Hard Times, Hard Times

While we cope (or not) with the economic news; follow the layoff announcements and rumors; listen for the snap, crackle, and pop of the credit crunch; and anticipate just how hard the times are that are likely to fall, The Wall Street Journal has a report on the Hartshorne, Oklahoma Hard Times Festival, which, they tell us, has (sigh) "fallen on hard times." (Note: access to this article may require paid subscription.)

Hartshorne, a rundown coal-mining town 100 miles from Tulsa, hasn't been holding their "Festival" all that long - the first was in October 2001. (Was that supposed to take people's minds off of 9/11? Hey, let's not think about madmen in airplanes and pancaking buildings. Let's think about those swell times in the 30's when Ma and Pa had to strap the mattress to the roof of their jalopy and Tom Joad it out to California to escape the Dust Bowl.)

But The Hard Times Festival has been a way to kick a little life into a down on its luck town, bringing vendors and tourists in for a few days, and paying homage to the Greatest Generation, who may have become the Greatest Generation because of World War II, but who sure got a running start during the Great Depression.

The Festival features the usual array of vendors: funnel cakes, cookies, flea-market junk ("used dresses, table lamps and rusted gas cans" - rusted gas cans? and "rusted feed store dollies" - rusted feed store dollies?), as well as musicians/street entertainers.

It has also featured a few Depression suppers  - all you can eat beans and corn bread suppers for a quarter.

In the past, though, there were more Depression-related events:

The first year, a bakery donated 500 loaves of bread, which were given away in a re-enactment of a 1930s bread line. Using grant money, Ms. Nicholson brought in Depression-related photo exhibits, authors and musicians. To raise money, the Sun published a cookbook.

One of the more popular events was the "talk around," held under a canvas canopy donated by a funeral home. There, Depression survivors and others spent hours telling stories about how they and their families had been affected.

Stories like that of the 78 year old woman who, as a girl, hunted for jack rabbits while she was wearing "'boots'" made out of burlap sacks and wire. (They sure don't make stories of deprivation the way they used to. Today a kid would think it was a hardship to have to wear knock-off Uggs rather than the real thing. Burlap sacks and wire are just inconceivable. Which is not to say that people won't suffer relative deprivation in what is and what's to come.)

But the folks who remember those stories are tiring out and dying off, and this year's festival had little of the Depression-era "stuff" that characterized earlier Hard Times Festivals.

Hard Times Festival activities run the gamut from outhouse relay races to a period-style fashion show, and cheap eats are a big part of the day. Gangsters such as Bonnie and Clyde prowl, hoboes panhandle and people in period dress rub shoulders with itinerant preachers, street performers like the incomparable Hotsy Totsy Girls, unemployed men, newsboys, farmers, coalminers and 5-cent shoeshine boys along Pennsylvania Avenue, Hartshorne's main street.

Wow!

Fake hoboes panhandling, and "people in period dress rub[bing] shoulders with....unemployed men."

While it seems a shame that the talk-arounds have died out, the concept of hobo panhandlers and "unemployed men" working the crowds sounds truly ghastly.

There are plenty of real unemployed men - and women - already, and there will no doubt be more in the months to come. And I'll bet there are at least a few of them in Hartshorne, already.

While there may be no panhandlers in a town that small - population 2,100 - Tulsa's a fairly good sized city. So is Oklahoma City. Bet they have panhandlers.

So it's may be just as well that next year the founder intends to drop the hard time theme and making it just a(nother) fall festival.

Sure, our hard times aren't likely to hold a candle to Depression hard times. And it's really hard to gather much sympathy for someone who now feels deprived because they can't upgrade to a McMansion, or put a flat screen TV if every bathroom. But they'll be hard enough for those who lose their homes and their jobs.  For the people who've already fallen through the cracks of the system, and for the greater numbers who're starting to fall through as the cracks widen.

At St. Francis House in Boston, New England's largest day shelter for the poor and homeless, they're regularly serving 1,000 meals a day (breakfast, lunch), where last year the average was under 800.

Hard times, to be sure, for plenty of folks already.

 

                                            Hard Times

Let us pause in life's pleasures and count its many tears
While we all sup sorrow with the poor.
There's a song that will linger forever in our ears,
Oh, hard times, come again no more.
'Tis the song, the sigh of the weary.
Hard times, hard times, come again no more.
Many days you have lingered all around my cabin door.
Oh, hard times, come again no more.

                                                                       -  Stephen Foster