1932 picture of Mom and Patricia. As indicated in an earlier blog, Hugh was born in 1924, and Patricia was born in !925. Although Hugh was born in the hospital, Pat was born at home. In the 1920s and 1930s, it was not unusual for a doctor or midwife to deliver a baby in the mother’s home, even in a city. Until Carol was born in !940, all of us except Hugh were born at home.
In the late spring of 1927 when Pat was barely a year old and Hugh was barely two, Dad borrowed a car and drove his new family to visit his family for the first time since leaving to seek a new life elsewhere. The rural roads back then were unpaved and narrow, and it took a full day to drive the 170 miles to the Girard area. Although cars had been around since the late 1800s, my mother saw her first car in 1911. It took a long time to develop a network of country roads. On the way back, they ran into a bad rainstorm and the car had no windows, at least, no working windows. When the rain slackened, Dad got out and built a fire to keep Mom and the swaddled babies warm while he fixed the car. Such was life outside the cities in the mid-1920s.
In the fall of 1928 Margaret was born at home on Wichita Street in Wichita. In 1929, of course, the stock market crashed, and the Great Depression began. Although Dad had a job and initially our family was relatively unaffected, the unemployment rate climbed to 25% and many small banks were unable to pay their account holders as values dropped, and their loans went unpaid. In those days, there were few laws governing foreclosure and a lot of people lost everything.
In 1930, Doris was born, and Dad was laid off, but he was able to get a job as a groundskeeper at a golf course just west of Wichita. The family briefly moved near the golf course and the town of Goddard, and Hugh and Pat enrolled in the Petterson Grade School. By this time, we had a car and Mom had learned to drive, but she had a minor accident while driving her children from school and never drove again. After six months, Dad was rehired by the Coleman Lamp and Stove Company and the family moved back to Wichita where Hugh and Pat were enrolled in the Harry Street Grade School.
Dwight was born in 1932 and, in 1933, when Dad’s father became sick with bone cancer, he again took his family back to visit his family near Girard. Doris vaguely remembered all but Dwight riding on Grandpa’s horse) Margaret remembered seeing Aunt Mary sitting by the window feeding our grandfather. He died shortly thereafter, in 1934. Grandpa Case also died in 1934. He died of in infection caused by a dental procedure. Antibiotics did not become readily available until penicillin began to be used for that purpose ten years later. Pat remembered the open-casket wake in Grandma’s house. Such wakes were common into the 1940s.
Dad’s brother, Clarence, also died of an infection before I was born. Before there were antibiotics, a lot of people died of infections. At the time Social Security became law, the average lifespan in the United States was 64, largely because of. infections and infant deaths.
