Bill Roberts

              Dr. David L. Crowder Oral History Project
Bill Roberts- The Depression in Idaho
By Bill Roberts
April 3, 1974
Box 2 Folder 32
Oral Interview conducted by Melinda Herbst
Transcribed by Alina Mower December 2005
Brigham Young University- Idaho
BR: In ’ 31 or in there somewhere my father had a loan on the farm, 160 acres which he filed on and proved up on in 1896 under the signature of William McKinley. And he had leveled his farm out and put it into production. And in 1932, when the Depression come along the price was so low on our— what we raised on the farm that we began to be hounded from our— where we had borrowed money to improve things. We had borrowed, my father had borrowed money from the Beneficial Life on 60 acres, then he borrowed money from the Federal Land Bank on 100 acres; and they were both crowding us, of course, for money. And we finally, when Franklin D. Roosevelt come into office, and he got to working; and there was a law passed that they would defer the principle on the Federal Land Bank loans for five years if we wanted and just pay the interest. Well, my father died in ’ 32, July the 25th, and my brother said he would take the Beneficial Life 60 acres, and I would take the Federal Land Bank 100 acres and try to work it out. Well, I have a whole lot of letters here from the Federal Land Bank, and the one that explains what Congress and signed by the President was this one that we could wait for 5 years to pay anything on the principal but to keep the interest and taxes up, but times were so hard that sometimes the taxes had gone delinquent, and after I took it over they started to write to me, of course, and they were very demanding, of course, for the taxes.
Well, we’s paid some, and we’d paid some, and I’d get letters thanking me for that and wanted me to pay more. Well, wheat was only about 25 cents a bushel and our beet crop was very, we didn’t get near as much for our beets as we do now, and we had to dig them by hand, and we dug them with walking plows, and we’d hire somebody to come in and top them by hand and throw them in the wagons to take them up to the factory, and so it was a pretty hard deal. And I know one year especially, I don’t remember what year it was, but I was digging my beets, and there came a cold spell. Well, I was plowing beets with a team of horses, and it froze so hard that the big chunks it would turn up would pert near knock me down as I plowed the beets. We had 80 acres that year, and as we went along a little later on there had come a lot of storm, and we couldn’t haul the beets out of the field, so we just had our toppers go along and top them and put them in piles and as it went on a little further, about Thanksgiving time, the ground froze up so we take these people that was helping us with our beets out in the field, and we took picks and broke these piles up and then thawed them in the trucks by hand, and I finished hauling the beets on Thanksgiving day that year. But of course, maybe that isn’t what you want, but it’s the time we had paying our bills. My father in his early days had enough money that he used to sign notes for with fellows so they could get some money, but by this time this Depression come along he had raised a family, a large family, and by the time this Depression come on things were pretty tough, and it was pretty hard to pay our payments to the Federal Land Bank and Beneficial Life, so my brother, Henry, he got a real estate man to make up a contract with Beneficial Life, and he re- mortgaged the farm that part of it. He started out that way, and I kept on with the Federal Land Bank, and we went on, and I don’t know whether it would do any good to read any of these letters or not.
MH: How old was you during the Depression?
BR: How old was I? Let’s see that was ’ 32, and I was born in ’ 91, 1891, I was about 40, 40 years old.
MH: Did you have a family then?
BR: Yes, I had a wife, and let’s see I had five children, but one died in infancy that was when she was 21 months old, and yes, I had a family, and my father had died, and we, let’s see, in ’ 32, yes, I imagine I had all my family. I [ had] been married since ’ 18, 1918.
MH: How many children did you have?
BR: We had five and, of course, I wrote back and forth to the Federal Land Bank. I’d pay them a little bit, and they’d tell me how much more I’d owe and how much I was to pay. And at one time they started to charge me eight percent. Now this, this they had reduced the interest to 5 ½ percent, but I got into default and didn’t pay right up so they raised the price to 8 ½ percent. And of course, it was really working hard at the time. Our potatoes, my brother and I raised potatoes one year, and they offered us $ 1.25 field run for them, and we didn’t think that was good enough, so we put them in the cellars we could get and the next spring after we’d sorted them three times and frost got into them, we sold them for 18 cents a hundred, Number 1s, Number 2s, we just practically gave away so that was the way prices was for potatoes. We could grow pretty good potatoes then, but our land was quite heavy, and it produced a lot of culls.
MH: How old were your kids then?
BR: Let’s see, I had one child born in 1919 and one, and a daughter was born in 1921. Now I’ll have to go get my Genealogy Book. 1932, Keith would be, we haven’t got it on there. You’d better shut it off for a while. Let’s see. They wasn’t old enough to do anything. The oldest was only 13 in ’ 32. And then from there on to ’ 36, the Depression seemed to be going, was around 16.
MH: Did he really know what was going on at the time or did he just accept it as he thought that’s the way that everyone lived?
BR: You said did he know?
MH: Did it bother him to know that?
BR: The children? Oh, no, I don’t think so. I don’t, so, but this oldest boy later on did a lot of beets all by himself. The other boys wasn’t old enough.
MH: Where about’s was this farm located?
BR: Just on the south side of town in Sugar City, across the street from the town site. 160 acres right on the highway run right through the corner of the railroad.
MH: So you was right here in this part of the country, huh?
BR: Yes, and I don’t know if you want this or not, but as boys when the railroads would come through, they had cattle guards, you know, to keep the cattle from going into people’s fields and going on the railroads and we’d go and get under those cattle guards and let the train run over us. We thought that was a big sport. I well remember when the telephone came. We watched the fellows come and build the telephone lines to our house. But that was earlier than this.
MH: During the Depression did you just farm? Were you just a farmer during the Depression? Or did you have another job besides farming?
BR: During the Depression, yes, during the Depression that’s all I’ve done was farm. We had sheep sometimes, cattle sometimes. We usually had milk cows and delivered milk; and earlier than this, we used to deliver milk to all the houses in Sugar City, and we’d get five cents a quart, delivering to the hotels, we’d get 15 cents a gallon. Us boys would take it out. Of course, that was before I was married.
MH: You said during the Depression you had cows and sheep?
BR: Yes, we had a herd of sheep at this particular time, and I kind of had charge of the sheep and my brother ran the tractor in the field. That was in ’ 32. We had a tractor then, ya see, but we had sheep, and we had cows.
MH: How much was sheep and cattle selling at the time?
BR: I don’t know if I could tell you or not.
MH: Too long ago to remember, huh?
BR: Yes, I can’t remember. Well, of course, we didn’t have an auction yard around here then. We just, our sheep, we’d shear them, and we’d ship them to Chicago or someplace to sell them.
MH: Did you do all your own shearing and stuff like that?
BR: No, we always hired ‘ em sheared, and we’d take ‘ em to the shearing corral and shear them. I also, I guess about this time a little later, I, we’d buy cattle and feed them in the wintertime and sell them. But that was quite a bit later than the Depression, too. You want to hear about the Depression, don’t you? I’m afraid you might get stuff in there you don’t want.
MH: Just say whatever you want to say about it.
BR: Well, I don’t know what it did on Idaho, but it had a great effect on us ranchers and farmers. Because we couldn’t pay our bills. When my father died, owed Mercantile, the whole family owed a lot of money and the banks went closed, and we couldn’t, my father had stock in the Sugar City Mercantile. Also the banks, and he was a director in the bank, in the Mercantile, and in the hardware and we, he had, the banker talked him into signing a note to pay my brother’s debt. And the banker said that he wouldn’t mortgage anything for it, but he’d like to have his Mercantile stock in the bank to show the inspectors when they came. They had enough to cover the note. Well, just ‘ fore father died, I took him up there and asked the banker, and the banker said yes it’s mortgaged. So his mercantile stock was tied up with his mortgage, and the bank went closed. So my brother and I, we went to see the man that was doing the receiving and made a proposition. We all owed money in the Mercantile, and my father had this mercantile stock. The Mercantile man said, “ Well, I’ll take the stock dollar for dollar and let it go on your bill; so we got all the family together and paid all our bills off, turned the stock over to the Mercantile.
MH: About how long after the Depression did it take to get back out on top?
BR: Well, I forget just when the Federal Land Bank note was due. The mortgage was due, but I don’t know whether I could find that or not, but I paid that in five years before it was all due. I paid the mortgage off. Besides that I bought, my father had his will made out. Each of us had a 30 acres on this farm, but the grandson had 16 acres or 12 acres, and one brother had 16. Me and my older brother and another brother had 25 acres. He had it divided up in his will, so I started right out to buying my brothers and sisters out. Forty acres, so I started right out to buying them out, and things were going a little better. By the time, five years, before the mortgage was up, I had it paid for and about all my brothers and sisters. But this land was a selling in for 110 dollars an acre.
MH: Now it’s a couple of thousand.
BR: 110 dollars an acre. I paid some of their bills, see. And one grandson, I took war bonds when he went to the army and take some of war bonds and make it home, why he took some war bonds to cash if he wanted to. So I finally ended up owning hundred acres, just a little under a hundred acres. I sold two and a half acres and a house for sixteen hundred dollars. That helped me get rid of the mortgage a little quicker, but anyway, that’s the way it went. Now is there anything else?
MH: No that’s enough.