Henkels & McCoy Timeline: 1930
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| 1930 |
During the 1930s the Great Depression's grip strangles
many small companies. Henkels & McCoy escapes this fate by, among
other things, ringing neighborhood doorbells and offering to trim
privately owned trees for five dollars. Prices are lowered to
$4.00 each if the householder could produce another customer, to
$3.00 per tree if the whole street signs on. But most people don’t
have enough money for food and clothing, let alone tree trimming.
Henkels & McCoy crews follow work wherever they find it, often to
locations far afield. Jack Henkels' wife, Anne, who turns out to have a real flair for business,
manages the office. (Right) A typical Philadelphia "rowhouse"
neighborhood of the era, with trees trimmed by Henkels & McCoy for
Philadelphia Electric Co., the local utility.
Anne and Jack Henkels; vintage stake-body truck bearing a tree for a
landscaping project.
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Link to
An American Adventure
Chapters 4 through 7
(covers the years of the Great Depression) |
The Dust Bowl Phenomenon
As if things in the 'thirties are not bleak enough, a long lasting
series of droughts, stretching from the Upper Plains to the Lower
Plains, bakes large areas of prime farming soil in southern
Nebraska, eastern Colorado, western Kansas, the Oklahoma Panhandle
north central Texas, and northeastern New Mexico. A series of dry wind storms follow, whipping up the
arid dirt and creating the Dust Bowl, a condition of depleted
agriculture, hunger, and misery that will last ten years. With no
crop to harvest and unable to repay loans, farm mortgages are
foreclosed. Dispossessed, many former farmers will head west to
California, where they will live the hard scrabble life of migrant
workers. They will be treated with scorn and be derided as "Okies,"
even as they try to rebuild their shattered lives. Their plight will
be the subject of many songs and stories of the era, most notably by
songwriter Woody Guthrie and by novelist John Steinbeck, right, who
wrote The Grapes of Wrath in 1939. The novel traces the westward
migration of the financially bankrupt but undefeated Joad family.
The hard hitting story will later be adapted to film, with Henry
Fonda as Tom Joad. |
September 8
"Blondie" first appears in newspaper comic strips across the US in
her original role as a dizzy flapper. Three years later Blondie
Boopadoop falls in love with and marries Dagwood Bumstead, who was
disinherited by his disapproving millionaire father. Americans,
caught up in the woes of the Great Depression, immediately took to
cartoonist Chic Young’s humorous daily reminders that love, not
money, conquers all. Can the Dagwood sandwich be far behind? |
 Also in 1930:
Cab Calloway, right, and his Orchestra takes over from Duke
Ellington as resident band at Harlem's Cotton Club. To hear the
dapper "King of Heigh-De-Ho" in action,
click
here.
The Chrysler Building in New York City is completed. The 77-story
metallic Art Deco skyscraper is a symbol of big city glamour,
excitement, and style. Its reign as World’s Tallest Building was
short, however, as the Empire State Building was just one year
behind.
The Dayton (Ohio) Bulldogs football team moves to Brooklyn, New
York and is renamed the Brooklyn Dodgers, meaning "trolley dodgers."
Note: It is not uncommon for baseball and football teams of the era
to use the same name, as also evidenced by the Philadelphia
Athletics and New York Yankees baseball AND football teams.
Al Capone is arrested for income tax evasion.
Philadelphia Athletics defeat the Cardinals 4 games to 2 to win the
World's Series.
Mohandas Gandhi leads a 200-mile nonviolent protest march for
India's independence from Britain.
Betty Boop makes her debut.
Sam Spade is born when Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon
appears in bookstores.
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