Extracts from the memoir, The Bottoms: A Place We Once Called Home
This memoir is filled with pictures and nostalgia, reflective of barrios everywhere and wherever Mexican families looking for work settled out, and survived.
By Tom Rodriguez
In so many ways, the Bottoms was the perfect neighborhood for young boys to grow up in. Within that twenty-four square block area was the Hill Packing Company, that had two large horse corrals and a slaughterhouse, and the John Morrell Meat Packing Plant, which had large cattle and hog pens and two slaughterhouses.Not surprisingly, the young boys in the Bottoms spent many hours watching the cattle and horses, including watching them get killed and butchered. Directly north of those two facilities was the Kansas or “Kaw” River, which the Bottoms boys used as their private swimming pool and fishing hole during the hot Kansas summers. Nearby on First and Kansas Avenue was City Park, a public park used primarily by Negroes. The Bottoms boys used to play baseball there during hot summer days and on summer nights would go there to watch the Negro and Mexican softball teams play under the lights.
Located within the Bottoms were four movie theaters – the Glen, the Kaw, the Gem and the Ritz. The Ritz was the Negro owned and operated theater. On most summer days, young boys in the Bottoms would go into one of the movie theaters at about 11:00 a.m. and stay there until 5:00 or 6:00 p.m. They watched almost every movie that played, from cowboys and indians, to dramas, comedies, cartoons and musicals. During the school year, they would go to the movies on Saturday mornings and on Sunday afternoons.
Other fun places in the Bottoms included a potato chip factory where the Bottoms boys used to scoop up tasty discards into large paper sacks and feast on them for days, a large produce distribution warehouse that the Bottoms boys visited daily during the summer to find discarded bananas, oranges, watermelons, and other fruits and produce items.
Being poor also impacted recreational pursuits. For example, because their parents could not afford to buy them expensive play things like bikes and scooters, the boys in the Bottoms neighborhood became extremely creative at making their own play things. To make scooters, for example, they would find, or conveniently appropriate, a large piece of two-by-four wood and cut it into two pieces, one about three and one-half feet and another about two and one-half feet. The shorter piece was used for the footboard and the slightly longer piece was used for the upright steering post. To make the handle bar for the scooter, they used a small piece of wood about a foot and half long and nailed it to the top of the steering post. On the underside of the footboard, they nailed two roller skate wheels, one in front and one in back.
Afterwards, the boys sanded down the scooter and decorated it by painting it or nailing pop bottle caps in various designs to the entire scooter.
Some of the boys even went as far as fashioning homemade rubber mud flaps and nailing them to the footboards. The mark of a great scooter was how fast it would go and the key to making a scooter go fast was having a good pair of roller wheels.
Most of the boys in the Bottoms neighborhood bought their roller wheels at “Handy Andy’s” a small used parts store located to the east off of 4th and Madison Streets. Handy Andy’s had a treasure trove of junk and if you were willing to look long enough, you could find almost anything you needed, running the gamut from the smallest bicycle parts to a wide range of small auto parts.
In building their scooters, boys searched until they found some roller skates and then made a deal for them. At Handy Andy’s nothing was ever priced and therefore every purchase was subject to negotiation, which Handy Andy took great pleasure in doing.
Best of all, within the Bottoms neighborhood there were about 60 young boys of the same age, give or take a year or two on either end, which meant that there was always something to do and always someone to do it with. For all of those reasons, the Bottoms neighborhood was a perfect playground for the young boys who grew up there during the 1940’s and 1950’s.
Recreational Pursuits
Because of the pervasive poverty that existed in the Bottoms during the 1930’s and 1940’s, families were always strapped for money.
Also, because most of the Mexican families in the Bottoms were large, it cost a lot of money to feed, clothe, and educate their kids. As a result, children in the Bottoms didn’t have a lot of clothes to wear and those that they did have were often well worn. In fact, most the blue jeans worn by the boys in the Bottoms had several “parches” or patches, which were often sewed on to the knees and butt to make them last longer. Many of the boys also wore high topped shoes called “Mata Vivoras” or “Snake Killers.”
In fact, in the 1940’s, and even into the mid-1950’s, most of the boys in the Bottoms, even those up to age fifteen or sixteen, used bikes to get around since very few people in the Bottoms had automobiles.
It was very common, for example, during the summer months to see groups of eight or nine boys riding their bikes in the Bottoms neighborhood and around town.
The boys in the Bottoms also made their own slingshots from tree limbs. The process of making a homemade slingshot began by searching for the right kind of tree and then locating the perfect Y-shaped tree limb. When a boy found a limb he liked, he would climb the tree and with a small hand saw or small axe, would cut down the limb.
Then the Y-shaped portion of the limb was cut into the size of the slingshot he wanted to make. The process of finishing a slingshot consisted of stripping the bark and then sanding the Y-shaped piece of wood. When that was done, two large strips of rubber tubing, about onehalf inch wide and eleven inches long, were cut from a rubber inner-tube. To attach the rubber strips to the slingshot, a knife was used to cut rings in the two prongs of the slingshot and the rubber strips were attached with strong string. The final touch was making a leather pouch to hold projectiles. The pouch was always made of leather and was egg-shaped with two eyelets cut out near each end to attach the rubber strips to the pouch. When the slingshot was finished, the boys would search for small smooth rocks to use as projectiles, or would use glass marbles. For target practice, the boys would often use empty pop or beer bottles and have contests to see who could break the most bottles.
Homemade bicycles were another thing that boys in the Bottoms became adept at putting together. Since their parents couldn’t afford the beautiful shiny Schwinn bikes that they saw in magazines and store windows uptown, they were forced to build their own bikes that they called “Hot Rod” bikes. The hot rod bikes did not have fenders, reflectors, horns, mud flaps, or any of the pretty accessories that new store bought bikes had. The Bottoms Boys bikes were built from the ground up. They would usually start by buying a used frame at Handy Andy’s and then after earning some more money they would buy a handlebar, seat, chain, pedals and even ball bearings. Lastly, they would buy wheels and tires.
The Old Gage Park Swimming Pool
During the hot Kansas summers, in the days before air conditioning, the only way for kids in the Bottoms of cool off was to go outside and hose themselves down, sit directly in front of a fan, or go swimming in a public pool or the Kansas River. However, swimming in the Kaw River was very dangerous, as evidenced by the fact that without fail every summer some young boy would lose his life swimming in the River. For that reason, most of the time the Mexican boys in the Bottoms went swimming at one of the four public pools that Mexicans were allowed to swim in, which were Gage Park, Garfield Park, Ripley Park and City Park.
Several times a month during the summer vacation months, the Bottoms Boys would catch a bus at mid-morning at Sixth and Kansas Avenue and ride it out to Gage Park where they would spend the day. A normal summer day at Gage Park for the Bottoms Boys consisted of a visit to the Gage Park Zoo to watch the monkeys play at “Monkey Island.” Monkey Island was a large concrete island surrounded by a moat that sometimes had a small alligator in it to discourage the monkeys from leaving the island. It was built in the shape of a small town and had signs reading “City Hall,” “Auditorium,” “Café,” and “Grocery Store,” and several ropes were hung over the tops of the buildings so the monkeys could swing around. After touring the Zoo, the Bottoms Boys would buy some popcorn or a hot dog and top it off with an ice cream cone.
Afterwards, they would head to the huge Gage Park Swimming Pool.
Selling Newspapers
To earn spending money, boys in the Bottoms did a variety of things including selling newspapers. Selling newspapers was a rite of passage for most young boys living in the Bottoms. The newspaper that they sold was the Topeka State Journal, Topeka’s afternoon newspaper.
Each day after school, boys in the Bottoms would head downtown to the rear of a small two-story building located on the west side of the alley dividing 4th and Kansas Avenue and 4th and Jackson Street. The building was used by the Topeka State Journal as a combination ordering station and recreation center for about fifty newspaper boys and a few adult men.
In a large room on the second floor there were two soda pop machines, a pool table, and a ping pong table. In an adjoining room there was a boxing speed bag and a heavy punching bag.
At about four o’clock each afternoon, Monday through Saturday, a tall, always well-groomed white man named Virgil Rogers would show up to take the orders for that day’s newspapers. The newspapers were bought two for a dime and then the newspaper boys would sell the newspapers for ten cents each and make a five cent profit on each newspaper sold.
The way to make a lot of money was to order and sell a large number of newspapers.That, of course, was not easy thing to do, and the only paperboys who sold a lot of newspapers were actually older men who had been selling newspapers for many years and laid claim to the busiest street corners. Paperboys on the best corners could sell a hundred or more newspapers each day. The best corners were 8th and Kansas Avenue, on all four sides of the street, 10th and Kansas Avenue, and 9th and Jackson Street.
Most of the paperboys during the 1940’s and 1950’s were low income boys from East Topeka, Oakland, Neutral, North Topeka and the Bottoms. There were boys of almost every race and ethnic group, to include Negroes, Germans, American-Indians, and Mexican-Americans.
The Gage Park Pool was easily one small city block in length and about a quarter-block wide. The pool had a long, high slippery slide and a large round cement island located in the shallow south end of the pool. On the north end, was a submerged fence separating the deep end, which was nine feet deep, from the shallow water.
There was a high wooden tower and two high diving boards that were located in the deep end of the pool. The tower was about thirty feet high and had room on top for about six grown people. On a few rare occasions, some crazy guy would actually dive off of the tower. The Bottoms Boys limited their diving to the high diving boards and only jumped off, feet first, from the wooden tower.
One of the water games that was frequently played by the Bottoms Boys involved throwing someone’s keys into the water and then diving down to see who could find the keys first. That was easier said than done because when you got near the bottom of the nine foot pool your ears would begin to hurt and the pain would force you to the surface without retrieving the keys. Of course, the boys would continue trying until someone found the keys.
A day at Gage Park would usually end by late afternoon when everyone had their fill of swimming. The Bottoms Boys would then catch a bus back to 6th and Kansas Avenue and then would either stop to see a movie at the Kaw or Glen theaters, or head home to rest before going out later to play.
Sadly, the old Gage Park Pool was demolished around 1960 and was replaced by a parking lot and a new but much smaller modern Olympic size swimming pool built far away from the site of the old pool. To this day, however, whenever the Bottoms Boys get together at the annual Bottoms Reunions, someone always brings up the days when everyone would go swimming at the old Gage Park Swimming Pool, one of the largest swimming pools any of them has ever seen, before or since.
Another unforgettable newspaper boy was a tall, curly headed White boy named Emory Baughman. Baughman was an only child being raised by a single mother and owned many things that were unaffordable to the rest of the boys who lived in the Bottoms. Baughman was a mischievous boy who rode his bicycle all around town and was always doing weird things. Once, he built a device that had two handles attached to it which he would ask unsuspecting paperboys to hold on to. When they did, he would flip a switch and it would produce an electric current that shocked them to the point that they could not let go of the handles. Baughman played that trick on many a paperboy and delighted in seeing their “shocked” reactions. Baughman also had a gun collection that he was fond of showing off to other boys. One of the guns in his collection was a long barreled rifle he called his “Elephant Gun.” For some unknown reason, when he turned sixteen years old, Emory Baughman put his prized Elephant Gun in his mouth and killed himself.
The newspapers covered the story but no suicide note was ever found or a reason given to explain why strange Emory Baughman killed himself.
Among the older adult men who sold newspapers was a small person named Johnny Beard, who had the southeast corner of 8th and Kansas Avenue. Beard was a white man about forty years old who stood about four and one-half feet tall and each day sold a hundred or more newspapers. Another well known paperboy was called “Fat Charlie.” Charlie was a large heavy set white man about forty-five years old, who sold newspapers on the corner of 9th and Jackson Street and picked up the traffic from the State Capital building and the Santa Fe Offices. But the oldest and definitely most eccentric newspaper man was a man called “The Shadow.” The Shadow, whose first name was Frank, always dressed in dark, heavy, drab clothing, summer and winter, and could easily be mistaken for a homeless person. The Shadow had the northeast corner of 8th and Kansas Avenue and sold about one hundred newspapers every day. In the 1960’s, the Topeka Daily Capital printed a story about “The Shadow” and noted that he had been selling newspapers for over forty years.
Like most of the boys in the Bottoms, I sold newspapers until I was thirteen years old. It was a wonderful experience because it significantly expanded my world. During the years that I sold newspapers, my friends and I explored the central downtown area of Topeka. I also got to see many interesting things and I met a lot of young boys of different races and from different neighborhoods throughout the City of Topeka.
“Picking Spuds”
Each summer, from the time that they were about ten years old to about fifteen years old, many boys in the Bottoms picked potatoes, or “spuds” as they called them, to earn spending money. It was something that the older boys in the Bottoms had done for many years and as they grew older and moved on, they were replaced by younger boys, many of them their younger brothers, nephews, or cousins. The pick-up location for going out to the potato fields was about a mile away from the Bottoms, underneath the north end of the Topeka Boulevard Bridge that connected South Topeka and North Topeka. To get to the pick-up location, the boys had to travel to the Kaw River and then walked on top of the river dike past City Park and “Tramp Valley.” When they reached the foot of the Topeka Boulevard Bridge, they climbed up the long steep stairs leading to the top of the bridge. They then walked across the Kansas River to the north end of the bridge, where they took the stairs down to the street below.
At the pick-up point, there were always a large group of boys from North Topeka and Oakland. The boys who picked spuds were mostly Mexican-Americans and Whites, and a few Negroes and American-Indians. At about 6:00 a.m. the pick-up trucks arrived. The trucks used were usually large flat beds with wooden side rails about four feet high and held about 15 to 20 boys per truck. The ride out to the potato fields usually took about a half hour but could vary by ten or fifteen minutes depending on what field was being worked on that day.
The Trip Home Selling Newspapers If one of us was having trouble selling their newspapers, whoever sold out first would help the other boys sell their newspapers. After everyone had sold out, or had given up for the day, we would gather in front of the Post Office and head for home. A couple of times a month, we would stop by Einstein’s Army Store located next to the Norva Hotel, where we would rummage through all of their World War II surplus military equipment. Einstein’s had parachutes, bayonets, army helmets, boots, canteens, army belts, and all kinds of neat military equipment. From time to time one of us would buy a canteen or a knife. On most nights, we would also stop at Harold’s Prize Package on the corner of 4th and Quincy.
Harold’s Prize Package made the best chili dogs in Topeka, and their cheeseburgers weren’t bad either. When the Bottoms was demolished in the early 1960’s, Harold’s Prize Package moved to east sixth street on the lower east side of Topeka, where the store is still located to this day. Harold died in 1985 but the store is still run by his children and grandchildren and they still make the best chili dogs anywhere.
From Harold’s Prize Package, we would make our way down to Fourth and Monroe Street where Paul Martinez and the Blancas brothers, Ray and Roger, would drop off to go home. The rest of us would then go on to Fourth and Madison Street. Many times, instead of going home, we would visit Abner’s Drug Store in between Madison and Jefferson Streets. Abner’s Drugstore was owned by Abner Laroque, a bookish, bespectacled pharmacist, who always drove a new Cadillac and had a tall leggy blonde wife.
Abner’s stocked magazines, comic books, and various sundries and also had a pin ball machine and a soda fountain where they served malts, milkshakes, root beer floats, and ice cream cones. As we got older, Abner’s Drugstore became our favorite hanging out place.
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Life in Topeka’s Bottoms during the Great Depression
The Great Depression was hard on all people, including Mexican immigrants and native born Mexican-Americans. Because of the Depression, many of the Mexicans working for the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe, the Union Pacific and Rock Island Railroads, either lost their jobs or had their hours severely curtailed.
As a result, to make ends meet, family members, young and old, took any jobs they could find to help out their families. Some of the more common jobs taken by young people included farm work at outlying farms in the Grantville area, setting bowling pins, shining shoes, doing yard work, and for many of the young women, taking jobs at the Seymour Foods Packing Plant.
Most of the young women who worked at Seymour Foods during the depression were just out of grade school, or were about 16 to 18 years old. They started out as “pickers” which was the lowest paid job in the company and was also the hardest and dirtiest job. Unfortunately, during the Great Depression it was the only job that young, unskilled, Mexican girls could get.
Being a picker meant that for eight to ten hours a day, six days a week, young girls and women picked the feathers off of dead chickens and turkeys after they were run through a steaming machine to soften the feathers. It also meant working in terrible conditions that included having to stand all day in inches deep cold water in the winter and in steaming warm water during the summers, and having to eat their lunches in the picking room or in the women’s restroom.
The Great Depression and Topeka’s Mexican Community
The Great Depression, or at it came to be known in Topeka’s Mexican community, “La Vida Negra,” i.e, “the Dark Life,” began in 1929 and spread rapidly across America. Consumers stopped buying goods, factories closed their doors and workers were let go, and people everywhere desperately looked for work. As the Depression moved into the 1930’s, resentment toward Mexican immigrants grew and many people demanded that Mexican immigrants return to Mexico. In addition, many newspapers around the country printed angry letters which said that America should take care of its own people first and that Mexican immigrants should be sent back to Mexico. In response, in 1931, the Hoover Administration announced plans to deport Mexican immigrants living in the country illegally.
Not surprisingly, many Mexican immigrants who had lost their jobs left willingly. Many others, however, did not want to leave and the U. S. Immigration Service began unannounced roundups and deportations of Mexicans who were here illegally. Tragically, during that dark period in American history, many U. S. born Mexican- Americans who could not immediately prove that they were here legally, were forcibly deported.
During the Great Depression, race relations in this country between Whites and Mexicans deteriorated and hostilities erupted in many cities and towns across America as Whites and Mexicans competed for the few jobs that were available. Against that historical backdrop, it is important to note that not very many Mexican immigrants living in Topeka, Kansas, thought seriously about returning to Mexico, and thankfully, almost none of them were forcibly deported.
Often, the women would sit on smelly sacks of chicken feed and eat their lunches. Many of the women also permanently disfigured their feet and toe nails from years of standing in the hot and cold water.
During the 1930’s, only Mexicans and Russians were hired as pickers. For some unknown reason, Russians, although white skinned, were treated the same as Mexicans.
White women, other than Russians, got the better jobs of dressing the chickens and turkeys, sorting out the bad eggs from the good eggs, and working in the “breaking room” where eggs were broken and processed into powder form. A commonly told story among Mexican women who worked at the Seymour Plant was that of a light skinned Mexican girl who was hired to work in the breaking room because they thought she was White but when the White bosses found out that she was a Mexican, the girl was immediately transferred to the picking room with the other Mexican women.
During that period, all of the pickers were paid twenty-five cents per hour and there were no health benefits, no paid holidays or vacations, and no pay raises. The women who worked as pickers made about seven dollars per week and did not receive a pay raise for about seven years, and even then, the raise was only five cents an hour.
Despite the low wages paid by the Seymour Foods Company, Mexican women said that during the Great Depression it was the only job they could get. Nevertheless, they said that the small wages were enough to get by on since things were very inexpensive during that time.
Many of the men who were unemployed during the Great Depression earned money by walking for many miles along the railroad tracks picking up pieces of coal that had fallen from trains and then selling the coal to people in the Bottoms. Many men also gathered up and sold scrap pieces of wood to people for their stoves.
Many of the younger men worked setting up bowling pins at the Topeka Recreation Bowling Alley located at 7th and Quincy Streets and earned three cents per game during the day and four cents a game at night.
During the years of the Depression, Mexican families in the Bottoms also received assistance from the Redden Chapel, which was located on 2nd Street in between Monroe and Quincy Streets. The Redden Chapel was operated by the First Avenue Mission, an affiliate of the First Christian Church. The Redden Chapel was run by a Mrs. Roth, and had a church on the first floor and a bible study school and playroom in the basement. Many Mexican girls in the Bottoms took cooking and sewing classes at the Redden Chapel. The First Avenue Mission began its work in the Bottoms in 1889 and did not close its doors until 1960. During all of those years, the Redden Chapel had close ties to the Mexican community, particularly those families living in the Bottoms.
During the hardest years of the Great Depression, many Mexican families in the Bottoms received limited government relief. They also grew vegetables in their gardens and shared the produce with their neighbors. As many of the people who lived through the Great Depression will tell you, life was very hard during those years and sometimes they didn’t have enough to eat or good clothes to wear, or enough fuel to heat their homes, but with God’s help, they managed to remain generally healthy and happy.
The Great Depression’s Devastating Impact on Education
The Great Depression had a significant impact on the formal education of almost all young people in the Bottoms. Those that were in high school when it started had to drop out in order to help their families and those who were still in grade school were told that they were not going to be able to go to high school after they graduated. Several lucky young men from the Bottoms were able to find jobs with the Civilian Conservation Corps and did work around the country during the Depression. Others earned money selling newspapers or shining shoes downtown. Unfortunately, almost all of those young boys who had to leave school to help out their families, never returned to school.
In retrospect, it is clear that had the Great Depression not occurred, that more families in the Bottoms neighborhood would have become financially stable and more of their children would have attended and graduated from high school. That, of course, would have put them on a faster road to assimilation and would have positively impacted their ability to find good jobs. All of that, of course, is pure speculation since even with a high school diploma they would still have faced the overt race and ethnic discrimination that existed in Topeka, Kansas, during the 1930’s and 1940’s. Nevertheless, these many years later, one cannot help but wonder what those young men and women would have accomplished had the Great Depression not come along and ended their formal education? Fiesta Mexicana: A Respite from the Great Depression
Mexico is a country that has always celebrated life through rituals and fiestas and the Mexicans who immigrated to Topeka, Kansas, in the early years of the twentieth century kept alive that heritage. Thus, it was in 1933, during the dark days of the Great Depression, that the Mexican parishioners of Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Church planned and held the first-ever “Fiesta Mexicana.” That first fiesta was intended as a way to raise desperately needed money for the church and school. As it turned out, the Fiesta also served as a great way for parishioners to temporarily escape from the emotional and financial burdens of the Great Depression. In that sense, the first Fiesta Mexicana brought the Mexican people of Topeka, Kansas, together in a way that given the hard times, could probably not have been accomplished in any other way.
The first Fiesta Mexicana was a one day event held on August 17, 1933, on the grounds of our Lady of Guadalupe Church. It was organized by Father Augustine Cuartero and the parishioners, with the special assistance of Mrs. Tom McDade, a white woman who was very active in helping the Mexican community and Our Lady of Guadalupe Church, during the depression years.
As part of that first Fiesta, traditional Mexican dances and songs were performed by a group of about twenty-eight dancers, singers, and musicians.
Then, as now, all of the food and at the Fiesta was prepared by the parishioners. The first Fiesta lasted for only one day, but it was so financially successful that people requested that it be held again the next year. A second successful fiesta was held in 1934 and that led to a decision to make the Fiesta an annual event. Over the years, the Fiesta has been extended so that it now lasts for five days and four nights, and includes a Queen and King contest, a coronation dance, an annual parade down Kansas Avenue, a golf tournament, and a 5k run.
In the last decade, the fiesta has also grown larger and larger to the point that today, Topeka’s Fiesta Mexicana is one of the largest Hispanic celebrations in the United States. From a historical and cultural perspective, the Fiesta has been and still is extremely important to the Mexican community in Topeka, Kansas. It is important because it teaches young Mexican- Americans about their Mexican culture and allows older Mexicans to stay connected to their culture and history.
When friendships developed into something more serious and led to talks of marriage, the parents of the intended groom usually adhered to the old Mexican custom wherein the groom and his parents visited the parish priest to inform him of the groom’s intention to get married.
This act was called the “Presentacion.” Following the initial visit to the parish priest, the parents of the intended groom and the priest then visited the intended bride’s home to inform her parents of the intended bridegroom’s proposal of marriage and to request the bride’s father’s “Plazo,” which was the formal approval by the father of the bride. If the father of the intended bride gave his Plazo, then the couple was officially betrothed. The next step was to announce the wedding banns in church on three consecutive Sundays, after which the marriage could take place if the couple still wanted to get married.
Dating, Romance and Marriage
During the Great Depression By 1930, many of the children of the first immigrants from Mexico were in their teens and early twenties, and like all young men and women, they were interested in the opposite sex.
Dating in those days, however, was much different than it is today. In those days, going on a date meant talking to members of the opposite sex only in the company of a chaperone, which was often an older brother or sister, or an older relative.
Mexican parents, particularly the fathers, were very strict and most did not allow their daughters to date boys. Therefore, the only acceptable places for young Mexican men and women to meet and talk was at church services held at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church, or at social gatherings and food sales put on by the church.
The End of The Great Depression
When the Great Depression began in 1930, Mexican families in Topeka, and in the Bottoms, entered one of the most difficult periods in their lives in this country - a period in which many Mexicans lost their jobs or had their hours of work and pay cut dramatically. Because of the Depression, many young Mexican men and women were forced to drop out of school to help their families, and in most of those cases, they never resumed their education. The Depression also forced upon many young Mexican men and women the unwelcome burden of having to become the major bread winners in their families.
In addition, many young Mexican women in the Bottoms were forced to drop out of school to work at the Seymour Foods Company where they toiled for six days a week, working eight to ten hours a day, plucking the feathers off of dead chickens and turkeys by hand.
Nevertheless, in spite of the great hardships encountered by almost all Mexicans in Topeka and in the Bottoms during the Great Depression, Mexican people continued to move forward in their lives and survived one of the most difficult periods in the history of this nation.
More importantly, when the decade and the Great Depression ended, it ended with renewed hope for the future and a promise of better and happier days.
Unfortunately, during the Great Depression, getting married was not always an easy thing to do because the eldest son or daughter in a family was often the main bread winner, or at the very least was always a large contributor to the family’s finances, so that in order for them to get married, they often had to find a job for the next oldest sibling so that the sibling could continue to provide income to the family once the eldest son or daughter left due to marriage.
In addition, during the Great Depression, even after many couples had became officially engaged and could have gotten married after the third announcement of the banns in church, many couples waited for a year or two in order to save up money for their home or apartment.
However, when they finally did get married, it was usually a large festive event. Most brides usually had four or more “Damas” (bridesmaids) and the bridegroom had his “Padrino” or Best Man, and the bride had her “Madrina” or Maid of Honor. The bride was always given away by her father, if the father was alive or was in the country.
Following the wedding, a breakfast was held for the immediate families of the bride and groom and then the couples often traveled to a photography studio, or had someone take them to Gage Park where they would take wedding photographs at the beautiful Reinisch Rose Garden. At noon, the couple usually had a large reception with food and drinks at someone’s house or at a rented hall. That evening, many couples also had a dance at a local hall or at someone’s home.
Following the festivities, if the couple had a place to live they moved into it. During the Depression, however, the bride and groom often had to continue to live in the homes of their parents for a few weeks, and sometimes even for a few months, while they put together enough money to rent a place of their own.
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| Tom Rodriguez |
Tom Rodriguezwrites this memoir of what it was like growing up Mexican far from his roots in Mexico. In 1914, his paternal grandparents came from a small town called Notchistlan, Guanajuato; in 1920, his maternal grandparents came from León, Guanajuato. They came to work for the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad in Topeka, Kansas, Tom’s birthplace. In fact, all along the rail lines of the Santa Fe and Union Pacific railroads in the State of Kansas, Mexican coloniastook root that remain to this day. For copies of his book, write a check for $26.00 to: Tom Rodriguez, 1912 Kransten Drive, Henderson, NV 89074.