Eldorado: My Childhood During the Great Depression

By Margaret Wentzel Lipthay

This is the story of my childhood, approximately from 1928 to 1943, which is also the time frame of the Great Depression. My parents came to America with my sister and me from Germany to find a better life. At first they did. Everything was wonderful and they had great success, but this was promptly replaced by failure, due to the unavailability of employment after the Crash of 1929. A whole new revision of our lives was necessary. My father purchased a very small farm on the eastern shore of Maryland, as a life-saving back-up. We could grow our own food and always have something to eat! This is the story of the life on this farm as seen through the eyes of a child. Many things were new and strange to my parents and me. Especially to me, because to a six-year old, everything is new and strange! This is the story of those six years, and the subsequent years when we had returned to New York and had come back to city living. Some of these experiences were sad and others were kind of funny. I have tried to stress the humorous aspects. I hope I have succeeded.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jun 12, 2012
• ISBN: 9781468573084

Margaret Wentzel Lipthay

After graduating from Cooper Union in 1947, I was employed by a number of display firms, fabricating displays for department stores. The most interesting of these was designing and producing papier mache clothes for six-foot tall pre-formed papier mache bunnies. Display work was very seasonal, however, so I felt that I would be better off with steadier employment. I became a bookkeeper instead, as I had taken a commercial course in high school, and eventually became office manager. After I married, Julius and I moved to Long Island, where we lived for twenty-two years. After my mother passed away, we moved to Florida, along with my Dad, so that we could be close to my sister in Tamarac. We relocated to Key Largo after both of them passed away. We continued to live there for nearly twenty years, until my husband died and I moved to Century Village, here in Pembroke Pines. This is a very nice retirement community and I enjoy being here. I have a splendid view from my fourth floor condo, overlooking the golf course with its lakes and the many birds that live there. I keep very busy, making friends, attending classes, and being a member of the Camera Club. Another plus is living so close to Julius’s sister, Dorothy. Once a week I volunteer at Adopt-A-Stray. I take care of the cats and welcome visitors who are interested in adoption and give them an opportunity to react with the cats. (See picture) My previous writing experiences consist of “ Letters to the Editor” and my monthly contributions to “The Coopa Guardian”, our Century Village paper.

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© 2012 by Margaret Wentzel Lipthay. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 05/21/2012

ISBN: 978-1-4685-7309-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4685-7308-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012905471

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

Dedication

Chapter 1 The Farm On The Eastern Shore

Chapter 2 School Days

Chapter 3 Eldorado

Chapter 4 The Farmhouse

Chapter 5 The Animals

Chapter 6 My Kitties

Chapter 6.5 Doll House

Chapter 7 Merry Christmas

Chapter 8 Dog Days

Chapter 9 A Walk On The Wild Side

Chapter 10 Plants And Flowers

Chapter 11 Hunting?

Chapter 12 The Hurricane

Chapter 13 What’s In A Name?

Chapter 14 The Boat

Chapter 15 Expediency

Chapter 16 Separate But Hardly Equal

Chapter 17 Scaredy Cat

Chapter 18 Shopping

Chapter 19 Astoria

Chapter 20 More Of The Summer In Astoria

Chapter 21 My Animal Friends

Chapter 22 Health Care

Chapter 23 Recycling The Trash

Chapter 24 The Rifle

Chapter 25 Back To The City

Chapter 26 Life Goes On

Chapter 27 Frugalitis

Chapter 28 Names

Chapter 29 How I Escaped

Chapter 30 Family History

Chapter 31 Social Insecurity

Chapter 32 Education

Chapter 33 The End Of Childhood, 1943

About The Author

DEDICATION

In memory of my beloved parents

Grete and Ernst Wentzel, who gave me a wonderful childhood.

Thanks also to my many friends and family members who have helped me with this book, mostly computer help, as I am totally computer illiterate;

Dotty Dine, Michele Stromer, Kim Takvorian, Barbara & Gary Mc Cray, Mel Markward, the Computer Club of Century Village.

My thanks also to my Internet researchers, Barbara Mc Cray and Jane McAllister Yantis, (baby sister of George McAllister, who was a classmate in Eldorado.) Thanks also to my friends in George Bettinger’s writing class for all their encouragement, and especially my friend, Carol Hinton, who insisted that I must write this book because she enjoyed my stories about the farm so much. I sincerely hope I have not omitted anyone.

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2. Lori on handles of wheelbarrow, Margaret inside, City Island, 1928

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13. Margaret Lipthay, 2012, working at cat shelter

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3. In the canoe, Ernst Wentzel, Adolf Gaub, Greta Wentzel,

Lori Gaub, Margaret, unknown dog.

City Island, 1929

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1. Greta Wentzel and her daughters, Margaret and Lori, Hamburg 1927

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12. Ellie, Annemarie & Rosemarie Gaub, 1942, Margaret Wentzel, Astoria, 1939

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4. Lori and Elinore Gaub, City Island, 1932

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5. Porch in Maryland, Aunt Grete and Margaret, 1932

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7. Greta and chickens 1932

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6. Margaret and chickens, 1932

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8. Oscar Beabout feeding calf and Margaret, 1933

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9. Ernst Wentzel, Lori Gaub, Margaret Wentzel, Ellie and Adolf Gaub,

with his car, 1935

CHAPTER 1

THE FARM ON THE EASTERN SHORE

Deti, my father said, Don’t play in the shade. It’s much too cold. Stay in the sun, keep warm and don’t catch another cold. I sighed. I knew that he was right, I was very prone to catching colds. Still, I didn’t like the idea of playing in the sun. The whole point of the game was to slither around on the frozen puddles, which had of course melted in the sunny areas. I did what I was told, kept sighing and standing around in the sunshine, and looking unhappy. I was not so sure that I was going to like living in this new place at all.

Papa had been here for a month when Mama and I came down from New York to the Eastern Shore of Maryland. It was January, 1931, and my father had been very worried about the Depression and how long it was going to last. There was just no work available, not for anyone and certainly not for him. He had been making very upscale, expensive gold jewelry, and there was no longer demand for luxuries like that now. He had been out of work for over a year now and felt that he must do something soon to secure our future as best he could. He had taken the savings he had left, $1000, and set out to buy a farm, thinking that at least we could always have something to eat. It was a good thought, but the only experience he had with farming had been when he was five years old and his widowed father had sent him to spend his summers with his uncle, who, himself, was only a part-time farmer because he spent the winters teaching school! Not a whole lot of experience for Papa, but he was always optimistic. How hard could it be? He soon found out!

My parents had looked at a farm in upstate New York first. I remember sailing up the Hudson River on the Day Line with them to look at one such farm. About the farm itself, I remember nothing, but I’ll never forget the house, especially the living room. I had never seen flypaper before and when I saw those long spirals of sticky yellow paper hanging from the ceiling, I was shocked, even at five years of age, because I didn’t realize that their purpose was to catch flies and not to be some sort of decoration. Ugly! Anyway my parents didn’t buy that farm, but probably not because of the flypaper.

Years later, on the farm, we had flypaper of our own, still unattractive to me, but apparently not to the flies, as there were plenty of them stuck to it. We had house guests once, who brought their cat Flinty, named for the city of her birth, Flint, Michigan. She was a regal longhaired Persian who did not associate with our cats and stayed indoors. The flypaper caught her attention one day and she thought it might make an interesting plaything and jumped off the buffet to grab that intriguing spiral which was twisting over her head. Big mistake! Cat and flypaper became hopelessly entangled. It took four adults to separate the yowling and clawing cat from the flypaper.

But back to the farm, it consisted of 33 acres, most of it pine woodlands. It was located in Dorchester County on the banks of the Marshyhope Creek, which was not a creek. It was actually a tide water river, about 75 feet across, and deep enough for fairly large boats to navigate, although very few did. Before the repeal of Prohibition, bootleggers would bring their cargo up the river by boat at night, stop at our place and transfer it to waiting trucks. My father’s role in this enterprise was to leave a lantern lit on the decrepit dock that remained at the edge of the river, left over from the busier days of the roaring twenties. The next morning a bottle of whiskey had mysteriously appeared on our front porch! Repeal killed this endeavor, even though Dorchester remained a Dry County. There just wasn’t enough business left to continue.

CHAPTER 2

SCHOOL DAYS

Even though we moved to Maryland in January of 1931, and I was to start school in February in New York City, I didn’t. I did not mind this one bit, I had more time to play. Classes in Maryland began in September and ran until June. There were no A and B sessions. In City Island, I was ready to be promoted out of Kindergarten in February and would have been enrolled in 1A at that time. I had already been introduced to the teacher, a Mrs. Byrd. To my great disappointment, no way did she look anything like a bird! My mother had received a postcard from the school when I was four, at that time too young for Kindergarten, to come and enroll me anyway, so that I could get a headstart on learning to speak English. My mother, my sister, Lori, who was nineteen at the time and I had emigrated from Hamburg, Germany in 1928 to join my father, who had arrived the year before. Economic conditions were in shambles in Germany at that time, and it was almost impossible for anyone to make a decent living. My father was still suffering from the two severe wounds he received during the first World War. In addition the political situation did not look good and did not seem to be getting better. His plan was, emigrate to America where everyone makes lots of money and then, if things looked better, both economically and politically, go back to Germany. Of course, this never happened for several reasons.

We arrived in New York on my third birthday. I remember it clearly. Papa met us at the dock in a taxi. It was raining and he had brought me a little red plaid umbrella. It’s strange that I remember the cab ride to City Island so well and recall nothing about the ship New York that we had just disembarked. In later years, my mother filled me in some of the details of our trip. Even though it had been a relatively calm crossing, my sister and mother had gotten very seasick, and had no interest in food and did not want eat breakfast and just wanted stay put in the cabin until they felt better. Not me, though! I had been befriended by a group of teenagers who thought I was cute. So at breakfast time, I insisted that I must go down to the dining hall, because my friends were expecting me! From then on, Mama would tell everyone, My Deti never gets seasick! It was tough sometimes to live up to that, but if your mother says you never get seasick, by golly, you never do get seasick! Years later when I was married, my husband said he was the envy of his friends. Their wives did