Dave Wood

My Grandma always said after prices for everything skyrocketed in the 1950s, “What this country needs is a damned good depression, like in the 1930s when you could buy pork chops for a nickel a pound!” That’s not what I learned in my college text and saw the WPA project photos of haggard mountain women on ramshackle sharecropper porches, children hanging perilously onto their sagging breasts. Nor was it the way my father remembered those days!

He remembered the Roaring Twenties, when as a teen he wore Chesterfield velvet-collared coats and snap-brimmed fedoras, drove his father’s Nash touring car with the Flapper of His Life, my mother-to-be in a naughtily short skirt and her cunningly beaded purse and danced the Charleston, sometimes atop the piano at places like Fournier’s in Eau Claire and La Crosse’s Avalon to songs like:

“I’m the Sheik of Araby/ And your love belongs to me/ And when you’re fast asleep, / Into your tent I’ll creep…..” Many decades later, long after the damned good depression had ended, we’d travel to Eau Claire to gather at Uncle Floyd’s house. Dad would sing the above lyrics, Floyd, who years earlier had played in Jack Pingel’s jazz band, strummed along on his ukelele and after each line Dad sang, Floyd warbled the chorus in his basso profundo that suggested the Sheik was trouser-less. If Uncle Floyd’s lyric is too ribald to appear in a family newspaper, let’s call it Floyd’s” Arabs in Their B.V.D.s Tune”

After beer, Coney Islands, and talk about the old days, with its bootleggers (my Aunt Myrt would add her stories about her cousin’s husband Brooks, one of Eau Claire’s leading bootleggers whose Packard sedan had four hollow doors to carry moonshine from Fargo to Eau Claire and joints like Lake Hallie Ballroom! Then back to the uke, with me on “drums” (Aunt Myrt’s metal pie plate and two table knives.) And the two elderly men went on singing tunes of glory from that youthful past:

“I wanna go back to my little grass shack in Kealakekua, Hawaii,/ I wanna be with all the kanees and wahinis that I knew long ago./ I can hear old guitars a-playing, on the beach at hoo-na-ny./ I can hear the Hawaiians saying “komomai no kau sika hali welaka-hoo.”/ It won’t be long ‘til be sailing back to Kona, a grand old place, that’s always fair to see./ I’m just a little Hawaiian and a homesick island boy/ I wanna go back to my fish and poi. / I wanna go back to my little grass shack in Kalakalooha, Hawaii,/ Where the huma-huma, nuka-nuka as poo-ee ah-hah goes swimming by…”.

I wonder what Floyd and Myrt’s staid Third Ward neighbors thought when they heard Floyd belt out his favorite baby-talk song: “Down in the meadow in an itty-bitty pool/ swam three little fishies and a Mama Fishie too./ Said Mama Fishie, “Swim if you can”/And they fam and they fam all over da dam./ Boop-boop-dittum-datum what-am choo,/ And they fam and they fam all over da dam.”

I’m also glad that Dad’s Baptist grandma never heard him wail his signature tune: “Join the Baptist Sunday school,/ We’re having lots of fun;/ Please check your chewing gum and razors at the door,/ And you’ll hear lots of  stories that you never heard before…..Daniel in the lion’s den was about to head BENEATH [Hell], / But Daniel was a dentist and he pulled the lion’s teeth!”

I wonder. How did these crazy folks manage to survive the coming ravages of the Great Depression? Read it in next week’s column.

Older readers are encouraged to share with me their memories of those days. Sample: An Augsburg coach told me “We were so poor, mother made gravy out of the water she boiled the wieners in.” Phone Dave Wood at 1-715-426-9554.