local feed and mill lot, we pulled nails from odds and ends of scrap lumber which we would then sell for 10 cents a sack.
All three of us boys were involved in a paper route that Stan was finally able to land against a lot of competition. For a time it brought in the only cash in the family. Stan still remembers the time when Mama broke into tears when the rent collector had come to the door and there was no money with which to pay the rent.
Today it is difficult for people to understand the corrosive effect that prolonged unemployment had on the head of the household. Back in the Thirties, the father was still the breadwinner, and when he came home day after day with empty hands, his self esteem crumbled before the anxious eyes of his wife and children. Men by the thousands could no longer face that daily prospect which seemed to have no end and took to the road, promising that they would be back after they had found work in another city, another county, or another state and had saved some money. But of course they ran into the same high unemployment wherever they went - too few jobs for too many workers. Many never returned home as riding the rails, being on the move, became a way of life that was reduced to the simple elements of finding the next meal and a place to spend the next night in one of the hobo 'jungles' or 'Hoovervilles' that had sprung up throughout the country.
One of the indelible pictures I still carry in my mind of that time is watching a freight train heading north through Richmond with a string of 30 or 40 freight cars. Every car carried from 5 to 10 or more men, some riding on top of the cars, others sitting in the doorways of empty box cars or riding the rods beneath the decks of the flat cars, leaving the crowded cities of the Bay Area behind them. This was in 1936, seven years after the collapse of the stock market and the start of the Great Depression.
Somehow we managed to survive as a family - just barely.
State and national politics were sure to arouse Papa's interest, and it was here that Uncle Stan and I experienced a closeness with Papa that was otherwise absent. We both can recall those early Presidential elections in which the three of us would stay up late to listen to the election returns coming in on the radio. That was BT (Before Television). Almost without exception the newspapers of that time were controlled by the McCormacks, the Pattersons, the Hearst chain etc who were vitriolic in their attacks on Roosevelt and his attempts to bring this country out of the Great Depression. So were Father Coughlan and Gerald K. Smith in their radio programs which were forerunners of today's abrasive radio talk shows. And columnists like Westbrook Pegler and H. L. Mencken unloaded their weekly quota of bile in their columns. But by using the radio and the force of his confident personality, Roosevelt came into our home and the homes of millions of other Americans, and gave us the one thing this country so badly needed - hope. Some of our favorite radio shows were:
- Jack Armstrong, The All American Boy
- Chandu The Magician
- Fibber McGee and Molly
- One Man's Family
I was hiking on Mt. Tamalpais in Marin County on December 7 1941, and didn't learn of the attack on Pearl Harbor until I called my sister just before catching the ferry boat that evening. Naturally she was excited and mentioned several rumors of possible attacks on California, all of which proved false. Stan and I became air raid wardens for our part of town which included Shipyard No. 1. During practice alerts the entire city would be blacked out except for the shipyard, which was too busy building ships for Great Britain. While we had the authority to turn people in for violating the blackout, Stan and I felt we didn't have enough weight to go up to the shipyards front gate and demand that they turn off their lights! Later on in the war, Stan became Third Mate on Standard Oil tankers and sailed in the Pacific war zone.
In the early days of World War II when things were going badly for this country, I remember Mama remarking that having survived the Great Depression there was nothing that this country could not do -- including winning the war!
As a whole I don't recall any serious grumbling about shortages and rationing during the war. It was generally accepted as part of the war effort. Gasoline and sugar were two items that were noticeable for their tight rationing. Among other activities in support of the war effort, were victory gardens on empty lots and War Bond drives, in which you could purchase a 25 dollar bond for $18.75 -- a heck of a bargain.
At one time or another during the war, Papa, Marilyn and I worked in Shipyard no. 4 in Richmond. Papa would work on the huge engines being installed in the new troop ships being built for the Navy. I worked in the fabricating yard doing layout work while Marilyn was on the office staff. Earlier, I had worked on B-24 bombers being built in San Diego by Consolidated Aircraft.
Once the war was over, and as a result of the war effort, nearly everyone had jobs and the Great Depression had ended. The war industries quickly converted to peace time efforts in order to satisfy the demands for civilian goods. People could now think about buying a home. One of the first things a GI friend of mine did on getting out of the Army was to buy a new car. One of the great things to come out of the war was the GI bill in which the government paid for a college ducation for those who wanted to get a degree, something that had been out of their reach during the Depression.
An open letter to his grandchildren
I was born in Oakland, Calif. in 1923 and grew up in Richmond, Calif., a blue collar town located on San Francisco Bay. Both my parents had left their homes in Norway while still in their teens, and had been among the millions of immigrants who had landed on our eastern shores during the early 1900's; Papa, your great grandfather (Sophus), in 1903 at the age of 15 and Mama, your great grandmother (Helena), in 1910 at the age of 18. While serving in the US Navy during World War 1 Papa had been posted to the West Coast, and after the Armistice had decided to settle down in California.
Having followed the Sea early in his life, both in Norway and on the East Coast, he quickly found employment in the ferry boats and tug boats that plied the Bay and began to raise his family of three boys (Henry, Stan, and myself) and one daughter (Marilyn) in a nice comfortable home. But then the Great Depression hit, and as Papa began to find less and less work, he lost the deposit on our home and soon we were moving from house to house, each one cheaper than the last, and finally ending up in a cold water flat on the south side of Richmond. It was at the age of 10 in 1933 that I finally became aware that Papa had lost his job on the ferry, and that we were poor.
How poor? Well one night a few days before Christmas Eve, the door bell rang and when we opened the door, there was a box containing both food and second-hand toys left by the members of the Lutheran Church who were aware of our plight, one that was shared by many other families in Richmond as the unemployment rate climbed steadily towards 25%.
Working conditions, and the lowering of wages on the waterfront, became so bad that the union called a general strike. What an ugly event that turned out to be. At that time we had no car, and being unable to pay the bus fare, Papa had to walk the 3 miles each day to and from the ferry dock to take his place on the picket line. That strike left a lot of bitter memories that require little effort to revive, even today over half a century later.
For the unemployed during the Great Depression, life became pretty grim. There was no social security, and with the Hoover administration's failure to take action, soup kitchens became a standard fixture in the cities. I remember how we boys did what we could to help our parents, going down to the Bay to look for discarded bait boxes which we would turn in for 2 cents each, or scouring the ground beneath the power lines, looking for scrap copper wire that we would sell to the itinerant scrap dealer. How we watched those scales to see how much we were going to make! A haul of 25 cents was a big day.
We helped Papa gather driftwood down at the Bay with which to heat our house during the cool winter months, sawing it up in short lengths with a cross-cut saw that was longer than my height, splitting it, stacking it, continuing a practice he carried over from Norway. We raised chickens and had a garden, and at the local feed and mill lot, we pulled nails from odds and ends of scrap lumber which we would then sell for 10 cents a sack.
All three of us boys were involved in a paper route that Stan was finally able to land against a lot of competition. For a time it brought in the only cash in the family. Stan still remembers the time when Mama broke into tears when the rent collector had come to the door and there was no money with which to pay the rent.
Today it is difficult for people to understand the corrosive effect that prolonged unemployment had on the head of the household. Back in the Thirties, the father was still the breadwinner, and when he came home day after day with empty hands, his self esteem crumbled before the anxious eyes of his wife and children. Men by the thousands could no longer face that daily prospect which seemed to have no end and took to the road, promising that they would be back after they had found work in another city, another county, or another state and had saved some money. But of course they ran into the same high unemployment wherever they went - too few jobs for too many workers. Many never returned home as riding the rails, being on the move, became a way of life that was reduced to the simple elements of finding the next meal and a place to spend the next night in one of the hobo 'jungles' or 'Hoovervilles' that had sprung up throughout the country.
One of the indelible pictures I still carry in my mind of that time is watching a freight train heading north through Richmond with a string of 30 or 40 freight cars. Every car carried from 5 to 10 or more men, some riding on top of the cars, others sitting in the doorways of empty box cars or riding the rods beneath the decks of the flat cars, leaving the crowded cities of the Bay Area behind them. This was in 1936, seven years after the collapse of the stock market and the start of the Great Depression.
Somehow we managed to survive as a family - just barely.
State and national politics were sure to arouse Papa's interest, and it was here that Uncle Stan and I experienced a closeness with Papa that was otherwise absent. We both can recall those early Presidential elections in which the three of us would stay up late to listen to the election returns coming in on the radio. That was BT (Before Television). Almost without exception the newspapers of that time were controlled by the McCormacks, the Pattersons, the Hearst chain etc who were vitriolic in their attacks on Roosevelt and his attempts to bring this country out of the Great Depression. So were Father Coughlan and Gerald K. Smith in their radio programs which were forerunners of today's abrasive radio talk shows. And columnists like Westbrook Pegler and H. L. Mencken unloaded their weekly quota of bile in their columns. But by using the radio and the force of his confident personality, Roosevelt came into our home and the homes of millions of other Americans, and gave us the one thing this country so badly needed - hope. Some of our favorite radio shows were:
- Jack Armstrong, The All American Boy
- Chandu The Magician
- Fibber McGee and Molly
- One Man's Family
I was hiking on Mt. Tamalpais in Marin County on December 7 1941, and didn't learn of the attack on Pearl Harbor until I called my sister just before catching the ferry boat that evening. Naturally she was excited and mentioned several rumors of possible attacks on California, all of which proved false. Stan and I became air raid wardens for our part of town which included Shipyard No. 1. During practice alerts the entire city would be blacked out except for the shipyard, which was too busy building ships for Great Britain. While we had the authority to turn people in for violating the blackout, Stan and I felt we didn't have enough weight to go up to the shipyards front gate and demand that they turn off their lights! Later on in the war, Stan became Third Mate on Standard Oil tankers and sailed in the Pacific war zone.
In the early days of World War II when things were going badly for this country, I remember Mama remarking that having survived the Great Depression there was nothing that this country could not do -- including winning the war!
As a whole I don't recall any serious grumbling about shortages and rationing during the war. It was generally accepted as part of the war effort. Gasoline and sugar were two items that were noticeable for their tight rationing. Among other activities in support of the war effort, were victory gardens on empty lots and War Bond drives, in which you could purchase a 25 dollar bond for $18.75 -- a heck of a bargain.
At one time or another during the war, Papa, Marilyn and I worked in Shipyard no. 4 in Richmond. Papa would work on the huge engines being installed in the new troop ships being built for the Navy. I worked in the fabricating yard doing layout work while Marilyn was on the office staff. Earlier, I had worked on B-24 bombers being built in San Diego by Consolidated Aircraft.
Once the war was over, and as a result of the war effort, nearly everyone had jobs and the Great Depression had ended. The war industries quickly converted to peace time efforts in order to satisfy the demands for civilian goods. People could now think about buying a home. One of the first things a GI friend of mine did on getting out of the Army was to buy a new car. One of the great things to come out of the war was the GI bill in which the government paid for a college ducation for those who wanted to get a degree, something that had been out of their reach during the Depression.