My Grandmother's Great Depression - and Ours

Mary Urban Endrich,
my mother's mother, in front of
their garage in Old Saybrook, CT

Economic recessions hit poor people the hardest. 

The Great Depression following the market crash in 1929 lasted a full decade, ending only in 1939 with the advent of World War II and the "boom" provided by a wartime economy of military production.

It turned many peoples lives upside down forever -- including my grandparents' and parents'. 

Never again did we live in fear of not having enough food.

Never again did any of us live without fear that this could happen again.

Hunger gets into your bones.

The wealthy remain insulated. No matter how hard the market crashes, the robber barons have always survived -- and in fact generally get richer.

The stock market, in which today many keep their retirement savings, went from a record high earlier this year to a 10% loss these past three weeks, losing approximately $5 trillion in value.

It would be nice to think these numbers are abstract, or, if you don't have any savings, disconnected from your health and well being.

However, when markets contract severely, as they are currently doing, it also means jobs and wages contract.

Mary's house, in which both my mother
and I grew up, on the Middletown Road
in Old Saybrook, CT

At its peak in 1933, 25% of the U.S. workforce, or approximately 12.83 million people, were unemployed.

Millions of people lost their homes and hit the road, seeking food and shelter.

My mother's parents, Mary and Richard, were able to hold onto their home and my grandmother's generosity was legendary.

They were lucky my grandfather had bought the property more than 10 years earlier. On it, Mary managed a "family farm" of one cow, chickens, and a large truck garden on the town line between Essex and Old Saybrook, CT.

Born to Bohemian immigrants on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, Mary had grown up on the farm to which they had escaped in Killingworth, CT.  She could grow anything, cook anything, and would feed anyone who came to her door.

Mary Urban, center, with her 
father, butcher and farmer Frantisek
behind her plus unknown relatives.

The "hobos," as my mother and aunt called them -- the unhoused and unemployed who took to the rails and roads -- marked an X on the road in front of my grandmother's house to communicate to their fellow travelers that this was a place at which they might find food.

Mostly doughnuts fried in lard!

Despite their safety and relative privilege, the looming sense of disaster never departed our household.

Mary's great depression -- she was also probably bipolar, and I grew up in the drama of that -- has now become my own.

The economic news has given me nightmares of starving as an old woman with no supports.

While I know this is my family legacy, born of the 20th century's Great Depression, of fearing there will be food shortages and never enough I am truly lucky to have never -- until now -- worried about this in my lifetime.

My generation has been blessed with relative peace and prosperity.

It is not that there is not always horror happening around us: we are flawed humans, some of whom still try to live in god's image and many of whom don't. 

Many in the U.S. worship only the golden calf, as it were.

I find it unutterably sad to be living inside a national culture with few values left. One that has sold our soul for material accumulation.

It makes me miss my grandmother's booming voice and laugh, her largesse with whatever she had, her love for family and pride in her new land.

My aunt Evelyn, grandmother Mary,
me the littlest, cousin Cindy in my
grandmother's garden between her house
and ours.

Her cultivation. Of zinnias, corn, yellow squash -- and me.

And for those of us who still value the gift of this creation we've been given, we do our best to give to the land, to cultivate it. To give of ourselves to others.

We might still, ultimately, starve from the greed and machinations of the wealthy.

The roots of the U.S. are in the genocide of the native cultures that cultivated this continent before the founders' arrivals; in the enslavement of Africans to build wealth from the stolen land; in the ongoing callousness with which workers and their family are excluded and mistreated by those with wealth and privilege -- all the things the practices of diversity, equity, and inclusion were created to heal.

But we will have our doughnuts. And our souls.

The Triumph of Mechanism Over Grace: How Do We Respond?

A new, feminist production of a classic
at American Repertory Theater

Can we break our historic cycles of violence against each other?

If you’ve gone through something traumatic, can you ever go back to who you were?

Can you ever go back home?

This is the essential question behind the new version of "The Odyssey" by Kate Hamill at American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, which I saw last weekend.

I'm wondering if people even read "The Odyssey" in school anymore. Did you read it?

Fantastic new translation.

The epic poem by Homer is memorable for the "adventures" -- the mythical creatures and challenges -- Odysseus has to face to finally make his way back to his home, wife, and son in Ithaca -- 10 years after the 10-year-long Trojan War.

Odysseus: a Greek hero famed for his intellect and craftiness. The devisor of the Trojan horse by which the Greeks finally won the Trojan War, and which today stands as a metaphor of trickery.

Having used the hollow wooden horse to sack Troy, ending the war, Odysseus still had some criminal decisions to make prior to setting his black ships to sail toward home.

Such as what to do with Trojan hero Hector's wife, Andromache -- whose name itself means "fighter of men" -- and tiny infant son.

Allegedly in an attempt to stop the cycles of violence, Odysseus -- in various versions of the story -- hurls the infant from the battlements of Troy, or has him killed. The son can then no longer seek revenge for the death of his father. Odysseus faces the same ethical challenge when he returns to Ithaca to find -- not surprisingly, given his 20 year absence -- his wife surrounded by young suitors.

All of whom he murders.

"The Illiad" was always my favorite of these two epics. Homer wrote "The Illiad" as an anti-war poem, never glorifying the violence of the Trojan War but consistently depicting its horrors. 

But the truth of my passion for the poem is the homosexual love story between the hero Achilles and his Patroclus at the poem's center.

There was not much in the class literature of my school years that reflected my experience as a butch lesbian.

Achilles and Patroclus were what I had.

And now I have these essential questions.

If you’ve gone through something traumatic, can you ever go back to who you were?

Can you ever go back home?

I was never able to go back home once I left.

Sound board and stage at ART's new production
of Homer's "The Odyssey"

How do we discover grace in ourselves? As the eminent mid-century Jewish philosopher Simone Weil defined it, grace being anything that "leaves us free to step aside from the tyranny of the ego and make room for one another, free to absorb and not to transmit violence."

My trauma was not physical violence, but that of being a young lesbian in a homophobic family and world.

I went away to college, moved into the more affirming world of feminism and gay rights, and never went back. It took decades for me to reconcile with my family.

Interestingly, my viewing of this new feminist version of "The Odyssey," which centers Penolope's experience, coincided with the appearance in the liturgical cycle of what is arguably Luke's most famous gospel: 6: 27-38, or, simplified as it so often is, the gospel of the "golden rule" -- do unto others.

I sat in the pew last week wondering how other U.S. christians are reconciling this gospel with the actions of the Republican administration as they eliminate jobs and humanitarian programs that save people's lives around the world in the name of "government efficiencies."

This term should send chills down all of our spines.

"Government efficiencies" are what dictators such as Hitler and Mussolini pursued. Making the trains run on time. Getting people into camps. 

Eliminating people. Or their livelihoods. Because they are not people to them. Their hatred has turned whole groups of people into things. Avatars in some imagined online gaming system.

And this, as Hannah Arendt noted and repeatedly warned against, is the essence of totalitarianism: reducing living beings to things in order to commit violence against them.

It is happening around us now.

I recently read a post by a white supremacist who repeatedly dehumanized a black woman reporter right here in Portland, Maine.

We're all watching while action after action, word after word, dehumanizes transexual people.

All the while, a large group of our fellow citizens are chortling happily about "government efficiencies" that are mowing down civil rights and other programs.

Who wouldn't like to see government operate as cost-effectively as possible?

But when, as my father used to say, the "almighty dollar" becomes more important to you than treating other human beings as you yourself want to be treated -- then you are no longer a christian.

Many would argue that you yourself are no longer human.

That only monsters care more about money than about those in need.

Luke's gospel is not only about turning the other cheek.

In it, Jesus requires us to actually DO GOOD to those who hate us.

"Give to everyone who asks you, and from the one who takes what is yours do not demand it back."

Pray for those who mistreat us.

"For if you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them."

This is how we end the cycles of violence with which we are afflicted. This is a gospel that stands as an affront to the "prosperity gospel" of contemporary U.S. evangelical christianity -- and to the actions of the current President of the United States.

Woe to those who seek to make a business deal from others' suffering.

As Ukrainian's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy noted, after being loudly and publicly berated by the U.S. President for defending his country from the totalitarian attack of Russia -- only woe will follow.

Ultimately, our compassion for these perpetrators must acknowledge that they are not well.

They are ill, acting out of character with our world, and spreading their illness.

We need a vaccine against their greed and hatred!

#newblogpost

Sources:

"How America Got Mean," David Brooks, The Atlantic, August 2023.

"Homer's History of Violence," Rowan Williams, The New Statesman, September 2023.

The Bust of the Boomers: How We Failed and What's Next

Baby boomer as artist in smock.

I'm at the tail end of the baby boom generations -- i.e., a "young" boomer at age 63.

Our generation is the result of a tremendous post-World War II U.S. economic surge, coupled with the optimism and relief that fascism had been vanquished by American exceptionalism, and genocide in both Germany and Russia at least temporarily halted.

With all of this hope and optimism in the air, everyone wanted and most importantly -- thanks to the GI Bill and the military-industrial complex economic boom -- many were financially able to have babies.

My first memory from age 2 was watching the funeral for President John F. Kennedy on a black and white TV in a darkened room at my mother's friend Pat's house. I didn't really know what I was watching, although I identified with the grieving John John who was roughly my same age and thrust into the public spotlight by the assassination of his father.

Even at age two I could feel the nation's grief, and sense the seismic upheavals that were about to transition us from the post-war boom years into the five assassinations, protests, riots, war and cultural upheavals that marked my youth.

We boomers grew up protesting. With the assassinations of Kennedy, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy the optimistic progressivism of the U.S. was violently subdued by those who did not want to extend civil rights to others; by those who did not want white U.S. wealth and privilege to be shared here at home or perhaps especially abroad through Kennedy's USAID, Peace Corps, and more.

Those of us who continued to believe that vanquishing fascism with U.S. prosperity and democracy had ushered in a new era of hope, equity, diversity and inclusivity, took to the streets to fight these reactionaries and their lies.

We believed in a common good, in community over profits, in a world in which the wealthy cared about those with less. We sought to build equity: creating cooperatives and collectives and buying land together and making consensus-based decisions. We respected and worked to nurture the environment around us, eating plant-based diets "for a small planet" and advocating for the Clean Water Act and the EPA. We fought and fought for civil rights for all -- people of color, women, queers, trannies.

A collective Friendsgiving in the 1980's.

And ultimately against the holocaust of discrimination and death that was the AIDS crisis in the 1980's U.S. during the Reagan regime.

Sadly, the forces of conservative reaction remain very much with us today worldwide, spearheaded in the U.S. by new figureheads -- Trump & Musk.

I might argue that these reactionaries to equity, diversity, and inclusivity for all would of course remain with us. That those who disproportionately hoard privilege and power at the expense of others remain in every society throughout history; and that history itself is a cycle of two steps forward and one step back. We never lose all the ground we've gained, but the regressions are painful.

I could argue that we underestimated the insecurity of white men around the globe to the extent that they now have to scream it at us in what would be comic ways if they were not so well armed for violence. Really, how did we end up in this reality TV show of racist masculinity?!

But what I want to argue is that we are here in large part because my generation, the boomers -- really one of the wealthiest and most privileged in American history -- have failed our next generations.

Woodsbians 1980's.

Too many of us became enamored with the creature comforts of wealth and privilege -- which is to say, exalting the individual over the common good.

We allowed capitalism to seduce us as we aged to the point that the Democratic party that once best represented our progressivism has become known as the party of the "liberal elite" rather than that of labor and the poor. In the 1990's, Democrats allowed our unions to be broken and our social safety nets to be diminished. We got in line behind the free market "neoliberalism" of NAFTA.

NYC Pride March 1990's

Truth lies behind every stereotype. Yes, the conservative agenda has used the label of "liberal elites" to tarnish progressive democracy.

But it couldn't be tarnished without the truth that lies beneath it.

We boomers have some accountability for where we are, and we have not only to acknowledge it but to re-present and insist on our vivid, ethical, equitable vision for the future.

Where is our moral leadership? Where is the big vision of "liberty and justice for all" we need to rise above the financial bureaucracy and meritocracy we've instead and reductively held up as goals?

A new feminist collective for a new century

My generation has fallen down on the job and it's time to pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and support the young people who want to move into the more just future we once embodied and probably still -- speaking for myself -- believe in.

We are going to have to give up some creature comforts, take some risks, and face some uncomfortable truths to get there.

It's not how I thought I'd spend my old age. But.

Time to stop texting and to breathe embodiment back into our beliefs. "Love" is not merely a nice warm feeling between individuals: it's embodied action for love of others and this world.

My Gritty Grandmother's Rooming House

My grandmother by adoption, Signe, immigrated to New Britain CT from Sweden when she was 18 years old in 1916.

She came to help her sister care for her twin girls -- Eva and Valborg. Her sister passed away, and Signe pretty much raised the girls.

She married a fellow Swedish immigrant, Axel Hjalmer, in 1923 and immediately had my dad, Evert Hjalmer, who followed his dad's footsteps and became a machinist. They lived in industrial New Britain, home of Stanley Tools/Works. Machinists were in high demand

They lived in the same area of New Britain their entire lives, all around Walnut Hill Park and the hospital: Hawkins Street, Arch Street, and finally the house in these photos on Prospect St.

Axel died in 1951. My grandmother supported herself by taking in laundry (she had a wringer washer in the basement) and renting rooms to her Swedish "old men." She herself lived in three rooms on the first floor of this house, sharing her kitchen and bath with the two downstairs roomers (I hated them despite their separate entrances). The three upstairs roomers had their own apartments. She lived independently there until one day when she was 85 she sat down on the end of her couch, had a heart attack, and died on my 22nd birthday.

I loved her dearly. She took me to Sweden with her for a month when I was 13, where I met her sister and brother and cousins.

I've visited her former home twice in the last decade. On my first visit, in 2016, the house as shown here in dark brown with the tree out front still looked much the same as it had while I was growing up.

But this last week when I visited much had changed. At first I thought the house had been torn down, as a new parking lot gapes right next to it where once other houses stood. But it is still there: It has been re-sided and the tree torn down, the tiny front yard paved for parking. Throughout my 60+ years this was always a run-down neighborhood and, unlike many parts of New Britain that have gentrified, it is maintaining and perhaps deepening its scruffy character!

This house meant so much to my grandmother, to her gritty life sustaining herself as a single mother and woman and immigrant. I love that she maintained her pride as a woman home owner by running it as a rooming house, and wish it seemed to be a bit better loved these days. But I am glad it remains.

#changeistheonlyconstant

#loveyourancestors

Finding New Havens for MLK Day 2025

We once understood the word "haven" to mean harbor, or port.

A safe haven. A new haven. A port in the storm.

We've navigated through our share of storms recently, both personally and as communities and as a nation. Storms on every level.

My spouse's recent and unexpected brain surgery, from which she is recovering super well. 

The loss of young people in addition to old in our small, rural community.

The return of our nation to a man who embodies selfish, abusive male values antithetical to the well-being and equity of all people, contradicting our own.

Aren't we always looking for havens? And finding them where we least expect them?

This new year of 2025, our new haven has been literally New Haven, CT, on Quinnipiac land, and Yale-New Haven Hospital.

Since we landed here rather than on our intended vacations, and as someone who grew up 25-50 miles down the coast from here, I've been repeating the joke that I never in my life dreamed of vacationing in New Haven!

Growing up during the 1960's and 1970's on Connecticut's eastern Long Island shore, New Haven was never a place one thought to visit.

All U.S. cities were in decline during this period due to "white flight:" the mass exodus of middle class residents from cities thanks to deindustrialization; poor urban planning including the redlining of neighborhoods and lack of investment; and the continued centering of the car in the heart of American suburbanization, which had begun in the 1940's. 

By 1975, New York City was on the brink of bankruptcy. The gritty, small Connecticut cities to its east, including New Haven, were not in much better shape. The redlining was particularly fierce in New Haven. And in 1970, New Haven played host to a series of prosecutions against the Black Panther Party, and related protests, cementing its infamy.

Yet founded in 1638, New Haven was one of the nation's first planned cities in addition to being one of its first settled colonies.

Like so many colonialist communities, it was established as a theocracy. It's centerpiece, Yale University, was established with funding from the former colonial governor of Madras, with funds from the East India Company.

The city became a hub of industrialization thanks to Eli Whitney, who founded not only the cotton gin but also Connecticut's formidable gun manufacturing economy, earning the state one of its first unfortunate nicknames as "The Arsenal of America." Much of Connecticut's considerable wealth, especially in comparison with other New England states, remains based in the military-industrial complex. New Haven is an archetype of American colonialism.

And a place in no way viewed by my parents as a "haven" for their prowling teenager, who nonetheless escaped westward on I-95 for concerts at Toad's Place and New Haven's famous thin crust apizza. The crime. The deterioration. The immigrants newer than themselves, speaking languages not their own.

How odd, then, to unintentionally return here 50 years later.

How odd indeed the way landscape works its way into our bodies early on, becoming a part of our cells and memories in ways I would not have thought possible.

I left this landscape permanently, after a previous departure, in 1982. Yet the gentle, salt marsh strewn coast criss-crossed by railroad tracks and marinas; the mighty sweep of the lower Connecticut River running through the deciduous hardwood forests; and the familiar suburban pathways and landmarks of my ancestors -- Killingworth, New Britain, Middletown, Deep River, Chester, Old Saybrook -- are etched into my fiber.

And at last, against all odds, New Haven has truly become a "new haven" for us.