Boarding Out by, Lillian G. MERKLE HEBERT After I wrote about the Bear Brand factory, I thought of some other things related to my life [ca. 1931-1934]. I roomed at Mrs. Carney's rooming house, for $1.50 a week, which was at 219 N. Dearborn and was either moved or bulldozed down when Montgomery Ward built the big store which is now Graham's furniture. After Wards moved out it was a Kroger's grocery for awhile. They took everything from the two blocks and south of Mrs. Carney's house was a Seventh-Day Adventist Church which is now an apartment building out on East Broadway, just a half block from Rte. 50. The Lincoln School had been at the north end of her block and that was torn down and the lower grades who had used that building were transferred out to one of the other schools. Since I worked nights, I didn't get up too early and usually went to a little street car diner on the west side of the first block of Dearborn and had a sandwich and a glass of milk for about 15 cents around 11:30, and that would hold me until the supper break at work and I would eat there. When I read it over about the prices, I think I was too generous with some of the prices. I believe the beef and noodles and spaghetti were four cents and pork chops or meat loaf six cents. Sometimes, they had roast chicken and, at Thanksgiving she roasted several turkeys, and even that, somewhat of a luxury then, was usually only about eight cents for a nice serving. Bread was a penny a slice, and butter a penny. There were always choices or three or four meats and the vegetables were more seasonal then than they are now, but when there were no fresh ones, she used canned ones. I know I seldom spent more than twenty cents for a very satisfying meal. One day when I was in the diner, I noticed that the dishes were piling up in the back. A man named Mick, a wheeler dealer, ran it and waited on the counter and visited with the customers and his mother-in-law was the cook. She was not a professional cook. I gathered, as I got to know them, that she had put up the money for him to go into business when he was out of work, and she cooked simply to protect her investment. I asked, if I came and washed dishes for an hour could I work for my lunch, and they hired me. After that, I went in about 11:45, ate my lunch and washed dishes until about 1:00, then went home and got ready to go to the factory at 2:00. When the factory cut back to one shift, I no longer did that. After we were married, they had moved to a little café on the northwest corner of Court St. and West Ave. When I was laid off in May [ca. 1935], I went there and washed dishes and flunkied for both of our meals, and Eddie came from the factory and ate at noon. I went in about ten, ran to the store for some supplies, washed dishes during the rush hour, and when Mary Ellen, the waitress, went home at two, I tended the counter for coffee and pie, etc., during the afternoon I swept the floor, wiped off all of the tables, filled the catsup bottles, shakers and then, at five Eddie came and we ate and then went home since Mary Ellen would be back for the supper hour by then. Since a plate lunch, a serving of meat, potatoes and vegetable with a slice of bread was 25 cents, I was putting in those hours for $1 a day. Sometimes the cook fixed us a nice meal if Mick wasn't arobut when he was there she had to give us only what he would approve of, since we were not considered customers. He would take the money from the cash registers when he came in to see how things were going, and sometimes, she didn't have the money to pay for supplies to make a good menu. I came to the conclusion that he was sort of a con man, or maybe a gambler, or something, because a year or two later the place closed and I never saw them around town after that. When I was called back to the factory in August I quit. I don't think I could ever be much of a waitress or short order cook. When I had been at Mrs. Carney's a couple of weeks, Genevieve came to work in Kankakee, too. Since I was sharing a room with her daughter, Mrs. Carney did not have a room for both of us, and sent us to the corner north of there, to Mrs. Draude, who kept rooms in a big house on the northwest corner of the corner. That house went, too, when the Ward store was built. We lived there for quite a few months until Genevieve got a job as secretary to Nelson and Kay in Watseka. Velma Blanton, a girl that she had roomed with at Mrs. Carney's when they went to Gallagher's Business School, had worked for them and had decided to move to Peoria where one of her sisters lived, and she called Genevieve to come in for an interview and she got the job. Since we had been paying two dollars each for the room, I asked one of the girls on the floor whose sister had worked for the summer, and was going back to school, if she wanted a roommate. She said yes, but didn't want to move that far away, so I moved down to South Dearborn with her. We roomed together until I moved to Liz's, in August before we were to get married [1934]. The room at Liz's was not very big, but had a bed, dresser, table and little chest with a two-burner stove on it and the closet was divided so that half of it was a pantry. There was a door to the side that opened on to a little alcove with a sink and toilet and also to the basement door. There was a door on the other side to the main part of the house, and we had to share that bathroom with the family. Now and then, one of us would forget to unlatch the little latch that we would put on to their door when we were in it, or they would put on ours when they were in it. Our front door was never locked, so if that happened she could come in our room and go into the bathroom and unlock their side, if we were at work. About a month before we got married, Mr. Wertz, who worked at Kroeler's, said they were selling things off of the floor, which they did now and then, so I had him buy me a sofa bed, for $25, where the back drops down to make a bed, and there was a bin underneath to put the bedding away. That made our room a little less crowded during the day and, we had to make up the bed every night and put it away every morning. That house was at 605 East Merchant St. and it is still standing, and now, the front porch is built on. When we lived there we came in front into a small room, sort of a big entrance room, from which the stairs went up, and the girls played in there. There was a small settee and I put the little desk I had bought in it, and I think it looke like they might have made a big room by building in the porch and taking the partition out. Liz' family lived in four rooms, and there was a three-room apartment upstairs. That is the way lots of families did to make ends meet in those days. They had four kids, and the youngest was just a baby when we moved in. It is hard for young people to see how we could make ends meet with those wages, but people didn't buy much, other than groceries and needed clothing. No one dared charge anything because jobs were sometimes gone overnight and nobody wanted to owe money to anybody. Those who had cars, drove them only when necessary, if they lived too far from work, or to get big orders of groceries, and we walked almost everywhere. From May to August, when I was still on six dollars a week, I had $15 saved up and George and Robert MERKLE from Claypool [Indiana] came and took us to Chicago to the World's Fair, and we all chipped in and paid the room rent for Friday and Saturday nights, at a home that was doing the same thing, doubling up on couches, in order to rent out sleeping rooms. One of the things that happened then, was at the Fair. We were all hungry and it was Friday. Since they were not raised Catholic, they could have a hamburger, which were a dime. We bought cheese sandwiches, also a dime, and they teased us because their hamgurgers smelled so good and we couldn't have any. Our sandwiches were on big slabs of rye bread, with only a bit of butter and the cheese was about a quarter of an inch thick and they were very slow eating. They finished their hamburgers in about four bites and stood there looking at us, still having eaten only about a fourth of our sandwiches, and very sheepishly, went and got themselves each one to get filled up. Then, we teased them. And some people call them the good old days. . .