My Father and the Great Depression

My father recently turn 101, never mind the fact he died in 1991. When I remember him, I think of how his adult life had two distinct phases. My dad was a WWII veteran and a guy who when he reached adulthood, had The Great Depression looking at him right in the eye like a big, angry bear. These factors affected my father for many decades, well after I had grown, flown the coup, and was living elsewhere.

As I was growing up, my father was one big cheapskate. Some of the penny-pinching testimonials now seem funny and even heartwarming, but at the time they made me shake my youthful head. I remember when I was going to play Little League baseball, I needed a mitt. My father took me to Woolco Department Store to look over their baseball gloves. I selected a decent, mid-priced glove with a nice catching pocket. As I was getting a feel for the glove, a clerk came up and asked if he could answer any questions. Without a second of hesitation, my father asked, “What’s the cheapest glove you got?” The clerk went into a back room and returned a moment later with a mitt that could have been made out of some old shingle off a roof. I think the brand name was in Yugoslavian. I had been looking at a glove that cost about $5. I think the glove I ended-up with cost about six bits. The mitt had no catching pocket whatsoever. The best that could be expected was to have the hurtling ball hit the glove, fall to the fielder’s feet, and then retrieved from the ground. What made matters worse, the glove was indestructible. To acquire a new, better glove, I needed to destroy the old one. Unfortunately that seemed impossible. A lawnmower did it no harm whatsoever. I ended up finding a glove that had been cast into some weeds, rejected by another little leaguer. It was the glove I used my entire Little League career. 

In 1958 our family took a vacation trip to Florida in the Oldsmobile. I think we were about halfway through Georgia when one of the car’s cheap, bald tires blew-out. Fortunately the car did not go spinning out of control, and we were able to thump down the road for a mile or so until we reached a gas station. My father could have gotten a new Firestone or Goodyear tire for a reasonable price. But apparently “reasonable” was too expensive. My father wanted something a little thriftier, after all, only the entire seatbeltless family was going to be riding on the tire at speeds over 70 MPH. My dad had a used tire placed on the car. “It still has plenty of tread,” he boasted as we returned to our highway journey. 

I can still hear my dad saying, “Just give me the cheapest you got.” He spoke that phrase many times when I was a kid.

My father retired in 1979. A few months after he retired he bought a membership at a golf course. It was not some highfalutin country club, but the membership did cost him a few hundred dollars. Needless to say, I was shocked. I actually thought he had taken ill.

To get out to this golf course, he traded in his old, smoke-belching car and bought a new one. He didn't buy a new Lincoln, but he did put out a pretty good chunk of change and purchased a high-end Nissan wagon. 

Something was going on and I had to find out what it was so I invited myself out to play golf with him. He was delighted to have a playing companion, in fact, on the way to the course he asked if I would be willing to play for 25 cents a hole. A quarter a hole!? No doubt about it, someone, or something, had hijacked my father’s body.

We pretty much broke even as far as the wagering, but on the way home we stopped at a Mexican restaurant where my father bought me lunch. He insisted. 

It was a few days later during a family get-together that my father declared that he had opened a new, final chapter to his time on earth. He called it the “dessert period of life”. I did not think an old dog could learn new tricks, but really, he pretty much succeeded. From then on he bought himself nice shoes, name-brand razor blades, and top-of-the-line golf balls. He and my mother had the money, and he figured it was high-time to start spending it. Yeah, I knew that somewhere in the $400 pricetag of his new swivel recliner there were a few cents that could have gone into that baseball glove I had wanted as a kid. But when all was said and done, I figured that was water long since under the bridge. I was never going to the Major Leagues anyhow. I was just glad to see that at the age of sixty-six, The Great Depression had finally ended for my dad.