News - Columnists - Stan Tiner

Monday, Oct. 13, 2008

Daddy always warned us ...

God willing, Daddy will be 100 on Nov. 8, and as he approaches that significant milestone the nightmare of a 1929-like event is playing out again on the national stage.

The Great Depression was Elmer Ray Tiner's defining moment, a catastrophic period that to some large degree set the tone for how he lived his life socially, fiscally and philosophically.

The Depression forced him out of his home in Tyro, Ark., (one less mouth to feed at home) and as a 21-year-old he and a friend hit the road on an odyssey across the heartland, working in wheat fields and laying pipeline. They rode the rails, lived in hobo jungles and sometimes were reduced to begging for meals.

Having learned the lessons that he observed from seeing his bucolic life in rural South Arkansas changed so forcefully by the fall of Wall Street, he determined that he would live in such a way that he and his family would be insulated from future shocks to the national economy.

He saved, always saved, some portion of whatever he earned, putting something away for the rainy days that he expected to come.

He paid cash for the things he bought, and taught us not to be wasteful. If you put food on your plate, you ate it, and if the clothes and food we bought weren't fancy, they were adequate. We didn't have much, looking back on it, but we never thought of ourselves as poor, because the middle or perhaps even technically lower-middle strata where we resided was so homogeneous, we felt solid and well-situated in the world.

Throughout my growing-up years, and beyond, Daddy always talked about the Depression in such fashion that it seemed almost a family member, deserving a seat at the supper table, because almost any conversation might include some mention of those times.

He constantly warned us it could happen again, and despite all of my push-back about how FDR and the smart-guys in Washington had created a firewall against the possibility of such a calamity, he firmly resisted such arguments.

Daddy sometimes insisted it might actually be good for folks if every generation had to fall deep enough into the abyss to understand the dangers of too much credit, and too much extravagance. As the decades flowed by in the river of time he observed the softness of society, and he warned when the next Depression came, times would be harder than in his day.

Back then everyone he knew had a garden, and an apple tree, and chickens and hogs. There was self-sufficiency and a capacity for living lean that no longer exists, he said.