Color photographs of the thirties. I always think of the world as being black and white back then, because that’s what all the photos are. It kind of reminds me of this classic exchange between Calvin and his dad:
Calvin: How come old photographs are always black and white? Didn’t they have color film back then?
Dad: Sure they did. In fact, those old photographs are in color. It’s just that the world was black and white then. The world didn’t turn color until sometime in the 1930s, and it was pretty grainy color for a while, too.
Calvin: But then why are old paintings in color?! If the world was black and white, wouldn’t artists have painted it that way?
Dad: Not necessarily. A lot of great artists were insane.
Calvin: But… But how could they have painted in color anyway? Wouldn’t their paints have been shades of gray back then?
Dad: Of course, but they turned colors like everything else did in the ’30s.
Calvin: So why didn’t old black and white photos turn color too?
Dad: Because they were color pictures of black and white, remember?
That kid’s going to need a therapist.
If the captions are to be believed, none of these photos is from the 30s. They’re all from 1940 on, which means the very tail of the Depression.
Got to love the Daily Mail’s mendacious description of the prosperity of the 20s as a “bubble.” Amity Shlaes, it’s the bat signal!
I miss Calvin and Hobbes.
I notice that despite how poor everyone looks (to us anyway), everyone looked as if they at least got adequate nutrition, especially the kids. The barbecue the homesteader and his kids are eating looks like many a meal I’ve eaten in my life. In fact, I got a little hungry looking at that photo. Mmm, barbecue.
Si quaeris depressionem novam, circumspice
They look like Norman Rockwell paintings.
Every once in a while Calvin’s Dad would leave the reservation and do something like this, only to be quickly corralled by Calvin’s Mom.
There might be some sort of interesting back story here – was Dad a Calvin-like free spirit at one time? Was it Calvin’s mom that broke his spirit, his own parents, life in general?
Calvin gave as good as he got. I remember one in particular…( paraphrasing, no doubt)
Calvin: I want to be a billionaire when I grow up.
Dad: Well, you’ll have to work pretty hard to do that.
Calvin: No I won’t, you will. I just want to inherit it.
Andrea, people living on farms during the Depression often had more food than people living in cities. They could grow a lot of their own food. The proof of the effects of a poor diet came during the draft induction physical exams from 1940 and on. A significant percentage of the men were deemed unfit for military service (4F) due to a variety of medical problems related to a poor diet growing up.
My maternal grandfather was a sharecropper in rural Alabama raising 5 kids during the Depression. He told me stories (verfied by my mother) of mostly having enough to eat but having to survive on an income of about $20 a month. Even factoring for inflation, that isn’t a lot of money but not having to buy much food helped.
One of my best investments was buying the CD set of National Geographic Magazine at CostCo some year back. The early color pictures allow were worth it.
Alone, not allow
Seconding larry j; I once pulled a stack of high school yearbooks at a KC public library dating from 1940 to about 1958. The kids in ’40 looked dirty and hungry. Significant improvement in appearance by ’50.
There was actually color photography as early as 1903.
Here’s a French picture I blogged, taken during WWI.
Carl Pham lives!!!
So Carl, did you start your own blog or just stopped posting here because you had developed “a life”?
I miss Calvin and Hobbes.
On the net you can find some rather well done “fan fic” comics of this. They take place 25 years or so later, with Calvin’s daughter as the new child protagonist.
@BL, i c wut u did ther.
@K, CP’s a domestic patriarch, a Cliff Huxtable/Al Bundy figure in The OC: he’s a busy man.
On topic: what’s always striking about these old photos is how everyone is poor in everything but dignity — quite the opposite of today.
Titus: it’s amazing how expensive clothing used to be, as a fraction of household income. It’s why there was an emphasis on mending and homemade clothes.
One of the great unsung changes of the 20th century was mass production of very inexpensive clothing.
I’m with Carl, this is the tail end of the Depression. AND into the war. There is a reason why women were working in a train yard.
The men were off fighting. And by the time THAT happened, there was money again. So some of them are not the Depression.
I like the homesteader garden pictures. By the time of the train yard pictures, 1943, most everyone had a victory garden. I can remember my dad talking about my grandparents victory garden when we had a garden in the mid 1960’s. He said those gardens were the difference in eating or not eating some days.
Also, my grandfather worked in a slaughter house, so they had beef when many people did not. Pop said it seemed like his mother started slow cooking those ‘cheap’ cuts on Tues night to eat for Fri supper!
But it was MEAT.
(I used to love when Hobbes bowled Calvin over. It cracks me up now to think about it we’ve got several Calvin & Hobbes books, the grandsons love that stuff)
Titus: it’s amazing how expensive clothing used to be, as a fraction of household income. It’s why there was an emphasis on mending and homemade clothes.
In my mother’s case, store bought clothes were quite rare. They wore hand-me-downs until they couldn’t be mended any more. Homemade clothes were made from whatever fabric they could get their hands on including flour sacks. Perhaps the only clothing they bought was shoes and they had to last an entire school year at least.
My grandfather told me that money was so tight, men would forego painkillers when having teeth pulled. It cost a dollar to have a tooth pulled using Novocain or the equivalent back then and 50 cents without. He knew a lot of men who’d take the pain to save the 50 cents.
I agree with the previous comments about the time of most of those pictures – they were from the WWII era instead of the Depression in most cases. By 1942-43, millions of people had jobs working in the war factories and shipyards earning fairly good wages for the era. They had a lot more money than they did during the Depression years but with rationing, there wasn’t much to spend it on.
Well, it’s cheap today because it’s all made overseas, so…
(Tangent: Souvenirs always feel like a Disturbance in the Force – I once saw a tempting cap in Ketchikan proudly proclaiming “Alaksa” in beautiful embroidery. Knowing that it was probably made in China, I wondered why I should purchase it knowing that it signified nothing less banal than point-of-sale. It was as though a million American factory workers cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced. Instead, I went outside and photographed the local specie of pigeon — Bald Eagles.)