1930- 31: Climbing Out of the Depression

I'll have to give John Kellogg credit for always believing in himself - that he could overcome whatever odds were lining up against him.

The picture of Ruth and John was taken in 1930, almost a year after the Crash in 1929.  Ruth lost her job at Montgomery Ward.  Any wives whose husbands also worked at Wards were let go quickly, so John's job lasted a year or so longer than Ruth's.  Then John worked for a newly-created division of the Welfare Commission in Chicago. Luckily he was hired by his former boss at Ward's, though that job only lasted 8 months.

Always on the lookout for an opportunity, John found one.  "Meanwhile I was searching for something new that people would buy.  I first saw a roll of Sealtex at a social meeting of a Bible Class.  I bought a dozen 2x60 rolls for 25 cents each and the next night sold them directly for 50 cents each.  They sold very fast.  For the next several nights, I repeated the above.  Then I felt sure I had located something that had a future.  Mom and I sold two shares of AT&T we had jointly bought after we were married to buy the rights for all sales in Cook County.  Long before that our car had been stolen and wrecked.  We had been using public transportation for many months.

Our son, Kenneth Alan, was born September 6, 1931."

John didn't talk about the family again until I was born in 1936.  His focus was on succeeding in business, much more difficult than it would have been before the Depression hit.  Everyone was impacted, so at least one didn't feel alone in trying to survive.

New Year's Day, January 1, 1941

The picture shows Ken and Diane Kellogg (me) on the front steps and stoop at 5458 W. Iowa in Chicago where our grandparents, Jim and Lottie Meredith, owned a two-flat for over 50 years.  You can see the sandy beige stucco on the porch behind us.  At that time, we lived upstairs in the smaller apartment.

In Pieces of a Life, Ruth's diary reports on the beginning of that momentous year, 1941.   "Drove down to factory with Papa and Jim to see new Aids machine in operation. Back again for New Year's Day dinner of Chicken and Duck with folks.

Just had time after dishes to get dressed and go to Florence and Clyde's.  Her folks came too.  We had a nice cold meal at 8.  Home 10:30"

"Papa and Jim" are my Grandfather Meredith and Uncle Jim.  The Aids machine mentioned might have been the long tunnel-like drying mechanism for the surgical bandage my father, John Kellogg, made.

Interesting about the food served on New Year's Day.  I have one vague recollection of duck and chicken or turkey being served for Thanksgiving at my grandparents' home when I was very young.  The custom must have ebbed away.

The other people Ruth mentions are the Ballentines, Florence and Clyde, who were their close friends. Florence and Ruth met when they both worked as stenographers at Montgomery Ward in Chicago.  By this time, Ballentines had a daughter, Bonnie Kay, who was one year younger than myself.

What Excitement! In 1904 John's Father Bought a Steven-Duryea

Okay, this is not the Steven-Duryea automobile that Charles Kellogg bought in 1904.  Continuing his father's fascination with cars, John bought the one pictured much later.  Shown in 1939 with John and children  Diane and Ken, it's a blue 1938 Lincoln Zephyr, the first expensive car John purchased.  John loved showing it off.

Pieces of a Life quotes John Kellogg's autobiography in talking about that other car, the Steven-Duryea. "In 1904 Buffalo received four new cars; one of them was ours.  I was five years old.  Cars then lacked windshields, tops, doors, mufflers and many other things we now take for granted.  To keep clean, folks had to wear goggles and linen dusters.  Vividly I recall the family driving the 25 miles to Buffalo to get outfitted.  I was asleep and they did not waken me.  I was heart-broken.

Our car came from Massachusetts and was a Steven-Duryea.  Like all others it had one large cylinder that shook the car when it exploded.  Cars were so very simple then.  If something broke, there was no service station to which you took it for repairs.  The village blacksmith forged your parts back together.  Each person with a car kept their own wood barrel of gasoline; recall, ours was down in the apple orchard.

Lacking mufflers, cars made a terrific racket.  Horses were just plain scared of them.  Horse owners at first tried to minimize the impact by putting blinders on horses; with these the horse could see only straight ahead.  These helped some.  Still the noise was so loud that often the horses ran away or their owners held them at great risk.  I have been in a car many times when the frustrated owner would lash out at us with his whip.  We went much faster, so in several seconds were out of danger.

Ruth Kellogg's Diary at Christmas, 1929

This is one of the many segments of Ruth's diary that is in Pieces of a Life, which focuses on her life and her husband John's.  They were married only about 7 months earlier.

Wed., Dec. 25, 1929 - Christmas Day
   "Up at 6:45.  We had a good time opening our gifts.  We didn't get many, bu those we did receive are nice.  Called up Florence to see if she got what she expected & she did!!  She is satisfied with it.  
    We arrived at folks' at 10:00 - before breakfast even.  Had a cup of coffee with them.  Had fun exchanging gifts there.  After big turkey dinner, we played rummy while Jimmie was at show.  Fun.  Home again at 8:25."

Ruth and her family enjoyed playing card games - a far cry from Ruth's Grandmother Meredith, who threw playing cards in the fireplace. She said, "They were the work of the devil."  As I was growing up, we played cards or board games often on Sunday afternoons.  I started playing at 5 years old and most likely my older brother, Ken, did too.

Ruth's friend, Florence Childers, received an engagement ring from Clyde Ballentine, her beau, for Christmas.  They were married a year later.  Ruth and Florence, who was from Iowa, met through their clerical jobs at Montgomery Ward in Chicago.

Ruth listed all of her gifts as she did every year and who the giver was.  She had ten gifts with the black kid purse from John being the star of the group.  Ruth also listed the seven gifts John was given with the standout being the fur-lined gloves she gave him.  John's car was stolen and wrecked a year or two earlier, so they walked long distances and took public transportation as well.  The gloves probably were warmly appreciated.

An Awful Day for Jimmie, Ruth's Brother

In 1927, an event changed the Meredith family forever.  They went to the Baptist Church, as usual, but during the service, Jimmie "stood up in church, ranting about religion.  Jimmie was normally quiet with a sweet disposition, so this was like the blast of a siren in the night."

Jimmie Meredith was 16, five years younger than his sister, Ruth.  Sadly, he went for a stay at Elgin, a state mental institution, to be evaluated.  "He was diagnosed as a schizophrenic and given shock treatments among other things.  He was in and out of mental health facilities, on prescribed drugs and in the care of psychiatrists for the rest of his life.'

This seemed like a bolt from the blue, but was it really such a shock?  Jimmie's Uncle Arthur Meredith had some sort of mental issues, though the picture of what they were is shadowy.  Jimmie's Grandmother Ruth Parks Olmstead Meredith was said to have been in a mental institution in Michigan in the late 1800s or early 1900s.  Again, we are left wondering what happened and whether it was a harbinger of what was to befall James William Meredith, whom we know as "Jimmie."

The picture above shows Lottie Weekes Meredith, Jimmie's mother, and Jimmie in the fall of 1942. They were standing on the cement in front of Ruth and John Kellogg's home in Oak Park.  That area was later to become a screened-in porch.  Jimmie is 31 and Lottie is 55.    

Missing Pictures Found!

These pictures somehow didn't print in the blogs on Nov. 5 and Nov. 30.  These added a lot to the two blogs, which were titled "Ruth Meredith's World as a Teenager" and "Just Three Months from Graduation."  On the right Ruth is 14 in the first picture, posed with a girlfriend.  This was taken in 1920.  It looks like a backyard in the Austin neighborhood.




The second one is Ruth's graduation picture, taken in March, 1926 when she was 19. It appeared in the Maroon and White, the Austin High School yearbook.   I commented on her Marceled hair style, which was very popular.  Her blonde hair was normally straight. Just 10 days after graduation on June 25, Ruth turned 20.  You can't tell from the photo, but her eyes were hazel.  

Mebbe So

"Mebbe so" was the way John Webb Kellogg said "maybe so", a reflection of his early years in Lancaster and Buffalo, New York.  Every once in a while I'll hear someone with that older upstate New York speech and be reminded of incidents in my childhood.

This picture of my father was taken in about 1919 when he was 20 and living in Detroit and Ann Arbor, Michigan.   He was working multiple jobs because his life was on a financial roller coaster.  Charles Henry Kellogg, his father, had died suddenly at about 59.  Like his father, another Charles Henry, he was an engineer who built bridges all over the East Coast.  Unfortunately, Charles, who had one of the first cars in Buffalo, left his second wife, Esther, a 16-room house, 2 servants and scarcely any money.  I don't know if anything went to the three much older offspring from Charles' first marriage.  They were all in their 30s and only one still lived in the Buffalo area.

By this time John's only full sister, Dorothy Helen, was 9, born in 1903.  At age 13 John's  life turned upside-down, dropping from a privileged status to being concerned about a roof over the head and food on the table.  His mother sold the house, fired the servants and moved from outlying Lancaster to much larger Buffalo.  There she rented and operated a boarding house, helped by one of her sisters from nearby Grand Island.  Esther Clara Webb Kellogg was a grand-daughter of Irish Potato Famine immigrants, a confidant, resillient young woman who grew up on a farm.  She was also the oldest of ten children, used to commanding the others.

Only in her 30s, Esther remarried in 1915, this time to an easy-going Bible salesman.  The family moved to Detroit where there were supposed to be jobs to be had.  According to John, in the early years the budget was tight for Esther and Guy Ashford Wood, her husband.  They had two children, Guy Jr. in 1917 and Sara Jane in 1919.

By the time John entered college, he relished working.  To put himself through the University of Michigan, he baked pies, became a sandwich man to fraternities, waited tables at a fraternity, worked at a "casino" (a resort cafeteria), bid on and won a contract for food concessions at sporting events.  In the first summer after he started school, he was able to work 100 hours a week at the Belle Isle Casino near Detroit and had a place to sleep there.   He saved a lot of money during college.  That was a lesson - save, don't spend - he drilled into his children.  You can find out more about him - and Ruth Meredith - in Pieces of a Life.