Letter from Roger Henn
Great Depression – February 2006 – Colorado Central Magazine
Editors:
Re: January, 2006, issue:
(1) What Coloradan ever called a burro a donkey? Author Laurel McHague does this once in her fascinating tale of a Leadville burro race. Shame on your headline writers — burro, jack, jack ass but never donkey. That word is left to Easterners of Missouri.
2) Don’t believe George Sibley lived through the Great Depression. I did. In 1930, I was selling newspapers on a Denver corner and making more money each week than many men were making. My older brother worked as a packer at Monkey Wards mail- order plant and averaged about $15 a week.
There were songs about the depression other than “Brother Can Your Spare a Dime.” “Rain, Rain Won’t You Ever Rain Again” (sheep in the meadow and the cows in the corn, they know that something is wrong) hit entirely too close to the “starving dust bowlers.” (Mister Herbert Hoover says that now’s the time to buy.)
“So Let’s Have Another Cup of Coffee and Let’s Have Another Piece of Pie” was a song I still sang in 1939- 40 (as I had in 1930) while financially struggling through my senior year at University of Denver. (My lunch for four years had been a half pint of milk and a banana bought at the grocery across Evans Avenue from the Campus.)
Another Cole Porter song of the Depression was “Love for Sale,” which was too suggestive for the networks and so was banned from the air.
Yes, we were escapists — we had to be to survive real life. Down on lower Curtis Street we could see three cowboy movies for 25 cents. They were as much escapist as Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers’ musicals were — whose songs we sang and whistled while we lived that awful depression. Thank God for Ginger and Fred, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin and Kern and his “Showboat” (was that escapist with “poor blacks” and miscegenation?). George, I hope your chorus sang “Begin the Beguine.” It was Kern’s favorite and a lovely melody.
Roger Henn
Ouray
