So Love plugged along on his own. By today’s standards his expenses look paltry — $49 for a semester’s tuition; $30 for books and fees; $80 for room rent; two meals a day at his fraternity for $10 a week; breakfasts at a diner totaling $1 a week — yet there was never enough to be sure of getting through the term. In the fall of 1932 “the Ann Arbor that I went back to was like a ghost town.” Of 28 members of his fraternity’s pledge class, only six remained in school, while the fraternity as a whole had dropped from 70 to 32, and “all the campus gathering places had closed.” Love became resourceful, even cunning, about money, getting by through a combination of scrubbing pots in the kitchen of the Gamma Phi Beta sorority house and a series of scrappy stratagems and lucky breaks. Every small event of daily life on and around the campus became an opportunity to make or save a crucial dollar or two. Love rounded up black cats to sell to fraternity pledges in a “Hell Week” prank, taking a $39 profit that paid his bills for a time. He scored a freak-luck win at a horse race — his first ever — at a track in Windsor, Ontario. Rival lawyers paid him for his testimony about a fatal auto crash he chanced to witness. He won enough at a fraternity craps game to eke out another semester’s worth of tuition. His father sent him cash after cobbling together and selling a new house constructed all out of scrap lumber. This was typical of what Love describes as the quintessential Depression experience — “hanging on.” People talked about the upturn that would come the next spring. The next spring people would say that the upturn would come in the summer, and so on. The thing is that people really believed this. They had a blind faith in it, and because
36 n LSA spring 2009
they did, they set up a pattern of living. It was called “hanging on.”. . .If you had a job, you hung onto it any way you could. You took less money and worked longer hours. If you were behind on the house payments or the car payments, you gritted your teeth and held on, scraping up enough to prevent foreclosure or repossession until things got better.
The Lost Golden Age
Some students in Love’s story scrape and struggle to make it through U-M, then find after graduation that the world outside Ann Arbor is far grimmer, and their time on campus begins to look like a lost golden age. Love’s ruined love affair with a girl named Jill Ryan, launched in a lecture course in the old Haven Hall, is in part a casualty of this phenomenon. Jill graduated on time, leaving Love still scraping along. She went home to bleak scenes in Youngstown, Ohio, then tried to convince herself she cared for Love as much as he did for her simply because she missed college life so much. When they made their final break, Love’s heartbreak was softened by his relief at no longer having to worry about how he could possibly support a wife. Eventually Love dropped out completely to help save his family. He drove a coal truck through a brutal winter in Flint. Then, in another marvelous act of generosity, his father
released him from responsibility, insisting that he go back to Ann Arbor. He took his degree in 1936, seven years after finishing high school, worked for a time, then returned to U-M for a graduate degree during the run-up to World War II. The result of this experience, shared with most of his generation, Love says, was a transformed worldview. The inflated optimism of the late ’20s gave way to a cold, clear-eyed realism. My generation came to the Depression governed by a set of principles deeply rooted in the past. “We emerged from it with an entirely different set of principles. A whole way of life disappeared in those years — a whole set of attitudes. My generation learned to look at things as they were, not as they were supposed to be. If that outlook came at great cost, it was, at least, a true education.
James Tobin is an associate professor of journalism at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Edmund G. Love’s Hanging On: Or How to Get Through a Depression and Enjoy Life (William Morrow & Co., 1972) is out of print but available through sellers of used books such as those found at www.abebooks.com and www.alibris.com.