Dan's Papers - October 3, 2008

As this is written, on Tuesday, we don't yet know whether the proposed Federal Bailout will be passed, and if it is passed, if it will work. Under the circumstances, I thought it might be a good idea to talk to somebody who was here in the Hamptons during the Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed, to try to get a sense of what we might expect today, 70 years later, if things go from bad to worse.

To that end, I went to see Richard Hendrickson, Sr., a former Bridgehampton farmer on Lumber Lane who has just gotten an award from the National Weather Service for monitoring the weather conditions on his farm and then dutifully reporting them to the Weather Service in New York for - ready? - 75 years.

This is just a marker in his long career, not the end of it. He still goes out every day to measure the temperature and humidity and barometric pressure by the hour, and the precipitation (if any) and all the other things that the National Weather Service needs. He was born and raised here, and a 15-year-old junior at the Bridgehampton School when he started this job. And it was important he did that at that time because his family needed the extra money. The crash happened when he was 11.

Interestingly, and perhaps scandalously, in 1935, still in the middle of the Depression, Hendrickson, at 17 years of age, married a local schoolteacher 10 years his senior. It worked out. They stayed married for 43 years. And so they went through the rest of the Depression and the Second World War and right up to 1978, when she passed away. He remarried. He is married to his second wife today. And after a long, uninterrupted career as a full-time farmer and part-time weatherman, he still lives on the same farm on Lumber Lane, where he was born.

I met him at his house this past Monday. We went to his study where he sat at his desk, and had me sit in a chair. His mind is clear. He remembers the Depression well.

"It was surely the greatest disaster ever," he said. "Nobody was lending money. And if you owed money, you either paid what you owed or they repossessed what you were paying on."

I asked how people paid for things.

"Everything was on a cash basis. I would buy feed and fertilizer and I'd grow corn and raise chickens. I kept my old farm trucks and I took things to market. And with that money, I'd pay my bills, or try to."

Turns out that living through a Depression in a community where you could grow vegetables, raise livestock and catch fish was not all that bad.

"It was mostly farms out here then," he said. "I can think of only one farmer that went broke during the Depression. Another one almost did. He was from Poland, settled here to potato farm, built a house, married and raised three boys and a girl. When the Depression hit, he was still paying off his house loan, trying to take care of his family and then with a little extra, pay the mortgage. And he got it down to just $35, or something. And then the lender just foreclosed. He said, 'Get out.' And I think some relatives saved the day by ponying up the rest.

"Theft on the farms was a problem then. Farmers would leave out potato bags for the night in a farm field to take them to market in the morning, and they'd come back the next day and they'd be gone. I had chickens stolen. Corn. Heads of cabbages. People even swiped field corn, which you raise for the animals. If you're hungry enough and you cook it enough, it's mushy but edible."

I asked what happened with the summer people. There were many rich Wall Street industrialists who had big mansions out here, built before the crash.

"Some of them, the very rich, still came out. I remember the Carly family - they owned the Teddy Bear business. There were the Quimbys, Pecks, Bradleys. They still came out for the summer. Some even sent their kids to our high school rather than to a school in the city. But other millionaires went broke. They just abandoned their houses. One summer, my wife brought home this young girl from Norway who spoke very little English. She worked for a rich man, but he couldn't pay her anymore. She was just wandering around. We gave her a bedroom for two years."

I asked about downtown Bridgehampton, and Hendrickson ticked off the different merchants that were on Main Street at that time.

"There were two barber shops. There were two butcher shops, Schencks and Sayres. There was Ralston, there was the A & P, the newspaper store with the presses in the back, and there was the Candy Kitchen. There was the Bridgehampton National Bank where Starbucks is today, and there was a Chevrolet dealership, Tucker and Murray, in the building where Pulver is today."

"Yup. One way or another they all got through."

"You said it was all pretty much cash. Was there barter?"

"Oh, sure. There were people who paid their doctor bills with bushels of clams if they didn't have any money. As I said, money was scarce. It was there, but scarce."

"And there were jobs?"

"Some. But lots of people worked with their hands on their own. There were men who were masons, or carpenters, or plumbers or electricians. There was Grayson, who was a great cabinetmaker. There were people who went around trying to sell used cars. Cash. They'd come to the house. I bought a pretty new Ford Model A that way. $200, cash. There were even people who walked along down at the beach to see what washed up. And then there was Mr. Halsey. He worked for some big stationery company in New York and every day, even during the Depression, he'd get dressed in a suit and tie and take the train to New York. They gave him a gold watch when he retired.

"As for us kids, we'd mow lawns or vaccinate chickens or grade eggs or pull weeds or if we had a father who had a farm as I did, just work for him. Lots of boys back then only went to school half-time. They'd work on the farm in the morning. Then go to school in the afternoon. It was not easy, I can tell you that.

"And then there were the young fellows who had come out here to live in the CCC camp that was set up by the government on Scuttlehole Road. There were about 30 of them, men who came from all over the country, single men who couldn't make it, married men who just couldn't support their wives and children and had just walked out. They lived in these wood-and-tarpaper barracks buildings up there, and the government paid them a stipend for some job they were supposed to do. It wasn't much. But they could get enough to eat and they had a place to stay.

"Once, after church, I met one of them. He was being paid to pick gypsy moths off the trees in the woods. They'd think of everything to get us through.

"Then, about 1936, FDR set up the Federal Land Bank and you could get loans again. Things got better after that. Pretty soon we were prospering again and there was credit available."

Richard Hendrickson walked me to the door. Outside were the aluminum weather masts the government had installed on his property. He would soon be going out there to make another reading.

I thought, whatever comes, we'll get through it. A bit easier with a government bailout up front, and a little harder with it being withheld for a while, as it was during the Hoover Administration until they finally threw that administration out in 1932 to get FDR in and finally set up some government work programs and projects.