I’ve been reading a very interesting well-written memoir of stories written by a woman named Heidi Saarbach Laird, who grew up in postwar Germany as the daughter of a Jewish father and Christian mother in the aftermath of the Nazi reign of terror. As I read the paragraph below, I immediately thought of my grandparents, Rudolf and Elsa Laemmlen, who left Germany in 1929 as newlyweds to start a new life in America.
If the men had survived the war, they and their families would then have lived through a deadly influenza epidemic in 1918, food shortages and chronic scarcity of essential resources, the ruinous hyperinflation of 1923, followed by years of political instability, the worldwide stock market crash of 1929, a number of attempted political coups, turmoil and unrest in the streets, and a series of short-lived governments failing in quick succession. Along with a pervasive feeling of being unjustly and too harshly punished for Germany’s role in the Great War, these survivors had to wonder what kind of a world was waiting for their children.
The Frankfurt Kitchen by Heidi Laird, p. 88
Rudolf & Elsa Laemmlen were married in Grossgartach, Germany on Saturday, the 28th of September 1929. Both had independently traveled to and lived in America as young adults, where they realized they could have a bright future. Departing for America on the 16th of November, they honeymooned for six weeks on a freighter ship called The Seattle, arriving in San Francisco on 26 December 1929 after crossing the Atlantic and sailing through the Panama Canal.
On the 29th of October, while preparing for their trip to America, the New York Stock Market crashed, ushering in the Great Depression. Rudolf and Elsa’s hopes and dreams for earning financial independence in a new land met a different reality than expected.
In 1988, Grandpa Rudolf told me about his life. Here is an excerpt from his story:
After experiencing America on his own as a young man from 1925-1928, Rudolf returned to his home in Grossgartach on a sunny September afternoon. Except for the man at the depot, he didn’t see a single soul as he walked towards his home. When he turned left on the street where he lived, he caught sight of a young woman coming diagonally across the street in a way that was beautiful. He felt inside: “Here comes my woman, my bride.” And so it was. Her name was Elsa Schaefer. In 1912, when she was seventeen years old, Elsa had traveled to America, where she found employment as a house maid. She earned between $4.00 and $6.00/week, and later $15.00 in a grocery store. Every month she sent $10.00 home to Germany to help her widowed mother. Instead of using it to help pay for her pieces of land, her mother put the money in a bank. It was all lost when inflation made the German money worthless in 1923.
In 1928-29 there was 30% unemployment in Germany. After losing $500.00 to get the patent on a sugar beet topper someone else used, Grandpa took a 4-week tractor course near Berlin, and worked for a few months to save some money.
Elsa and Rudolf wanted independence. Believing they could make it together in America, they married on September 28, 1929, and in November they set sail on a honeymoon cruise to America. They left from Hamburg on one of the four German motorboats that went through the Panama Canal. The Seattle was a freighter weighing 7000 tons. It cost only $200.00 per person from Hamburg to San Francisco. Stops were made in Antwerp, Le Havre, Southhampton, Trinidad in Venezuela, both ends of the Panama Canal, and in Los Angeles, before landing in San Francisco six weeks later, on the 26th of December, 1929. Except for a wild mid-Atlantic storm with 30-foot waves, it was a wonderful honeymoon, one of the nicest anyone could ever imagine.
Grandpa remembers well his amazement when he saw the huge stocks of bananas in Panama. A young boy offered to sell him a stock for 25 cents, Grandpa paid him 50 cents, and both were thrilled with the deal.
They landed in San Francisco at 11:00 a.m., and by 4:00 p.m. had purchased a reconditioned Model T Ford Roadster for $145.00. They drove to Modesto to visit friends, then on to Sanger, where they stayed with good friends, the Hans Linshoefts. After a few days, they found a 20-acre place to rent on Lac Jac Avenue. They stayed two years. After that, they rented the 27-acre Higgenbotham place, near Parlier for three years. The land on these farms had not been leveled and irrigation was a back-breaking job.
Dried peaches were sold for 3 3/4 cents a pound, and raisins for $55.00 a ton. They received $300.00, three times from Germany before no more money could be sent out. With that, and with the money they earned, they were able to buy their present place from William Kreb for $8250.00 in November, 1934.
Here is part of an interesting explanation of what happened with the American economy at the time Rudolf and Elsa arrived in 1929 and in the years that followed:
Dr. Heather Cox Richardson is a political historian who posted this historical essay on Sunday, October 29, 2023:
On October 29, 1929, the U.S. stock market crashed. It had been rocked five days before, when heavy trading early in the day drove it down, but leading bankers had seen the mounting crisis and moved in to stabilize the markets before the end of the day. October 24 left small investors broken but the system intact. On Monday, October 28, the market slid again, with a key industrial average dropping 49 points.
And then, on October 29, the crisis hit. When the gong in the great hall of the New York Stock Exchange hit at ten o’clock, the market opened with heavy trading, all of it downward. When the ticker tape finally showed the day’s transactions, two and a half hours later, it documented that more than 16 million shares had changed hands and the industrial average had dropped another 43 points.
Black Tuesday was the beginning of the end. The market continued to drop. By November the industrial average stood at half of what it had been two months before. By 1932, manufacturing output was less than it had been in 1913; foreign trade plummeted from $10 billion to $3 billion in the three years after 1929, and agricultural prices fell by more than half. By 1932 a million people in New York City were out of work; by 1933, thirteen million people—one person of every four in the labor force—were unemployed. Unable to pay rent or mortgages, people lived in shelters made of packing boxes.
While the administration of Republican president Herbert Hoover preached that Americans could combat the Depression with thrift, morality, and individualism, voters looked carefully at the businessmen who only years before had seemed to be pillars of society and saw they had plundered ordinary Americans. The business boom of the 1920s had increased worker productivity by about 43%, but wages did not rise. Those profits, along with tax cuts and stock market dividends, meant that wealth moved upward: in 1929, 5% of the population received one third of the nation’s income.
In 1932, nearly 58% of voters turned to Democratic president Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who promised them a “New Deal”: a government that would work for everyone, not just for the wealthy and well connected.
As soon as Roosevelt was in office, Democrats began to pass laws protecting workers’ rights, providing government jobs, regulating business and banking, and beginning to chip away at the racial segregation of the American South. New Deal policies employed more than 8.5 million people, built more than 650,000 miles of highways, built or repaired more than 120,000 bridges, and put up more than 125,000 buildings. They regulated banking and the stock market and gave workers the right to bargain collectively. They established minimum wages and maximum hours for work. They provided a basic social safety net and regulated food and drug safety.
When he took office in 1953, Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower built on this system, adding to the nation’s infrastructure with the Federal-Aid Highway Act, which provided $25 billion to build 41,000 miles of highway across the country; adding the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare to the government and calling for a national healthcare system; and nominating former Republican governor of California Earl Warren as chief justice of the Supreme Court to protect civil rights. Eisenhower also insisted on the vital importance of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to stop the Soviet Union from spreading communism throughout Europe.
Eisenhower called his vision “a middle way between untrammeled freedom of the individual and the demands of the welfare of the whole Nation.” The system worked: between 1945 and 1960 the nation’s gross national product (GNP) jumped by 250%, from $200 billion to $500 billion. . . .
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Art Laemmlen holding Ann Laemmlen
I suppose it was a gift to be raised by a father who lived through these hard times. One of the themes in our family of today is “WE DON’T WASTE.” We clean our plates, we wear our clothes out, we prepare our own food, we avoid convenience stores or shopping for things we don’t need, we have a garden, drive cars until they die, we make do.
My kids think I raised them this way because of all the years I lived in Africa. The truth is, it’s in my blood, and I’m proud of that!
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