The Greatest Depression

Now that we are poised for the Greatest Depression...thought I write while the electricity still works.

See, my father and my uncles lived through the Great Depression, which really should be called the Last Depression. For about ten years they sat around in the backyard. I've been in a great depression for 20 years, and that's pretty much what I have done too. But I'm on Effexor now, and that has made a difference. It's whoopie time!

During the last Depression, there was a marked rock along the road that guys bumming for a job would see, and so they knew that the Fallis house along Richmond Rd was a place you could get eats. The kitchen was always filled with dirty stinking guys looking for jobs and food. No one was ever turned away by my Methodist grandmother. Method to her madness I guess.

So everybody sat around except my uncle Eric, who was on the road selling coal. From Toronto to Nova Scotia for the Canada Coal company. He liked selling in Nova Scotia, cuz after business was conducted, the owner would close the business and they would go fishin'.

But mostly in my father's day it was about sittin' around that ended with a free trip to Normandy and a government paid-for and everything nice trip through Caen, and Falaise Gap in France, and Holland and then Germany. Oh, my dad and his pals really knew how to make up for all that sittin' by becoming urban renewal specialists.

As a boy, my father took me to the war museum downtown, Ottawa. We were talking and suddenly he hopped over one of those barriers, and onto a 25-pounder field-gun. He began instructing me about calculating elevations for firing, and how to load shells--while running the darn gun in front of me. I was scared. Scared somebody would come along and maybe shoot us or something. Or that he might fire a hole through a wall.

Anyway, it was a part of my father I really was surprised to find out about. My dad the florist/artillery guy. The 25 pounder was thought by the Germans to be an 'automatic field gun' because of the rate of fire. A great urban renewal tool that was unique by virtue of being self-propelled. A field gun on tank tracks basically.

During interrogation of German soldiers, they'd take two, and bring one behind a building and fire a shot. "Me talk! Me talk!" the remaining solider would say. Then they'd bring the first guy back. Big joke.

The Canadians faced six Panzer tank divisions and two Tiger tank divisions in and around Caen. While the Americans love to talk about Patton's big break-out, it was the hand-to-hand fighting of the Canadians who held up the German arsenal that made the Patton manouver possible. The toughest were the Hitler Youth who made up one of the Panzer divisions. (At the end of the war, these kids were still fightin' with just 15 tanks left).

The Nazi tanks were equipped with German 88 field guns that could blow airplanes out of the sky or kill a sparrow in Brazil, if they wanted. They could kinda make you jumpy if you were on the receiving end as a result. One Tiger tank could easily take out 15 Sherman tanks in five minutes without working up a sweat.

One-time as a kid, my dad was doing his Victoria Day fireworks thing in the backyard. One of the fireworks made a loud 'weeeeeeeeeee' noise. My father who was by that time about 60 years old, made a scared 'holy crap' noise and ran the fastest I have ever seen him run. Then while everyone was looking at him, he breathed a heavy sigh and arranged his glasses. Oh those holiday memories never seem to fade do they?

Not eveything was fun and games and fireworks overseas for my dad. One time my father saw a Canadian officer just take a revolver and then blew some kid's brains out. Kid was about 11 years old. Just cuz. Hitler youth. Funny what Canadians will do when they get a headache.

I still have a pair of scissors (as sharp today as they were in 1944) that my dad confiscated from one of those little Hitlerites. And a pair of field-glasses used by Germans to aim artillery. Hey remember the Rat Patrol show? The bad German guy (as though there was any other kind) had the same field glasses. I tell ya, those guys in Hollywood don't fool around. EEe's grate to beee in Amerika!

While on his vacation tour of France (Caen being a city the size of Ottawa without a brick standing on-top of another after my dad was done) the Canadian army decided to take a picnic-break beside a field filled with mushrooms. My father, who was a naturalist knew the mushrooms were safe, and asked permission to pick some. Which he did. He got some butter from 'Cookie', and fried them up. His pals waited for him to die, which as I am evidence of, he did not.

Next morning he got up early to pick some more mushrooms to find the field empty!

My dad gave me three pieces of advice about the army. 1. Don't join. 2. Don't sleep under tanks. Squish. 3. And don't volunteer. Squish.

My dad had two buddies with him. One was Cec H. the other was Norm F.

After one particularly nasty encounter with German tourists in France, my father went to check on Cec, only to find that he had been killed. Child-hood friends.

And now for the rest of the story...!

Cec had been dragged by some buddies to the army triage tent. The Dr. decided to invest some efforts helping Cec stay alive since he had three bayonets pointed at his guts. Cec ended up in England and had a big metal plate stuck in his head. My dad, wrote the 'bad news' to Cec's sister, only to find out six months later that Cec was back in Canada chasing women.

Cec died as an old man while I was living in Toronto, and I did not get the funeral. But before I left Ottawa, his wife died, and I attended the wake. His kids (both adopted) asked who I was. I told them, and there was this shock that erupted across their faces. I was older naturally. Old memories for all of us.

I told them I was there because my father would have wanted me to be there, and expressed my sympathy for their father's passing too. A circle story fulfilled.

Norm F. was a giant of a man. 6' 7" And he got the same ration as other guys. Which in Holland wasn't enough for anybody since there were these kids with sunken black-circled eyes begging for food all the time.

Even today the Dutch are screwed-up when it comes to food. They eat french fries with mayonnaise. Never heard of ketchup. And they still have dark sunken eyes as a result. Probably the dope they smoke though, which I would do too if I couldn't get ketchup.

One of the weird things about veterans of ww 2 was the strange tastes they had for food. Sometimes, my dad would just get up out of his chair and race to the kitchen, where he'd get two pieces of white bread and cover them with six inches of ketchup. Yum. Yuck.

The daily ration for Canadians (if it got to the front) consisted of a hunk of raw greasy mutton sometimes, and maybe an egg or piece of toast and crappy tea. Norm F. was pulled from the lines because of starvation, and never did fully recover from his mal-nourishment even after the war.

Year's later, my dad went on a fishing trip with Norm F. My dad had offered to provide the eats. "Don't worry Wels, I'll take care of everything." Norm's idea of everything was a dry loaf of bread. Hmmmm. Probably was considered by Norm to be a feast I guess.

One time my dad's outfit was passing an American cook camp in France. The Americans invited the Canadians in for hamburgers! And get this! Ice cream! Just a stone's throw from the front lines! Ice cream! The passing Brits were happy to invite themselves in for the good eats too. The Yanks told the Brits to take a hike toward the bullets. Something about the Americans becoming revolting in 1776.

Outside of Rotterdam, in Holland, those darn Germans decided to turn their coastal guns inward for some Britania-like Demolition games we played as kids--except better!

Tore things up pretty bad. Among those who died that day was a cousin of my mother's. His guts had been torn out by shrapnel. He asked my dad who was also the medic for the outfit, if he would be alright. My dad, told him, "You'll be fine." Then the guy died in my dad's arms.

My father said when he was doing his medic thing, his job was to casually walk on-top of bullets and drag guys who had been hit, stop the bleeding, give them morphine, put a blanket around them and 'get them the hell outta there'.

Certainly, when my dad took sick, there were dozens of cards from thankful guys who expressed their love for him.

After the war, when there were no more bricks to blow-up, my dad was given the job of keeping the Germans happy, and the Russians scared. In 1947 his mother (my grandmother) had a huge stroke.

My uncle Eric closed the florist shop for a day at Britannia Heights in Ottawa, and went downtown to see a Senator Fallis (one of the five women who fought for and secured the vote in Canada for wimin) and told her that my dad was now gettin' a little old in the tooth for babysitting the Euroweenies. Two days later, my dad got orders to go home. His pals who stayed on in the European sunshine for another year...1948!!!...wondered who my dad knew.

When my dad got home, he used his war money...a dollar a day...to buy his mom a fridge. Out with the icebox. She never really got a chance to enjoy it though.

My dad said for six months after getting home he just couldn't sit still. He'd go to a ball game and find he had to get up and go for a walk. Odd I guess when you have a day when nobody is shootin' at you. My mother's diary at the time expressed her concern that he had not called. I guess he was a wee bit whacked out doncha know.

What with the Depression and vacation overseas and all.

Which led both my father and Uncle Eric to become Social Credit devotees. The so-called funny money party. "Funny money indeed", would get my uncle going! "You know where money comes from in the banks?" my dad would ask. "Right out of thin air!"

And here's how the scam works: A country's central bank is privately owned. Begins with the Rothschilds who scammed the Brits after the Battle of Waterloo.

The guvernment decides it needs to borrow money to make new tanks or whatever. So it does so through the central bank. Say $700 billion for a bail-out. Then the government can't pay it, so it borrows more money to pay the interest. Government's get in trouble when they borrow too much of the mystery money as a percentage of GDP cuz the money loses its value....through this contrived inflation. Supply and demand. Which means ya gotta borrow more and so on.

And the scam goes further. The central banks loan mystery money to the small banks at interest. The small banks then loan money to each other at interest when they get in a bind cuz they loaned too much to the peeps, and money loaned to the peeps is done through another scam at interest through a system they call 'fractionalization'. Which is another word for 'rip-off'.

The little banks during the Great Depression loaned five dollars for every one dollar they had on deposit. The banks followed the lead of the central bank by creating mystery money out of thin air. Fractionalization. But...loans were put on the books, and if too many peeps defaulted, a bank would go broke cuz there wasn't enough real money to cover the loans.

Now that we are sophisticated and smart and all...we now allow the banks to lend money at a 10-1 ratio--which is why we have all these banks foldin' and goin' down.

Forcing the government to go to the central bank to borrow more mystery money. While the little banks get bought up for cents to the dollar, along with real-estate and anything else of value.

But I got a tent and a barbecue, and a $600 hundert dollar pick-me up truck right?

And I have three nephews and a brother-in law doing urban renewal in Iraq and Afghanistan. I'm too old and too sick to help.

My friends here in Wisconsin, recommend I buy a Beretta, because it would fit well in my small hands. Which would be handy since we have turkey's struttin' around again in the back yard. Five of 'em. You can walk within ten feet of them before they lope away. Or whatever turkey's do to move. Easy targets.

There's just so much to do when you are starting over.