Part 16
The Crash

Editor Note: As you read the following put yourself in my parent’s (your Grandparents or Great Grandparents) place. Leland is 28 years old and Clara 24 – not unlike the current ages of their great grandchildren Holly, Randy, Heather, Jamie, David, Amy, Jeff and Michael. They have a young family – the youngest, Leland A. less than one year old. They are just getting started in a career – in this case farming – and have many of the same hopes and worries we have today. ( The photo is of Leland, Bea, Alice and Leland A cutting up potatoes for seed about 1930)

And what follows will have a profound effect on their lives, not only for the next 10 years but will shape their attitudes about money, debt and banks for the rest of their days. So join us for a personal look at the Great Depression.

1929 is turning out to be a good year for the Cottles, thanks to some spring rains and plenty of sunshine the harvest is one of the best in recent years. Leland and Clara are settling into, and expanding, the original Cottle homestead. With 3 children (Alice, Bea and Leland A.) and a calling as ward Bishop – life is busy, but good. We pick up the story on October 28th 1929. Supper is over and the kids are outside playing in the creek. Leland and Clara are having a serious discussion.
Clara, “Lee, I think we should sell the wheat right now! It is a good price and you can freight it to Malad tomorrow.”
“I don’t know if that is the right thing to do. Wheat is down a little a little bit – remember back in 1920 wheat was selling for $2.45 a bushel and last year it dropped to $1.49 so it seems to me the price has nowhere to go but up. So I think we’ll hold out for a couple of days.
“Alright Lee, that’s ok with me, but at least take a few sacks of potatoes to market to sell tomorrow so we can have the necessary cash to buy groceries.”
“Clara, I’ll do that – we could use a little ready cash.”
So the next morning Leland heads to Malad with a load of potatoes in 100 pound bags. He finds the price for potatoes a little lower that he wants but nonetheless he sells his entire load and returns to Stone. Meanwhile Bea comes home from school with a story about some wild crash in New York. She is not sure if it trains or automobiles but it must be bad because the teachers are talking about it. She asks her mother why people would be jumping out of windows because of a car crash – it just doesn’t make sense to her.
Of course it is not a car crash, but the famous Black Tuesday Stock market crash that ushers in the Great Depression. The only source of national news in Stone is the newly purchased wireless radio and the news broadcasts are intermittent and sometimes difficult to understand because of the static. So it is a few days before Leland and Clara become fully aware of what has happened in New York and other large cities. The roaring 20’s come to a complete and sudden halt on October 29th 1929 – often called “Black Tuesday” - as the mighty New York Stock Exchange loses almost 40% of its total value in one day. This has a domino effect on the rest of the economy, although the market, in early 1930, makes several attempts to regain the lost value, people panic – consumer spending drops, factories lay people off, causing a further drop in spending (this is not a treatise on the depression but just a little background). Banks, most of whom have loaned more money than their assets, begin to call in their loans – the people, many of whom have run up large personal debt during the good time twenties – cannot pay back the loans on demand. Banks started to fail and the whole house of cards come tumbling down. Let us see how this crisis plays out in Stone, Idaho.
At first the news of troubles in the Stock Market seems remote and far away, and not likely to have much effect in rural Idaho. But things change quickly. Remember that discussion about whether or not to sell the wheat in the fall of 1929 because the price had dropped to $1.59 a bushel. Well, by late 1929 the price is 0.90 cents and before Leland can sell in the spring of 1930 he is lucky to get 0.49 cents, less than one third the price he turned down six months ago. Leland also reports that the price of potatoes drops so low that they are not even worth hauling to market and he just feeds them to the pigs. All this happens so suddenly that there is little chance to prepare. People lose homes and farms and the unemployment rate goes as high as 30 %. Welcome to the Great Depression!
It is a double worry for Leland and Clara, for as well as solving their own financial problems, Leland, as Bishop of the ward, is heavily involved in the plight of ward members. Take, for example the Wren family, while not members of the ward they live in Stone and so Leland feels it is his responsibility to help them as well. Mr. Wren is unemployed and to top it off suffers a broken leg and so is laid up all winter. Leland hauls wood to keep the Wren house warm, takes some of his own wheat to Malad to be ground into flour so Mrs. Wren can bake bread and even goes to Holbrook to get some hay Mr. Wren is owed and brings it back to use as he feeds the Wren cattle, all this while trying to keep his own farm running.
Early one evening while Lee is “separating” (skimming the cream from the milk – sort of an early forerunner to 2% milk) the neighbor boy comes running into the barn screaming, “Come quick, my little sister has swallowed a sucker, stick and all!” Leland jumps in his car (the neighbors have no car) and heads to the neighbors where he finds a grief stricken mother and a frightened little girl with a broken sucker stick in her hand and the sucker and other half of the stick in her throat. Leland grabs the girl and heads the 36 miles to Tremonton and the nearest doctor. A few hours later he returns with a happy smiling little girl in the seat beside him, with a sucker in her mouth! Leland said he bought her the sucker after the doctor busted the one in her throat while removing it and she felt sad at the loss because her family could only afford one candy trip to the local store per month.
Early in the morning of March 6th 1931, the day of the annual ward reunion, Clara says, very calmly, “Dad, I don’t think I will make it to the reunion today, I think I’m about to give birth – but don’t worry I did make the salad for the reunion.” Since it is early in the morning and the ground frozen Lee can still travel on the normally muddy roads to get Mrs. Carter, a practical nurse, who arrives just in time to see Clara cuddling newborn Wallace in her arms. Leland worries if everything is alright but Clara just tells him she is fine and to get on his way to the reunion, because no ward reunion would be complete without the Bishop (Doesn’t this sound just like mom?)
(Editor: I am stopping here and this will be the last installment until Fall when I will have much more about the Cottle Family and the Depression – good times and bad. So have a good summer, thanks for all the excellent comments – to Steve and Alice thanks for the pictures and stories– I will use them in future episodes. And remember I welcome any and all stories, facts or photos relating to the Cottle family.)