Dec 29, 1913 - Dec 17, 2000
6 children survived Depression all alone
By LUCILLE SCHUMACHER
It was a cold Christmas In 1929, the year my mother died. My father had died 12 years earlier, when I was four, and ny stepfather had died just two years before, but there had always been Mother to take care of us. Now we were alone.
She died Dec. 22 and was burled he day after Christmas.
That was a sad day for the children, and to come home to the wide-open doors of our Sanilac county farmhouse made It worse. We walked In and no one was there. It was very cold and we had little to eat. We fixed hot dogs and ate some canned food.
We were six kids left all alone, but somehow we knew we had to survive. The oldest stepson was 18. I was 16. The youngest were 2 1/2 and 4 1/2.
We all did whatever there was to be done. We milked 15 cows by hand and sold the cream to buy
The hardest part was washing the clothes, Including the sheets and overalls, by hand on a washboard. My knuckles bled many a day.
OUR SEWING MACHINE didn't work so I made dresses by hand, sewn from my mother's old dresses. We never thought about asking for help. No one ever asked me if we needed anything, and i never expected anything of anyone.
My thisrt for learning never left me. When the two young boys were 4 1/2 and 6 1/2, the teacher said she would enroll them. I then saw the superintendent at Ubly High School and I thought I could manage to go to school two days a week and still get all the work done at home. I was told, If I got my grades, they would graduate me. I had llth
Dec 28, 1913
I got up at 4 o'clock In the morning to keep up with my grades. That didn't bother me because, even when my mother was alive, I would get up at 4 or 5 o'clock and study.
One cold. blustery morning, I had the bread all baked from scratch (I made 15 loaves at a time. twice a week), the cows wn mllked, clothes washed, and I looked out and the moon was still shining through the clouds. I uid. "That's funny, I only »et the clock ahead an hour." My brother laughed and said he had set It ahead an hour also. We had gotten up at two o'clock. We accomplished a lot that day. We lived like that for three years. We never had an argument.
I could say much more about the Depression, but at the time we never even thought about it being a Depression. We were too busy, and we had fun also. We never missed mass on Sunday, nor did we work on that day. Our main concern was, could we get everything done we had to do tomorrow?