The entries Ruth Chilstrom penned in her diary were often short, yet poignant.
“W. no work,” meaning her husband, Wally, had not found work in 1936.
“W. no work. Snow. Roads closed.”
The entries expressed the frustration, struggles and hardship the family endured in the 1930s during the Great Depression.
Worried his mother’s diary might one day be thrown away, the Rev. Herbert Chilstrom, a retired Lutheran bishop and native of Litchfield, sought to preserve his mother’s words by typing each entry into his computer.
“My mother kept a simple diary. It was, who came to visit, how much they got for a dozen eggs, how much a loaf of bread cost,” he said. “I recorded every date. One day, she bought a pair of shoes for my brother and me and indicated it cost $1.98. Then something would leap off the page, and when I put it into context of what I knew and heard from my sisters, the struggle and the Great Depression really came home to me.”
When Chilstrom read one of his mother’s diary entries, he could feel the weight on her shoulders. At that time, his parents had lost their farm. With no home, his father had taken three of Chilstrom’s sisters to live with his father’s mother. And, Chilstrom and his brother and one sister went with their mother to live with her parents.
With a family separated by poverty and living in cramped quarters with relatives through the brutal winter of 1935-36, Ruth had enough.
“Must find place,” she wrote April 5, 1936.
“Those three words — I could feel the desperation coming off the page of that diary, and that impelled me to want to write more about what the family was going through,” Chilstrom said. “Then, I thought, ‘this needs to be woven into the larger context of what was happening in the country.’”
Family memories in context
From his home in Green Valley, Arizona, Chilstrom, has written his eighth book, “I Almost Missed the Great Depression,” in which he recalls historical moments and how they affected his family of 10 living in Litchfield.
In the summer of 1930, Ruth and Wally worked side by side in the hay field. Ruth slipped and fell, precipitating a miscarriage, Chilstrom writes in his book.
“Had this not happened, I would never have been conceived the following January 1931. Life hangs by a very thin thread. So, there’s my story line: I almost missed the Great Depression,” Chilstrom recalls in the third chapter of his book.
Chilstrom was born into a poor Swedish family living on a rented Litchfield farm, two years after the start of the Great Depression.
His father, being a staunch Republican, named his first son — and fifth child — after the then-president of the United States, Herbert Hoover.
“From the turn of the 19th century to the 20th century, almost all farmers were Republican because the government was good to farmers. In the Beckville community, you would have had a hard time finding many people who were Democrats. So, even though Hoover was extremely unpopular, my father was so Republican, it was no problem to hang this moniker around his son’s neck,” Chilstrom said with a laugh.
“My mother leaned pretty much the other way. So, they had some pretty strong disagreements over the dinner table, over whether Roosevelt was doing the right thing. My mother saw there were some benefits from it (the New Deal), but my father didn’t see it,” he said, recalling how after supper he would linger around the table to listen to his parents’ political discussions.
In writing the book, Chilstrom relied on his mother’s diary, his memories, the recollections of his sisters who are still living, as well as historic books.
During the Depression, banks failed, unemployment rose, and shanty towns, sprang up across America, including in Litchfield, Chilstrom said.
“On the southwest edge of Litchfield, down Miller Avenue and to the west, that what’s we called ‘shanty town,’” he said, adding that most of those homes are gone now. “When people lost their home or farm, they would scramble for building materials, and the houses were tiny.”
The struggles his family faced during the Great Depression are at the heart of his latest book.
“I hadn’t even thought about writing a book like this until I started typing day by day, the pages of her diary. I got started about a year and a half ago, tucking it into other things I was doing. Once I got the inspiration of writing a book, it began to come together rather rapidly.”
However, at 85, Chilstrom has lost most of his sight, so researching historical facts was difficult.
“I can’t read books, so I listen to books on tape. I scoured books for the blind and listened to them. From them, I was able to thread together what was going on (during the Great Depression),” he said.
Chilstrom’s parents, Ruth Lindell and Walfred Chilstrom, were married May 10, 1922, at Beckville Lutheran Church in rural Litchfield. The Roaring ’20s had been good to the young family.
And then Black Tuesday hit.
“The earth trembled as the nation plunged into a deep economic crisis to be forever known as the Great Depression,” Chilstrom says in the book. “It became the yardstick by which every economic downturn since then would be measured.”
A growing family
At the time, the Chilstroms had four daughters, Adeline, Lorraine, Winnifred and Virginia, before Herbert was born. Two years later, another boy, David, was born. As a result of complications at birth, David sustained brain damage and grew up developmentally challenged.
Conditions on the farm turned dismal, worsening during the next two years for the Chilstrom family. Grain prices fell, dry weather limited the ability to grow crops, and during a rare thunderstorm, the family’s two work horses used to till the soil, sought shelter under a tree. The tree was struck by lightening, and the horses died instantly. With no insurance, it was another blow to the struggling farm family.
“By 1935, the family was on life support,” he says in the book.
The Chilstroms could no longer afford to live on their rented farm. The only option was to split up their family.
On March 16, 1935, the family left their farm and headed in different directions — Ruth took Adeline, David and Herbert and moved in with her parents and their 20-year-old son on a farm one mile south. Wally took the three other girls, Lorraine, Winnie and Virginia, and moved to his widowed mother and single brother’s farm house one mile east. Ruth, who was six months pregnant, gave birth to their seventh child, Martha, in June.
Time for prayer
Ruth’s parents, Arvid and Hedda Lindell, had emigrated from Sweden in the spring of 1901. Arvid worked for farmers in the Litchfield area until he could rent his own farm land.
Hedda, was a devout Christian and grew up attending church with her family in Sweden. Hedda’s father, Chilstrom’s great-grandfather, was a well-known lay leader in the evangelical community in southern Sweden.
Chilstrom remembers his grandmother reading from her Swedish Bible and “Psalm Bok” after the evening meal while living with his grandparents.
Even at 4 years old, Chilstrom knew that when his grandmother reached for her Bible, it was time for stillness and prayer.
“We would gather around the table for Bible reading, and I wouldn’t understand what she was reading, it was in Swedish. But it was that moment of silence. I was such a rambunctious kid, but I knew it was time to stop and think about more important things. That memory surely is powerful in my recollection,” he said.
That winter brought record-setting blizzards and frigid temperatures.
And Ruth’s diary reflects, in brief, the hardship and frustration at the time.
Feb. 3: W. — no work.
Feb. 4: Blocked roads and cold. W. no work.
Feb. 5: 28 below zero. W. no work.
Feb. 6: Very cold and snow. W. no work.
Feb. 7: No work. 30 below zero.
Feb. 8: W. no work. 22 b-zero. Snow and roads closed.
Feb. 9: W. no work.
Feb. 10: W. no work.
Feb. 11: W. no work. 20 b-zero.
Feb. 12: W. at work opening roads.
Feb. 15: W. no work.
Feb. 18: W. no work.
Feb. 19: W. no work.
Feb. 20: W. worked all day.
Feb. 21: W. no work.
Feb. 22: W. no work.
Feb. 24: W. worked all day.
Feb. 25: W. worked all day — shoveled drifts 8-10 ft high.
Feb. 27: W. no work.
Feb. 29: No work. Snow storm.
March 1: Blocked roads.
March 2: W. worked.
The need for the Chilstrom family to have their own home again became more pressing that summer when Ruth’s parents decided to retire from farming and leave the farm.
Sense of community
Wally began working with the Works Progress Administration and stayed with it through much of the late1930s.
The WPA laid new sidewalk in Litchfield, created a park and swimming beach, transformed a swampy area into a golf course near the shore of Lake Ripley, upgraded a sanitation system, extended water and sewer lines, and planted hundreds of trees.
So, even though he disliked the President Roosevelt’s Democratic policies, Wally had a steady job.
“Out of the Depression came a sense that we are one community and you pull together. Roosevelt, despite his childhood and wealth, had a compassion for helping poor people and those disadvantaged. And it’s people like that who help us understand — you either pull together or sink together,” Chilstrom said.
After searching for and visiting potential rental properties with no luck, the Chilstrom family found a small home on Ramsey Avenue North and Seventh Street, near the wooded edge of town, in October 1936.
After a year and a half of living apart, the Chilstrom family — Wally, Ruth and their seven children —were back to living under one roof, in a two-bedroom house.
Times were still hard, money was scarce, and the family relied on their large garden, part-time jobs that the older children were able to get, and the generosity of others to get by.
A book with purpose
Chilstrom graduated from Litchfield High School and then went on to college and then the seminary. He was elected bishop of the Minnesota Synod of Lutheran Church in America in 1976. Later, he was a member of the inner circle who helped bring three branches of the Lutheran Church together to form the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. He became the first presiding bishop of the ELCA in 1987, and led the church for eight years, until 1995.
He retired 20 years ago and he and his wife, Corinne, also a retired pastor, began writing books.
Throughout the book, Chilstrom said, “it becomes apparent that my father was a very kind and loving and tender person. His children would stand up to say we couldn’t ask for a better father. Our mother, with organizational skills and personal energy, she was the anchor that really kept the family going. She was very strong physically and bright mentally, and could converse in English and Swedish,” Chilstrom said.
She managed the finances, the garden, and the children, while also bearing children and suffering miscarriages.
To show his devotion to his mother, Chilstrom dedicated his book to her.
In the forward of his book, Chilstrom said in writing the book, his hope is three-fold:
- That older readers who experienced all or part of the Great Depression will be motivated to write and tell their stories. “Even if it’s a page or two, they owe it to their descendant to share that part of their life,” he said.
- That descendants of families who lived through the Great Depression will discover reasons to give thanks for their parents, grandparents and others who survived and conquered those stressful years.
- That everyone gain a new appreciation for public leaders at the local, state and national level who acted unselfishly and responsibly to bring hope and resilience to the country.
“My primary hope in writing the book was to share stories with my family. You never know which descendant will find it interesting because this is ancient history to them. Maybe others will say, ‘I love history, and I love to know how my family fits into history,’” Chilstrom said.
“On a broader scale, I hope it helps people be informed about what happened in history. Most people have heard about the Great Depression second-hand. A few people 80 and above have tasted a little of the Depression. I want to help people understand how difficult that era was in American history.”
