Recession in 1957
Diapers on the Lines
John A. Klein Sr.
June 2, 2010
In my paper a month ago on learning to fly, I wrote that the onset of the recession of 1956-57 put an abrupt end to my personal venture with airplanes. In an epilogue to that piece, I said the recession took its toll of many building trades contractors. I was working fulltime then for a coalition of building trades contractors.
“Thanks to the determination of my big boss,” I said, “we survived the worst, but finally had to liquidate and reorganize in the following year.”
I have a short story about one of the ways we managed to survive, at least for a while. I hope my readers will enjoy the listening as much as I enjoy the memories.
Scene One
It was a nice autumn day in ‘56 when the boss called me aside and said our accountant was begging him to cut back drastically, as others were doing, but he himself could not stand the prospect of our house-building crews being out of work throughout the coming holiday season. So he gave me an assignment.
Down Summerfield Road from where Howarth Park now is, on the west side approaching Hoen Avenue, there was a parcel of land the school district had looked at as the site for a new elementary school. It was about ten acres of level land, with sewer, water, and other utility services at hand---a perfect site for a fifty-lot subdivision for single-family homes. The going price for buildable land like that had reached the upper range of three to four thousand an acre, but no one in the building business had yet been willing to crack the four thousand dollar ceiling.
My assignment that afternoon was to buy the property, and I was authorized to go to four thousand an acre if I felt it necessary. I was admonished in a friendly way not to come back into the office until I had that property in hand.
Satisfied that the school district’s interest had turned to another location, and with that off my mind, I immediately looked up and contacted the owner. He turned out to be a somewhat elderly native Italian of the farmer type. I told him why I wanted to meet him, and he cordially invited me in. He spoke in good English, heavily accented. I will call him Mr. S to spare my readers the effort of pronouncing his name correctly. I should note his house was on the hilly side of Summerfield Road, directly across the street from the ten acres. He had a vineyard on terraces in front of the house.
The first thing he did after seating me was offer a taste of his own homemade wine.
Now I had practiced law serving people in rural Sonoma County long enough to understand some old country ways, and knew better than to refuse a taste of someone’s own vintage, or indicate by speech or body language that all I wanted was to “get down to business.” It just was not done that way with people who lived close to the land and lived life in synchrony with nature’s timing. Mr. S and I had about three satisfactory meetings over a week or so of time. I cannot say his wine was about to win a prize at the county fair, but small talk over a glass of wine brought us closer together and gave us the chance to evaluate one another without conducting personnel interviews.
It came out well. Mr. S understood my position that to convert the land to the value of residential lots we had to acquire it by contract at a low down payment and borrow against it the money needed to subdivide it, build the infrastructure and build the houses. On his agreement that he would take a thousand dollars down and subordinate his security to our construction financing, I met his price of forty thousand dollars---four thousand an acre.
I offered to draw the contract if he would have a lawyer approve it on his own behalf. He agreed, telling me his lawyer was George Murphy.
The contract provided Mr. S would release his security on each lot when sold, and that we would have the same arrangement with our construction lender. He and the lender would each receive an amount out of each sales escrow calculated to pay off both the construction loan and the purchase price by about the time two thirds of the lots had been sold to homebuyers. It was a standard approach in the building industry. George Murphy well understood it and approved the contract as I had written it.
We moved very quickly on the subdividing and government red tape. Came the Christmas season, the sound of hammers and saws all the daylong told of fifty new homes coming along to help satisfy the heavy demand for housing in Santa Rosa. Best of all, our carpenters and crews were taking home paychecks.
Scene Two
George Murphy was a prince of a man. He was senior in the firm of Murphy, Brownscombe and Leo Gleeson. They were good lawyers, ethical and personable. Murphy was a story in himself. I had become acquainted with him shortly after I came to town, and had spent pleasant hours with him listening to his experience as a boy living in San Francisco during the great 1906 earthquake..
He was a consummate “gentleman of the old school.”
One afternoon early in the New Year, I had a telephone call from George Murphy:
“John, I hate to bother you, but I’ve just had a call from Mr. S, who says he sees some people moving in across the street, but he hasn’t received any checks in his mail.”
“George, it’s true we’ve made some sales, but although we had no trouble arranging construction financing last autumn,, since that time loan money for home purchase has dried up completely. In addition, if you will check again the contract for Mr. S, it provides for payoffs only when the final sale of a finished home has closed escrow. Try as we may, we can’t find loans for our buyers right now.”
George understood and said he would call Mr. S and put him at ease.
I had explained to George that the demand was hot. As soon as a home was finished, we had buyers waiting. Most of them were young war veterans with eligibility for Veterans Administration guaranteed loans. They were terribly anxious to move in, so we devised a plan. We knew exactly our monthly cost for the interest on the construction financing attributable to each lot and house, and the real estate taxes and insurance on it, so we offered to rent to our buyers month to month for the exact cost of carrying the lot and house on our books. It worked, and we were able to put people into possession and wait out the availability of their permanent financing.
Weeks went by. Another call from George Murphy.
“John, Mr. S just called me. He sees smoke coming out of the chimneys across the street, and he is worried. He has no checks”
I again explained to George how we had worked out the rental plan. Once again, he assured Mr. S. that we were in good faith within the terms of our contract with him, and that in a matter of time it would work out. Mr. S was of course accruing interest from us on our contract balance with him.
As I recall, Mr. S had George Murphy check in with us again when it appeared the subdivision was practically full and young wives could be seen walking out of doors and visiting in small groups on the sidewalks.
However, Mr. S was a gentle man too, and George Murphy could assure us he was staying reasonably calm throughout his long and patient wait to see the color of money.
Time kept passing; the end was yet to come.
Once again, the telephone.
“John, I really hate to bother you. I understand the situation. But Mr. S is getting impatient. He is having a hard time understanding why it has taken so long. I am at a loss. Can you help me?”
“I would like to help, George, but I don’t know what to say that I haven’t already said. Is there anything new that’s bothering him?”
“Yes John, he says now there are diapers on the clotheslines.”
I could not figure how exactly to explain that for Mr. S. The now famous baby boom was in its infancy, and I do not think very many of us yet knew it was happening.
Scene Three
A very short time after that the recession broke and we were closing loans almost every day. Mr. S probably had checks in his mail for thirty straight days. He was rapidly paid off and we had fully performed our contract with him.
I wish with everyone else that the recession at present date could come to such an abrupt and happy end,
We were then in the mid fifties well into the postwar baby boom. Maybe Mr. S was not up to date on that. I cannot say it had anything to do with ending the recession, but it sure made a great market for homebuilders.
And carpenters, plumbers, painters, electricians and others to boot.
Baxley Days
by George Sackman
June 2, 2010
My earliest memories come from my pre-school years when I lived with my grandparents in the little town of Baxley, Georgia. My father George William Sackman had died before I was born in 1933, from complications after kidney-stone surgery. My mother Mary Rix Lawrence never remarried, and it became necessary for her to leave me, from age three to five, with her parents while she sent home money, teaching school in Jacksonville, Florida during the great economic depression.
My grandfather Henry James Lawrence was a retired attorney, and although he still had occasional clients, they could only afford to pay him with a sack of corn or a load of firewood. In more prosperous times Grandpa had invested in farm and forest land. His father Allen Thomas Lawrence had been shot in the face and left for dead on the Civil War battlefield at Antietam, was discovered by Sisters of Mercy and nursed back to health enough to walk home to Dooley County, Georgia from Maryland. Grandpa’s mother Martha Virginia Pope was a teenager when their house narrowly escaped being burned by General Sherman, only because a Captain had commandeered the farmhouse to use as his temporary headquarters.
There was always plenty of farm victuals (pronounced "vittles" in Georgia) on the table and life for me was mostly one big adventure. Grandma Mary Rix Bryan was genuinely eccentric and proud of it. She would have preferred to repeal the twentieth century, wearing ankle-length black dresses, and refusing to have either plumbing or electricity in the house. We had a hand pump for water, kerosene lamps to read by at night and chamber pots under the beds. One of my chores was hauling in wood for the kitchen stove. Grandpa would arise every morning at the stroke of four, start a fire in the fireplace, and walk to his office he called "my heaven".
About ten o'clock he would return to a grand breakfast of fried eggs, thick slices of salted bacon, smoked ham with grits and "red-eye" gravy, hot biscuits, freshly churned butter, syrup reduced from sugar cane juice, and strong coffee boiled in a granite-colored enamel sauce pan. I was allowed to drink coffee with milk, and soon after breakfast would run straight to the outhouse located in the far corner of the cow lot. It was generously stocked with pages from back issues of Grandpa's subscription to the Congressional Record. Recalling those days I have often mused about the fate of the printed speeches of many legislators.
My grandmother and I occasionally had knock-down, drag-out confrontations. She attempted to raise me in the stern manner she thought proper, but I was a born rebel and would react to her arbitrary orders with righteous rage. I remember telling her she was "going straight to Hell and the dammed Devil won't have you". At about this point, nearly apoplectic and red in the face, she would go out in the back yard with a pair of garden shears and cut a switch with intent to apply it to my legs and backside. While she was thus occupied I would run out the front door and the half-mile to Grandpa's office downtown. By the time I returned with him in the afternoon both Grandma and I would have calmed down and it would be as if nothing had happened.
Grandpa had an extensive personal collection of books in glass-front oak cabinets arranged like library stacks at one end of the "parlor", a formal room used only to entertain company. After I was able to read I was given the run of the library, but my only recollection now is that in the literary classic "The Inferno" by Dante, hell was cold. Word games were a popular family amusement and I loved learning big words and showing off my recent acquisitions. Having overheard that the husband of a family friend had died, I reported that the widow was "prostitute with grief". On Sunday afternoons after church, Grandpa would take me for long walks around the countryside while Grandma took a nap. My favorite place to visit was the junkyard littered with rusty wrecks of cars. I also loved to climb up on the big machines used to grade the dirt roads, often parked on the outskirts of town. Even though I loved Grandpa dearly, he was not “mechanically inclined” and I would have wished for my father, who had been an engineer, to answer my incessant questions about "how things worked". My uncle John Averett Lawrence once said that he thought I was an intelligent little boy who, he confidently predicted, would be qualified some day to achieve the highest status in Georgia society by becoming a preacher in the Baptist Church. I indignantly retorted, "NO, I'M NOT. I'M GOING TO BE A MECHANIC".
In March of 1938 I had my fifth birthday and that fall I at last rejoined my beloved mother in Jacksonville, Florida. After that we returned to Baxley only during Christmas holidays and summer vacations. Eventually Grandpa and Grandma passed away, the house was sold, accidentally burned to the ground, and a parking lot occupies the site.
My friend, Robert, died last week. Although I had worked with him for only a short time, at Sacks, the Hospice/Face to Face thrift store where I volunteer, we had developed a relationship that was meaningful to me. He was in charge of the toy department, repairing and bringing all manner of toys back to life. One day, as I passed by his workbench, I heard him talking to a stuffed animal he was sewing with a long needle.