Reminder of the Past or Sign of the Future
Reminder of the Past or Sign of the Future
This morning we ran out to Sam’s Club to grab some stuff. Yes, part of the reason was because the kids are going to be off of school for the next month as a preventative measure to guard against the possible community spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak. But, honestly, it was mostly because we’ve run out of some of the common household staples that we’ve grown accustomed to replenishing during our once-per-month trip out to Eastwood Towne Center.
Being self-employed and having a home-based business does have its advantages, especially when you’re married to a per diem nurse who, for the most part, has the flexibility to call her own work schedule. Normally this translates to at least one day every few weeks, where after getting the kids off to school, Teresa and I get to have some time to ourselves, which usually consists of loading Zanna up in the car to take her for a bye-bye and stopping off somewhere to have breakfast before taking care of any errands. Since my sister Stephanie from Pennsylvania had showed up to our house the night before, bringing with her a giant box of QD donuts as a thank you for us letting her crash at our place, we ended up diverting from our normal Sam’s Club trip routine ever so slightly, audibling to frosted covered cinnamon rolls instead of going out somewhere for breakfast, and swapping out Zanna for my sister who we had invited to come along with us because she had nothing else better to do (sorry Zanna!)
As we made our way across town toward the interstate, the three of us began to talk about what we expected to find when we got to Sam’s. A lot had transpired over the past 72 hours which only added to growing public anxiety over the coronavirus outbreak. New information about the rapid spread of the virus prompted a rash of event cancellations and school closings, in turn setting off this wave of panicked consumer buying. We knew, for instance, that Sam’s Club and the other large retailers had already sold out of many items – Clorox wipes, hand sanitizer, paper towel and toilet paper – because we had heard the reports on the news. It wasn’t until my wife had gotten onto the Sam’s Club website to try and place an order for home delivery, was she able to confirm for herself that many of these products were on backorder until next week. Still, in the back of our minds I think we were half-expecting the reports to be blown out of proportion. Maybe it was wishful thinking, because when we pulled into the parking lot at 8:30 a.m., it was noticeably fuller than usual. At this point, the store wasn’t even open to the general public – our Plus Membership was going to give us a good hour and a half head start on the folks with regular memberships, helping us to hopefully avoid the larger crowds when things would get super busy. And remember, this was still a weekday, so this doesn’t even take into account all of the people who were still at their offices or out making sales calls or whatever, finishing out their normal work week.
At first, the scene at Sam’s Club didn’t appear much different than what you would see on any “Black Friday”, when all of the crazies scarf down their traditional turkey and pumpkin pie Thanksgiving dinners to get out to the Sam’s Club or Best Buy parking lot by 5 p.m. sharp to reserve their spot in line, waiting 12 hours for a chance to purchase an 85- inch flatscreen to hang on the wall of their downstairs half bath, or last year’s knock-off brand tablet which has been marked down $10 off the manufacturers suggested retail price. Typically, this is the kind of behavior that I would characterize as excessive, or at the very least, unnecessary, because I guess I’m just one of those people who doesn’t like to stand in the cold and fight angry crowds for something that I probably don’t need. But maybe that’s just me.
That being said, we did kind of need paper towels, not because we were stocking up for the coming apocalypse, but because we had just about run through almost all of our 12-pack of Maker’s Mark brand paper towels that we had bought a supply of a couple of months back. Well, as previously mentioned, there were no paper towels. In fact, Sam’s Club was sold out of just about every paper product you could think of: paper towels, toilet paper, napkins, legal pads, gift wrap, copies of “A Very Stable Genius” (both paperback and hardcover), you name it. People were buying it up to sneeze, cough or wipe with. The stark evidence of this consumerism gone wild became very apparent when we made it over to the far end of the store, which is when we first came across all of the empty racks which are usually stocked full of pallets of different paper products stacked one on top of another. As I tried to process how a store could sell out of so much product in such a short period of time, how many customers must have had to come through over the past 48 hours and the amount of quantities they each must have been purchasing. I couldn’t help but think back to another time in our nation’s past when a national emergency had created shortages of just about every material imaginable.
The Old Once Again Becomes New
During that first fall after Teresa and I had just moved into our house on Riley Street in Lansing, we decided we would do a few projects to try and winterize the place before the cold weather and snow hit. In addition to installing self-storing aluminum storms on the outside of all of the windows, we decided to rent a large hopper from Home Depot so that we could blow insulation into the floor joists up in the unfinished attic of our Cape Cod. This was a relatively simple D.I.Y. project which consisted of pulling a row of the planked floor up with a flat pry-bar to expose the void beneath, and then snaking the hopper unit’s flexible hose down into the empty cavities between floor joists to blow as much of the bails of cellulose insulation in as possible, before moving out another 5- or 6-feet to pry up another row of planking and repeat the whole process. However, as I made my way across the attic floor, moving from the front, street side of the house toward the back, I started noticing something interesting. The whole half of the floor on what was the front side of the house where I had started, had consisted entirely of uniform rows of 1x6 pine plank boards. But then, as I reached about the halfway point, I would start to come across a random row of 1x8 planking, then there would be a couple more rows of 1x6, and then maybe another row of 1x8 or an occasional odd row of 1x10 or even 1x4.
When I finally made it to the far back corner of the attic I came across these two large pieces of plywood that occupied a roughly 6- by 5-foot area of the floor. I had seen these pieces of plywood sitting there numerous times before but had never really stopped to consider what they were. I guess I had assumed that they were an access panel to some plumbing or whatever, but had never stopped to think about how this wouldn’t have made sense, since these were located more than fifteen feet away from where the stack for the bathroom was, and the kitchen was even further away, on the complete opposite side of the house. But it wasn’t until I went to lift the first piece of plywood up out of the space where it sat, that I realized this wasn’t an access panel at all.
The two pieces of plywood were actually Identical 3x5 signs from the “Works Projects Administration”, one of the alphabet soup programs that were part of the New Deal Agency instituted by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1930’s to help put millions of Americans back to work by completing various large-scale public works projects. These particular signs were used as billboards for telling people where to take items for the “rural scrap collection” to support the war effort.
As a huge history buff, my immediate reaction was one of astonishment, as hiding there in plain sight, were these two beautiful pieces of history that had sat undiscovered, face down in a dusty attic for who knows how many years. Then my attention quickly shifted towards wanting to figure out the mystery of exactly what circumstances could have led to these signs ending up in our attic, and a hilarious, and somewhat ironic explanation started to emerge.
The Irony in Hoarding
When we first moved into our house on Riley, we had 85+ year old neighbors living on either side of us. On one side we had this nice elderly lady named Josephine. Josephine was suffering from advanced Alzheimer’s so her adult son John used to look after her, including arranging for several care givers to stay at her house with her 24/7. On the other side was Bill Brenke, the former Lansing City Council Member and the guy that the Brenke Fish Ladder in Lansing is named after. According to Josephine’s son John, who we got to know really well, his parents and Bill (and Bill’s late wife) were original owners, and had built their houses, along with the original owners of our house, back in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s when the area just south of Mt. Hope between Cedar Street and Pennsylvania Avenue (which would later be known as the Hollywood Neighborhood) was still very much considered “out in the country”. Bill, who built his house in 1941, told me about the difficulties he encountered when trying to finish the driveway, because of the concrete shortages that coincided with the United States entering into World War II. All of these stories from our old neighbors, juxtaposed on the timeline of events, helped to start filling in the gaps of our own house’s story.
Based on the real estate deed for our house, we knew that it was built in 1938, a full three years before the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor was attacked, which was of course the event that ultimately triggered the U.S. entry into the war. Even if the house was built in 1938, it’s not unreasonable that the owners may have wanted to hold off on finishing the attic, perhaps for financial reasons, or maybe something more practical, since after all, the upstairs was not living space and just used for extra storage. For whatever reason, you can imagine this scenario where it took the original owners a couple two or three years before they got around to finishing the upstairs. So, they start buying 1x6 plank boards to begin work on the attic floor. By this time, the war has started, and consumers are beginning to find that all sorts of construction materials are in short supply. The longer they are working on this project, the more and more scarce the needed construction materials become, so they buy whatever dimensional lumber they can get their hands on, which would explain why there are all of these random rows of 1x8 and 1x10 boards. Then, when they finally get all the way to the end, they can’t find any more dimensional lumber so out of desperation, they go and “borrow” the plywood signs telling people where to go to donate their materials for the “Rural Scrap Collection” effort. It’s really quite ingenious when you think about it.
You’re probably asking what any of this has to do with the current public pandemonium stemming from the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak? Nothing really, other than perhaps one person’s concrete and dimensional lumber is another person’s toilet paper and hand sanitizer. Or maybe the events at Sam’s Club that got me thinking about this old WPA sign in the first place, serves as a sort of commentary on this bigger generational difference between how our grandparents handled adversity compared to our initial reaction to this impending health crisis, which frankly, hasn’t been one of our generation’s finest moments.
For instance, the WPA sign example is kind of like the equivalent of those idiots now-a-days who are stealing the hand sanitizer stations off of the cart corrals out in front of the big chain store parking lots. Of course, back in the day they didn’t have the security surveillance cameras we have now, which means that the chances of these morons getting caught is a lot higher. Plus, the people of the “greatest generation” didn’t have that title bestowed on them for just any reason, most of them lived through both the great depression as well as through World War II, so compared to our generation, I guess I’m willing to cut them a little more slack.
I know people are scared, I get that, and fear definitely drives some of the questionable behaviors that we have been witnessing. But it doesn’t make it right, and it certainly doesn’t excuse it. I’m not blaming people for stocking up on reasonable amounts of toilet paper or frozen food or non-perishables, you definitely should. We should all do our part to help slow the spread of this virus, namely, committing to practicing social distancing whenever possible. But while some people may be okay with rolling the dice and potentially putting themselves at risk, the elderly and people with compromised immune systems don’t have that luxury, so don’t go out if you don’t need to, and definitely stay home if you are showing any signs of being sick. And above all else, could we all just keep a little perspective about what’s really important at the end of the day?
I get that everyone is frustrated about how this crisis is impacting our day-to-day lives. And yes, events and conferences being canceled, meetings that get postponed, or even contract work that gets put on hold are huge inconveniences, and potentially even detrimental to the bottom-line of our businesses. But as scary as all of this uncertainty is, just remember that there are plenty of people out there who are much worse off than you or me.
I think about this blind lady I know, who is in her early seventies, living alone on a fixed income that barely makes enough to get by. I think about the working poor making minimum wage in the service industry who don’t have shit for savings or retirement, who were struggling before all of this happened, what sorts of tough choices are they going to have to face as things continue to get worse? There are kids right here in our community, kids who attend the same school as my son, who rely on getting 2 of their 3 meals every day through the food assistance program at the school. I can guarantee you that their parents weren’t the ones running out to Sam’s Club and Cosco at the last minute to get a month’s worth of supplies.
Like those generations before us, we too will make it through this crisis. And hopefully, if we’ve learned anything from our ancestors, we will figure out how to rise up to meet our collective challenges while continuing to display grace, and understanding, and compassion for one another. And who knows, maybe someday our great grandchildren will look back at these times and talk about how we emerged from our generation’s defining moment as better, more resilient people. I believe we can, and we will, there are many signs that point to it.