John F Ward

By the time the Gotham Silk Hosiery Co. Inc. in Dover, N.J., told its 500 employees on March 17, 1932, that it was shutting down for at least three weeks due to a lack of business, such news was hardly news at all.

Thirty days into Lent, the Christian season of penitence and fasting, Gotham Hosiery became just one more of dozens of local companies – tens of thousands nationally – parched by the economic drought now known as The Great Depression.

By the end of the last day of February in this leap year, unemployment in the United States was estimated at around 20 percent. One in five — some 12 million to 15 million workers — had no regular job to go to each day. As their savings were used up, they stopped paying their bills. With fewer paying customer, stores closed, restaurants closed, businesses folded, banks went out of business.

The economy, generally, was shriveling.

Since 1929, nearly 11,000 U.S. banks had failed; their $2 billion in mostly uninsured deposits and investments had evaporated.

Since 1929, the industrial stocks – considered an indicator of the health of this solidly industrial nation – had been drying up; the stocks that survived at all might be worth just half their pre-Crash value.

Since 1929, the gross national product – which usually grew at more than 3 percent a year – had shrunk about 10 percent each year and farm prices had withered to half what they were three years before.

This malady had infected other parts of the world, too. European nations were suffering hardship, at least partly because they had not fully recovered from the ravages of the first World War.

In fact, some people were blaming the international aspect of the depression on the United States. In 1930, in a misguided effort to protect U.S. firms, Congress hiked import tariffs to record levels. The only effect that had was to choke off trade with Europe, South America and Australia, ensuring that the U.S. economy could not recover yet and slowing the economies of the U.S. trading partners.

The Republicans, who controlled the Congress, were reluctant to provide any direct relief for the jobless and hungry, fearing that would somehow break the nation's work ethic. But two years of deepening depression, and the trouncing that Republicans took in the 1930 mid-term elections, forced Hoover to reexamine his policy; the president finally abandoned his evangelistic practice of preaching prosperity while millions of Americans were suffering from real hardship.

In January 1932, Hoover’s plan passed in the House of Representatives, 335-55, and in the Senate, 63-8. The legislation made huge amounts of money available to the banks and credit associations that had survived the Depression thus far. The notion was that those institutions would then loan the money to U.S. businesses, which would revitalize the economy. Between a massive check from the U.S. Treasury and an even larger bond issue, the Reconstruction Finance Corp. was to have $2 billion at its disposal.

Critics of the plan asked where the relief was for the individuals out of work, for the farmers whose farms had blown away in the huge dust bowl in the nations's southern plains, for the entrepreneurs whose clientele had been without steady income for a year or two or three.

In short, they asked where was the help for people like Helen and Carl Viard and their two children, Ken and Grace. Many people like Helen and Carl were getting by, relying on their own pluck and determination and the tolerance of others in the same boat.

It is ironic that part of what kept the Viards solvent was exactly what Hoover had noted two years ago when he first declared that the nation’s unemployment was not a major crisis. In 1930, the president had insisted that many of the unemployed lived in small towns and villages where they would be cared for by family and friends and neighbors, that small-town Americans would show their spirit of cooperation. He could have been thinking of Boonton when he said that.

Certainly, the Viards had cooperation like that from merchants in town. In fact, after Carl lost his job, Helen went downtown to the butcher store. She told the butcher she hoped to continue to conduct business with him, but that she expected to have trouble paying the whole bill at once each time she shopped there. She asked whether he would let them pay him in installments; he agreed. He was patient about collecting full payment, and she was faithful about eventually paying him everything he was due. And the Viards certainly returned that spirit to their community.

Carl was adept at finding odd jobs; his engineering talents were widely known in his community and he was frequently called upon to repair household appliances or plumbing systems or electrical wiring.

In fact, Theresa B. Wilson, headmistress of St. John’s School, which she and her husband had co-founded in 1909, relied on Carl so much (as did many residents of the park area), she dubbed him “our husband.” Whenever Mrs. Wilson was away, Carl would check on her house; whenever anything broke, he would fix it. He did the same for plenty of other people. Despite all the work Carl certainly did on other people’s homes, it is not clear he was ever paid for most of it.

It is also not clear what role Carl’s mother had in helping the Viards maintain their home, although she kept the gardener working on her own parcel of land, next door to Helen’s and Carl’s home. It’s unlikely that Frida Krollpfeiffer let her son’s family suffer too greatly for lack of money. Still, the loan Helen took to buy the house in the first place was not satisfied until the 1950s, although they had sold the home a decade earlier.

For her own part in that Depression economy, Helen certainly bartered. She developed a reputation for working in exchange for something she valued almost more than food for her family: her children’s education.

As soon as Ken and Grace were old enough to attend nursery school at St. John’s, Helen worked as the public relations person for the newspaper of St. John’s School. In return, Helen’s children attended the school, free of charge.

Carl’s family wondered why in the world Ken and Grace should have private schooling when their parents often didn’t have money for basic provisions, but Helen ­– who had never finished high school – believed a first-rate education was vitally important, and believed a private school would provide that first-rate education.

Helen also put her talents as stenographer and typist to use in fashioning gifts for the few students graduating from the tiny St. John’s School. Each spring, she would attend the graduation ceremony, take down the baccalaureate sermon, word for word, and type it up, with a copy for each graduate, as a gift.

When Ken and Grace were old enough to study piano, Helen bartered with a music teacher, providing her children with lessons.

And when Grace was old enough to study dance, Helen opened their home – with its 40-foot-long living room – to the dance class, from young children all the way on up.

Still, despite the bartering, there were some things that required cash. So, while Carl was out of work, Helen became a manufacturer’s representative, selling dresses from her home. She also made and sold mustard pickle, better known as white chow chow, made according to her Grandma Davis’ famous recipe.

Whatever the family’s finances were, Helen ran them. Carl was talented at making things work and keeping them working, but only if that thing was not a checkbook.

Especially when Carl was out of work, bill collectors would call the house, threatening to cut off phone service if the bill was not paid by the next day.

“Oh, Carl,” Helen would say, “I gave you that money order.”

They had no checking account, because in their early married years Carl had simply written checks without ever checking what the balance might be. In his life, money had always been there, but now he was responsible for making it, too, and there was not as much as he was accustomed to.

So Helen would ask him where he had put that particular money order, and he would say, “Oh, well, I know you gave it to me last week – Yes, I put it in my little black book,” and he would go to the closet and find the book in whatever coat he had been wearing that particular day, “Yes, here it is.”

So Helen ran the finances, bartering and negotiating and striking deals to keep them ahead of the bill collectors.

Foreclosure sales were nothing new to Boonton. Auctioneers had been selling off the contents of homes since long before the Crash of 1929, and would be selling them long after the town recovered from The Depression; the Depression simply brought more foreclosures to town.

But the Christmas spirit can shine through even into the economic gloom of a depression. Perhaps that is why Sheriff Fred S. Myers and a number of local attorneys got together just before Christmas 1931 to postpone a handful of auction sales, at least until after Christmas. It might not have given those people their homes for long, but it gave them a holiday respite.

In spite of the economic hardship, it was still an idyllic childhood for Ken and Grace. Instead of focusing on Carl’s unemployment, the family focused on happy times: picnics and games and visits from relatives and friends.

Of course, through it all, Carl would look for work, never giving up hope. And when he was looking for work, he worked at it. He went out every day and made the rounds in the morning. When he returned home in the afternoon, he would say: “Not today, dearie,” and Helen would tell him: “Well, the Lord just has something else in mind and we just have to have faith in it – that we’ll be shown.”

It would end up being a four-year pursuit of regular work, and although the couple were busy, it was not being busy that kept them from bitterness; it was their faith.

It was faith that kept them optimistic when that was not easy to be. It was probably faith that drew them out to Ohio for several weeks to look for work, leaving their children with Carl’s mother. That trip, too, ended with, “Not today.”

Of course, Carl was not the only one in Boonton without a job.

Hoover had still declined to provide direct relief to the unemployed, although he had commissioned federal public works projects that provided some areas with some work: the San Francisco Bay Bridge, the Los Angeles Aqueduct from northern California, and the Hoover Dam.

Locally, though, governments were picking and choosing among public works projects.

For instance. Boonton was discussing an expansion of its public water system and a renovation of what already existed. In January, the Board of Freeholders – the county’s governing body – decided not to undertake any two-county construction of bridges that year, to save money.

The same month, Boonton’s council placed the $90,000 allotment for the new post office into the six-year plan, even though it had been scheduled for just this year’s budget. The Montville Post Office had closed in 1896, moving to Boonton, meaning that the Boonton facility was already more than 30 years old. But the town decided they should wait on a new structure.

Even if the new post office were to be built, only a few people ever worked on public works projects. The majority of make-do work was simply odd jobs. Even on that front, the town could help. In mid-February, Boonton’s municipal director – the equivalent of a town manager – started asking around town and advertising in the newspaper, looking for “anyone wishing men to work in yard, cleaning windows, etc.”

Hammond and his coordinator, Sam Harris, hoped people would take the chance to get some work done around the house, help out some of their neighbors and take advantage of the town’s largesse; the town would pay those workers.

By this time, the bank’s messages, in its newspaper ads, were different than they had been at the start of the Depression. Now, the Boonton Trust Co. was advertising: “Banks are community affairs and should be looked upon as such; if you want to help your own town, bank there; keep your money working for you and for your town.”

In February, Col. Frank Knox, heading President Hoover’s anti-hoarding movement, reported that $51 million had been brought back into circulation and that panic withdrawals from banks had practically ceased.

Of course, not everyone had patience for the Depression. The Raffner Furniture Co. of Patterson admitted: “We throw our hands up. We are licked. We quit. We are through. We can’t lose money for ever. We couldn’t go on losing money indefinitely even if we had a national bank to back us.”

They sold out to the walls: chests of drawers as low as $5, bedroom suites for $25, living room suites for $25, dining room suites for $59.

Such news, reported in The Boonton Times-Bulletin from its offices on Main Street and in papers like it across the country, was so common that it might have elicited just a tsk-tsk from such readers as Helen and Carl Viard.

So might the news of the suicide of George Eastman, the ailing genius behind the Eastman Kodak Co.; or of German President Hindenberg losing by a few thousand votes to the Nationalist Social Workers Party.

Likewise, the news that county health officials were worried that the deprivations of The Depression might trigger a resurgence in tuberculosis – discovered 50 years ago – so clinics were planned for Dover, Morristown and Butler.

Helen and Carl might have been disheartened by updates on the kidnapping of young Charles Lindbergh, the 20-month-old son of Col. and Mrs. Charles Lindbergh, from the family home in Hopewell, N.J., or found it ironic that the suspected getaway car had headed for Newark.

They might have found it encouraging that Catherine Gill of Dover spoke at the town’s observance of the birthday of Frances Willard Day, who founded the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. (Carl and Helen were both teetotalers.)

Or that a $1.1 billion federal building package would include $90,000 for a new post office for Boonton’s 6,766 residents.

Or even that the Morris County Welfare Board, presided over by U.S. Sen. Frank D. Abell, had been promised cooperation from the county’s 38 towns in administering relief to the needy.

But it was not relief that Helen and Carl were looking for; it was work they wanted, and so every day he could, for four years beginning in March 1930, Carl Viard would leave the schoolhouse at 234 Rockaway Ave in search of work.

From time to time he returned home with some promise of an odd job, but for four years he met Helen at the door almost every day with “Not today, dearie.”

And for four years she responded with “Well, the Lord just has something else in mind and we just have to have faith.”