“The Depression, though more severe, was nothing new,” McMartin wrote.  “It was not a bad decade: years at the beginning and end were poor, but 1935-37 were actually quite good years.  In Fulton County, no one starved, no one prospered, and most continued to find some work.”

Glimpses of life during the Depression

By Bob Cudmore

Amsterdam native Isadore Demsky received a few gold pieces as Bar Mitzvah presents in 1929.  Added to money saved from working a paper route, Demsky—who later changed his name to Kirk Douglas--had collected $313, what he termed a fortune in those days.

The young man was going to save the nest egg to go to college but over his mother’s objections gave the money to his father Harry Demsky, a local ragman and legendary strong man. 

“He wanted to buy up a lot of metal, because the prices were so cheap (24 cents a pound) and then sell it at a killing,” wrote movie actor Douglas in his autobiography, “The Ragman’s Son.”

But the bottom fell out of the scrap metal market in 1929 with the crash of the stock market.  The elder Demsky ended up selling the copper he bought with his son’s money for two cents a pound.

Douglas wrote, “That was what the Depression meant to me, that prices came tumbling down and my father lost my savings.  Our scale of living wasn’t much different before, during or after.”

GLOVE CITIES

Historian Barbara McMartin in her book “The Glove Cities” wrote that although Johnstown and Gloversville enjoyed relatively good times in the 1920s, workers and owners in the glove industry had to struggle, even before the Depression.

“The Depression, though more severe, was nothing new,” McMartin wrote.  “It was not a bad decade: years at the beginning and end were poor, but 1935-37 were actually quite good years.  In Fulton County, no one starved, no one prospered, and most continued to find some work.”

SCOOPING COAL

Arnold Wittemeier was born in 1920 in Fort Hunter where his father, Harold, owned Wittemeier’s, one of Montgomery County’s biggest coal companies.

Coal for the family business came on the West Shore Railroad.  In the Depression, Arnold Wittemeier said, coal trains would speed through the valley to try to keep people from taking coal from hopper cars.

“It got so bad that cars of coal were having two tons of coal scooped off of them,” Wittemeier said.

NRA PARADE

An estimated ten thousand people turned out in Amsterdam on a raw and windy November 9, 1933 to parade for economic revival.

The Depression gripped the nation then and former New York Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt had become President that year.  Roosevelt was launching his New Deal, a key part of which was the National Recovery Administration or NRA.

According to the Albany Evening News, the NRA Parade was the biggest in Amsterdam’s history and featured hundreds of marching mill workers, office employees and school children. There were scores of floats, bands and drum corps.

Republican Mayor Robert Brumagin reviewed the Main Street line of march at a reviewing stand at Church Street. But newly chosen Democratic Mayor-elect Arthur Carter was receiving cheers from the crowd, according to the Evening News, as Carter—a friend of President Roosevelt’s--walked at the head of the contingent from the James T. Bergen American Legion Post.

Michael J. Wytrwal was NRA chairman for Montgomery County.  Wytrwal was a prominent businessman in the Polish neighborhood on Reid Hill. His family operated a coal yard, drugstore and furniture store.

The most notable Amsterdam public works project during the Depression was the municipal golf course, named for Mayor Carter and partly bankrolled by FDR’s federal government. 

BLUE PLATE

In the Depression, Orsini’s Royal Restaurant at East Main and Liberty streets offered a blue plate special.  Genevieve Orsini Hartigan Palumbo said the special cost 35 cents and included meat or fish, mashed potatoes and vegetable.  Coffee was an additional five cents.  Orsini’s also offered a meal ticket for $4.50 that was worth $5 in food.

Wednesday

"Soldier mortals would not survive if they were not blessed with the gift of imagination and the pictures of hope," wrote Confederate Private Henry Graves in the trenches outside Petersburg, Virginia. "The second angel of mercy is the night dream." 

Author Wanda Burch discusses her book, “The Home Voices Speak Louder than the Drums: Dreams and the Imagination in Civil War Letters and Memoirs.”  The late singer-songwriter John Kenosian has set some of these letters and memoirs to music. 

Thursday, November 10, 2022

Selling Amsterdam carpets

A 1930 in house publication called the Mohawk Courier contained praise from a New York City theater for a Mohawk rug and described how the Amsterdam firm’s sales force was expanding around the country to fight the Great Depression.

The saga of the Japanese American U.S. Army soldiers who fought in the Pacific theater...

November 11, 2022 Episode 448- Bruce Henderson, author of “Bridge to the Sun: the Secret Role of the Japanese Americans Who Fought in the Pacific in World War II.”

Bruce Henderson

One of the last, great untold stories of World War II—kept hidden for decades—even after most of the World War II records were declassified in 1972, many of the files remained untouched in various archives—a gripping true tale of courage and adventure from Bruce Henderson, master storyteller, historian, and New York Times best-selling author of Sons and Soldiers—the saga of the Japanese American U.S. Army soldiers who fought in the Pacific theater, in Burma, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, with their families back home in America, under U.S. Executive Order 9066, held behind barbed wire in government internment camps.

Mohawk Valley Weather, Tuesday, November 8, 2022

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