Nothing But a Five-Dollar Bill
March 14, 2020
During the Roaring 20s, while others were drinking gin and doing the Charleston, my grandmother Mother Shellie was teaching sixth grade, rearing two children, churning butter, chopping the heads off poisonous snakes, harvesting figs, pears, peaches, and scuppernong grapes and preserving them in some manner, tending her worm bed, doing all the things a mother and a farm wife had to do, and memorizing a piece of scripture or poem every day.
I’m not sure we can begin to understand how hard she worked, and how thrifty and resourceful she had to be. She had been abandoned by her husband, a Mr. Kinchen (of whom no one ever spoke), and left to raise a young son as a single mother, not an easy row to hoe in the early 20th century. Luckily she met and married Buddy, Mama’s father, my grandfather, and things seemed to get easier for a bit. She religiously deposited every paycheck she earned as a schoolteacher in the bank.
When the crash of 1929 hit, like most people, Mother Shellie lost every penny in her bank account. I never heard this from her (she was not one to talk about herself) but Mama told the story that on the day the banks closed, Buddy’s brother Wayman came over and handed her a five-dollar bill and that was all the money she had in the world.
I’ve thought about that scene my whole life. I can just see her, her slight figure standing in the kitchen holding that five-dollar bill, realizing that every dime of her hard work had disappeared into thin air, and her thrift and discipline had come to nothing. Still, she had to get up the next morning and do all her chores, and then go back to teach school. In a world with no money. (Her son, my uncle Rex, 21 at the time and just getting started in life, never again trusted a bank. Instead he stashed wads of cash in drawers, cans, and jars all over the house.)
But along came FDR and his Brain Trust in 1932, and one of the things those brains came up with was the FDIC, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which we have to this day. If even that one institution had been in place in 1929, Mother Shellie’s hard-earned money would’ve been insured, Uncle Wayman could’ve kept his five-dollar bill, and unfathomable suffering would have been averted across the country.
Today I’m thankful for FDR who had the guts to against his own class to save the nation from it. It’s time for us to pick up that torch again.
©2021 Joy Cunningham