When Christmas Was Poor

There have been many times in history that celebrating Christmas was difficult, but perhaps the most notable time in U.S. history was during the Great Depression. In some ways we are revisiting that terrible economic collapse again. So now I’d like to share some personal history about a family that survived during those dark times, my grandparents and their three children—the Millers, my father’s family.

My father’s side of my childhood family was for much of their lives poor. Charles Edward Miller, my grandfather, made his living as a blacksmith. Blacksmiths didn’t just make horseshoes; they made many things that could be shaped from iron and other malleable metals of those days (in the late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds.)

However his profession was obviously tied to horses and horse carts, and as a young man Charles worked closely with these spirited beasts in other ways as well. He was following in his father’s footsteps when his father apprenticed him to a Belmont jockey trainer at the age of fifteen. Eventually, Charles Miller rode one of the horses at the Belmont Stakes racetrack, just as his father had. But jockeying was a brief interlude and what Charles really learned at the Belmont was blacksmithing.

Charles was proud of his work, which he performed out of his garage, but eventually time caught up with his noble profession and blacksmithing waned. The automobile and other changes brought on by the Industrial Revolution were to blame.

For Charles and his family of five, poverty preceded the Great Depression. I’ll forgo a history lesson here, but just a little background to put the facts in their place; first came the Great War (WW I) and then came women getting the vote and the passage of the 18th Amendment—Prohibition. Next came the Roaring Twenties (today we might call this a “bubble”—a besotted bubble) and the Stock Market Crash of ’29. This crash shoved the world over a cliff, and with a sudden precipitous drop our economy was into the Great Depression. The Great Depression lasted through the thirties until World War Two (WW II.)

Other forces were at play during this fascinating period of U.S. history, but for my purposes this is enough background.

Let me return to the thirteen years of Prohibition when the very adaptable Americans adapted. For the Miller family, already teetering on the edge of poverty, adapting to this wave of social change meant the children had to leave their formal education and go to work. Estelle, Charles’ wife, also had to turn their home into a boarding house.

My father Roland had just completed the fifth grade when he began “rum running” with his older brother Russell, from the shores of Long Island near their home. Roland’s exposure to hard alcohol and extreme fear (a lethal combo) at such a young age did him no favors. The abbreviated education was equally damaging for this very bright child. Despite these handicaps, years later he would rise to an executive position in one of our nation’s great steel companies, Glendale Steel Corporation of Brooklyn.

If Americans were lucky during these times, their lives were meager. For the unlucky, life was outright misery. Russell eventually died of alcoholism at a relatively young age in his mother’s boarding house. Roland survived longer, but suffered the same illness most of his adult life.

One more family secret, and one in which I share his pride; Charles E. Miller used to boast that he was a "half breed", part “injun”. And as proof, he offered the fact that he posed for a sculpture still standing today in Central Park. This sculpture is called The Indian and you can find pictures of it on the internet.

Research into this matter has led me to know that at least two hundred young men were paid to pose for this statue, so I must add that I have no real proof of our family’s connection to American’s first inhabitants--just a lovely fantasy.

Oh, and another side note; I still have Charles E. Miller’s anvil, and a tree stump he saved that has a horseshoe embedded in it.

And the moral of this story? America’s inventiveness and adaptability are its greatest gifts. Also, how you adapt to hard times may determine what you become for the rest of your life.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to you all.