Smokey Stuever's War: Part 1

The Great Depression, and the Civilian Conservation Corps

Eugene Sand, left, and Ed “Smokey” Stuever

Twenty years ago, after recording many colorful stories told by Ed “Smokey” Stuever, a maintenance sergeant in Service Company of the 712th Tank Battalion, I sat down with Ed at a reunion, hoping to get as many of his stories as possible packed into one interview. He was 88 years old at the time. Later, I would rearrange some of the stories when I put the interview on a set of three hourlong CDs so as to get some of his stories about the war ahead of his stories about growing up, but in retrospect, his stories about growing up in the Great Depression and his time in the Civilian Conservation Corps make for damn good reading, and even better listening. I used the beginning of that 2005 interview for my recent Substack in which Smokey described his recent return to Breese, Illinois, the town where he grew up.

Smokey Stuever: As we were in the area, I was interviewed by the local paper, they’re gonna have a centennial next year, 150 year anniversary of the community, and they’re having quite a writeup about me in their local paper, attending the area. And I refreshed their memories about a stream that had seven springs in it, and it went through the corner of one of my neighbors that I had worked for before I joined the CCCs [the Civilian Conservation Corps]. I had worked for him for $15 a month, room and board, and that was the Depression years, and most of the work was husking a large field of corn, me and a neighbor man.

Aaron Elson: How old were you?

Smokey Stuever: And I was about 17 going on 18 when I joined the CCCs, so that my parents, who were retired and moved to town, could get federal assistance, because there was my brother and me, two available workers, and in order to get government aid one of us had to go to the CCCs and I went. So I ended up at, north of Chicago building the Skokie Lagoons. It was a marshland that had burning peat and it created awful smoke conditions in the area on a damp, rainy night and it caused many traffic deaths. So the Corps of Engineers was called in and they said it had to be flooded and decided to make six lagoons, and it was done by the CCs with wheelbarrows and shovels, manual labor. Adjoining that property is now the Chicago Botanical Gardens. The land was very black and fertile, and it was ideal for the lagoons and it’s one of the best fishing areas in northern Illinois. They have everything in it.

The Skokie Lagoons (credit: Forest Preserve District of Cook County)

Smokey Stuever: I was born on the farm where my dad was born on in a log cabin, and he lived there most of his life. He was 50 years old when I was born, and my mother was 35, and they were both deaf mutes. It took some time for him to meet my mother until she was coming out from St. Louis to visit her sister on an adjoining vacant farm, and that’s how they met, and when they got married they had a two-day celebration because of uniting a pair of deaf mute people. And at that time my grandmother had moved into town and was living in a house, and one day she was walking and she stepped on a broken little bridge in the sidewalk and broke her leg and gangrene set in and she died overnight, so my dad had to buy the farm at a public auction because my grandmother never made out a will, and so the price was very steep, over $100 an acre, and that was quite expensive at the time. And then, as we grew up, we had to learn the sign language; my brother and I learned the sign language and dad had a, manual help, a man helping him and my mother had a lady helping her because you did all your canning, you supplied your own supply that would last through the winters and it was general farming, was raising grain and dairying, and as I got to be around 12 years old I started working for neighbors and I earned some wages but they had no money to pay me and one fellow gave me a Holstein heifer for my wages and I used that for my 4-H Club project and I entered it in a big competition at the county fair in Breese that year and I got first prize. I won out over a large group of competitors, and it was a great part of my life to be in the 4-H Club and learn how to keep records and expenses and etcetera.

Just before the Depression years, about 1930, my dad had rented some land and it was a good year for growing corn in that area and just on 10 acres we grew a tremendous amount of corn and it was the first time the corn crib got filled up to the roof, and I assisted him in husking the corn and let my brother go to high school that year. Then the following year I was supposed to stay home [he means go to high school] and he worked at home, but it didn’t end out that way; the bank foreclosed on my dad and before that he had sold a lot of that corn to a granary in town for 27 cents a bushel and two years, we had two years of drought and you couldn’t raise nothing, and it got very expensive. He had to buy some of that corn back for 51 cents a bushel. It was impossible to survive, and so the bank foreclosed on us and he had to move off the farm that he was born on and I was born on. It was very, very heartbreaking. We had nothing. But I mean zero. And we moved to another farm, and we got a little help there because they built a highway right alongside the farm and I got a job on there and then when my brother was out of school he joined me and we made some good wages, and before I left the old farm, though, my brother and I had a lucky winter. We caught a lot of muskrats in a little creek that was about a half a mile from the farm, and we made around $300 on furs that winter. And that same creek further downstream in the summer of the year my brother and I would go in there and catch bullfrogs. You’d have to go when the moon was dark because when it was a full moon, the frogs would see you coming and they’d jump in the water ahead of you and you got nothing. But in the dark of the moon they sat at the edge of the water and you could see their white throats and you blinded them with a flashlight and all you had to do was reach down and pick ‘em up and put ‘em in a gunnysack. So when we got like 24 or 25 of them that was a big meal. And one time when we had a big meal, we had visitors from Oklahoma and that always was a conversation piece.

My father, being a deaf mute, learned how to dance, and one time one of the neighbors was celebrating their 25^th wedding anniversary and they were playing cards; my dad was great at playing pinochle, and he corrected one of the players for not putting an ace on a trick that he had taken, but then my mother interrupted and says, “Go get Dad and tell him that we need him.” And so did the neighbors. So I went over there where they were playing cards and I says, “They would like to have Dad to start the square dancing.”

“Ohhh, let’s go!”

My mother led one square and my dad the other and then the other squares watched and caught on. So they finished the night late dancing the square dances, and there was just a fiddler and an accordion player up on the hay wagon playing the music. And how they kept in step was through the vibrations in the floor. It was a great thing; they were very sensitive to noise, bumps or anything. If somebody dropped something they would know it. Like my mother would be cooking dinner and when she had it ready and my dad was in the other room reading papers, all she would do was stomp on the floor and he would look up and she’d say “Come and eat.”

One of the things my father taught me when I was a little boy, I think I must have been about five or seven years old, somewhere in there, and it was near Christmastime, the 21^st of December, the beginning of winter, when the sun reaches the farthest point going south, and he opened the front door and the sun came in. He says, “This is the 21^st of December and it’s 12 o’clock noon,” and he opened the front door and the sun came into the center of the living room. There was a strip of metal across the seam of the linoleum floor. All the farmers in the area had big living rooms and linoleum covered floors in those days, and it was like at least a 12-foot room, and the sun had came right up to that brass metal and he says, “Now next week, a few days later, the sun will be somewhere down here,” and it was, I don’t know the exact number, but it was about like eight inches shorter than what it was on the 21^st of December.

Then on the equinox days like the 21^st of March and September the 21^st, we’d be in the barn and he’d see, tell us, see the sun come into the hallway in the barn and the sun is right straight in, touching the walls on both sides of the door, and go out, outside the barn and look down the fence line, it’s right in the middle of the sun. And he says, “Go out on the road and look at the sun going down on the road,” and the road [sun] went right down in the middle of the road, and a couple of days later it was off to the side of the road.

Everything was done by the sun. We’d be out in the field and my brother was urgent to go home at noon and he’d say, “Come on, let’s go, it’s time to eat, I’m hungry,” and my dad says “No, it’s only a little after 11. Ma won’t have lunch ready.” So he stuck the fork in the ground and showed the shadow; he says, “It’s not time to go yet.” So we went a little later, and sure enough, he was quite accurate with telling time by the sun.

And everything was squared. It’s amazing how on barren, primitive land where there was no roads how the surveyors made everything square and all they had was magnetic north to go on, and they sure squared off everything. Where I live now is in a congested residential area and there’s a lot of pie-shaped lots and I have one and the buildings are not in line with the sun, and I’m confused. The first time I backed a car out of the garage I was four foot on my neighbor’s lawn.

Aaron Elson: Tell me more about the muskrats. How would you catch them?

Smokey Stuever: Oh. The muskrats was in this branch, it was called Lake Branch, and at that time the streams were much wider than they are today; all the erosion and fillment (sediment) closed these streams a lot less. The streams at that time were at least 12, 15 feet wide. Today they’re only about six feet wide. Some places they were twenty foot wide. And there usually was a cornfield on both sides or there was soybeans on one side and corn on the other, and then some small growth. The farmers wouldn’t let trees grow because the trees took away light for the crops, and so the muskrats, they loved some of the corn but they would go for roots of different plants. They lived off of the corn, and usually in that area we set our trap underwater where they would come down the slide, down the bank, and they’d get caught in that trap and they’d try to swim across to their den and they swam around a stick that we had the trap attached to and then they would drown, so the next morning we’d go along and just pick up all the corpses and reset the traps again. And one time there was some damaged muskrats, something was eating them in one little particular area and I made careful survey of the area and I found a mink den, and I caught a big, beautiful mink, and I sent its fur to a Taylor Fur Company in St. Louis and they sent me a letter back, “You would have got a lot more money if you would have stretched it long and narrow.” But the muskrats, you stretched them wide. And so, muskrat skins we got around three dollars a hide, but that mink hide I got eighteen dollars for it and I would have got a lot more if I would have done the right job.

Every farmer had orchards and when they had young trees the rabbits would eat the bark off of these young trees and it would create a lot of damage, so they welcomed us to go into their orchards and clean out the cottontail rabbits. My brother would take the shotgun and I had the rifle; I would get the sleepers and he’d get the ones that were trying to get away. So he usually had a basket with the big rabbits and the ones he’d shot up, and we’d dress them out carefully and we’d go to town and he’d get 35 cents for the big ones and I’d get 25 cents for the medium and smaller ones.

If we would freeze them we would hang them on the clothesline overnight and they would be frozen stiff the next morning, and they loved that, when a rabbit is frozen it tastes better when you thaw it out and cook it, it takes the wildness out of it.

Aaron Elson: How about the bullfrogs? How would you kill them and how would you cook them; would you eat the legs?

Smokey Stuever: That was all that, on the bullfrogs all you could eat was just the hind legs. There was not much of a carcass. What we threw away, the chickens and the cats and different animals would eat ‘em, eat the cleanings. Nothing laid around, everything disappeared. And we would just eat the legs.

One time we caught a big bucketful of crayfish and my mother showed us how to squeeze the tail and get just the meat out, and then she cooked them on the stove and we had them. That was a delicious meal.

Usually we caught a lot of perch, bluegill and catfish. We weren’t into bass and that, yet. We were strictly poling. On Bull Branch there was an area that had seven springs on it, a small farm upstream, and the water came on down to near our farm and in that area there was a kind of a deep hole and we made it a little deeper. We had a pet horse, an old mare that my dad had, and we had a scraper, and we made the hole deeper and built a dam and we dammed up the creek and had a nice swimming hole, and the farmer that owned the land had like six daughters, and so we weren’t allowed to be anywhere near that area when his daughters went swimming. He’d be sitting up on a hill with a shotgun. Until one Sunday morning downstream, Mr. Henry Hollencamp, cows were bellowing out loud, they were all standing by the creek and they were crying out loud, so he went down to investigate and there was no water. So he walked upstream and then he finally found our dam, and he opened it up and he came over to our house and he said, “Did you guys build that dam on there?”

But we had a tube in there, we had the water started running down but it didn’t get back to his cows again, and so he says he stuck it through, so that’s what we called him after that, old Stuck It Through Henry.

I had a brother, Fred. He was two years older than me, and in our young life we had all the diseases like scarlet fever, measles, mumps. He had scarlet fever pretty bad, had a fever of 106. That’s how my dad became a deaf mute is, when he was three years old he had scarlet fever with a real high fever and lost his sense of hearing and became deaf. My mother started school, she was about six and a half years old, and she came down with spinal meningitis, and that’s how she became a deaf mute. In those years they didn’t know how to detect spinal meningitis until it was too late.

I have grandchildren that came down with spinal meningitis, and then they were detected right away and cured. So, it’s the old story where a lot of lives were lost because of no knowledge of medication.

Aaron Elson: And what happened to your brother? Did he finish high school?

Smokey Stuever: Oh yes. My brother finished high school, and he finished with high honors. I didn’t have a chance to go back to high school, but I had a, what do you call it, a course at home from taking a course in bookkeeping.

Aaron Elson: A correspondence course.

Smokey Stuever: Yeah, a correspondence course from Pennsylvania, and I did pretty good with that, and learned how to keep records, and ...

Aaron Elson: In terms of formal schooling, you only went through what, eighth grade?

Smokey Stuever: Eight grades, yeah. And the eight-grade school that I went to was a one-room school with all the eight grades in it and one teacher, he taught us how to sing and everything. Oh, I said that before.

Aaron Elson: But your brother, what did he do, did he go into the service?

Smokey Stuever: No. He finally got married so that he could take care of my mother. My dad had passed away in the meantime, right after I was in the CCCs.

Aaron Elson: How did your dad pass away?

Smokey Stuever: He had a large tumor that bursted his right lung. They thought he had TB because he was spitting up blood, and then they took him to St. Louis and they discovered that large tumor in there, and he passed away from that.

Aaron Elson: Did he smoke?

Smokey Stuever: Yes, he had the old pipe and chewing tobacco, like the old farmers did. My brother did pretty good. He became a sheet metal man and that was his trade most of his life.

I met my wife before the war when I was working on the North Shore. After I left the CCs I got a job with an oil company delivering fuel oil to the rich homes along the North Shore. I was doing real good in the wintertime; in the summertime I worked for a landscaper named Schroeder. He was a German and he was in the First World War in the German army, and I didn’t know it at the time, but he was a member of the Nazi Bund. And when I did find out, I left him, but I was only out of the CCs for about a year and a half and President Roosevelt picked me out of a cherry bowl and I was the first draftee out of Winnetka, Illinois.

Aaron Elson: But you got the numbers reversed, didn’t you?

Smokey Stuever: Yea, well, what happened is I had a number of 185 and when the headlines in the Chicago Tribune come out that morning when I was working for a corporation lawyer, he was a Scotsman, and he saw me kick his newspaper around the front yard from his bedroom window, and he come running down in his bathrobe and he says, “What’s the matter, lad, you goin’ bezerk?”

And I says, “Oh, I beg your humble pardon, Sir, I thought this was me. My number’s 185 and the first number that was called was 158. So when I saw that 158 I was a little bit confused, I thought that was me. And that prompted me to give it a kick.”

So, “185, oh, my gosh,” he says, “this calls for a celebration. Come on in, lad, let’s have something to talk about,” and he was a colonel in World War I and he started telling me all about the war, and encouraged me to go through with everything and not refuse anything, do what you have to do and all that. He was trying to be of guidance to me, and after the fifth shot of Scotch, I never drank in my life, he says, “Well, Edward, go get the car ready and I’ll be out in a jiffy as soon as I get my flower.” I had to raise carnations for his lapel, and he’d go out in the garden, and pick out a nice carnation and put it in his lapel and then he’d stand there smelling it.

He had a touring car with the top down and I had the chauffeur’s cap and he was sitting in the back seat, and we drove along the North Shore, along Lake Michigan, to downtown Chicago and I dropped him off at the office, and he says, “Edward, you take the day off and pick up your little sweetie and take her for a ride in the car.” So I did. It was on a Thursday and it was maid’s day off, and my wife was working as a maid on the North Shore, and what a wonderful day we had. We went way out in the country, then we went back to his place and swam in the pool, then I cleaned up the car, put it away, and took her home. He would come home on the train and take a cab home that day, but otherwise I’d meet him at the train or somewhere, he was quite a sociable person, he was always going somewhere, had meetings after his day’s work.

Aaron Elson: Was he married?

Smokey Stuever: Yes. He had a wife; she usually was out in Connecticut most of the time with her children. In the summertime she would go to Illinois because it’s cool.

Aaron Elson: And what was his name?

Smokey Stuever: Oh, I’ve got Peterson on my mind but it ain’t Peterson. Why can’t I think of that name? Boy, he had red rosy cheeks from booze like all the Scotsmen.

Aaron Elson: When you drove that day, it was the first time you’d had so much booze, did it affect your driving?

Smokey Stuever: No. I was so full of vigor.

Aaron Elson: Were you already married?

Smokey Stuever: No. I had met my wife on a Thursday night. On Thursday night was maid’s night out, and they usually ended up at an area on the north side of Chicago. The dividing line between Chicago and Evanston was Howard Street, and there was one street, Palina, about a block and a half long, full of dance halls and slot machines and everything. So I had a big Studebaker sedan, and I would pick up the queen of the maids, we were quite friendly, her name was Christine Augustine; she came from Wisconsin. There was a lot of girls from Wisconsin worked as maids on the North Shore, and Christine was the boss. She would pile in about 14 of these maids in my car when it was time to go home, and she’d crawl in on the driver’s side and say, “Move over, I’ve got to tell Edward to drop you off.” And then she says, “Ed, I want you to meet the sweetest little gal that I know, and you’ve got to be nice to her or else we’ll have nothing to do with you.”

So, the evening came, and the first date was all we needed. We just took over after that, and we didn’t go to the honky tonks, because she came from a very strict family.

Aaron Elson: And her name?

Smokey Stuever: Her name was Genevieve Schmitt.

Her folks lived in Northbrook, Illinois, where she was born, and I was living in Winnetka, about four miles east, and renting an apartment until I got called to duty.

Aaron Elson: This period, was that during or after Prohibition?

Smokey Stuever: Oh, that was after Prohibition, yes. Oh yeah, when Prohibition was repealed, I was still on the farm, and any farmer that produced a thousand bushels of wheat had to produce a barrel of beer. I can remember that. I was only about 12, 14 years old when Prohibition was, I’d say I was 12 years old.

Aaron Elson: Do you have any recollection of stories about gangsters or crimes related to Prohibition?

Smokey Stuever: Oh, yes. They even existed after the war. Chicago still had Capone’s crew in different areas. I had worked for a fellow named Otto Deutsch. He had a business of cleaning beer lines and installing beer lines and he was a Berghoff’s service man of northern Illinois, and we did a lot of service work. At that time it was strictly coils and ice. There was just the beginning of refrigeration, there was hardly any refrigeration, all done with, coolers were chilled by big blocks of ice, and in Chicago, mostly on the South Side, but the Capone people were scattered all over and operating quietly, but one day we had to go into one of their joints and we had orders to replace some beer lines that were leaking down in the cooler, and in order to get down there we had to go through the back door, and there was a basement door with a lookout person on there, and you had to knock three times and then followed by one knock, and the guy would open up the door and say, he said, “Who’s that you got with you, Otto?”

“Oh, that’s Eddie from Melrose Park.” And Melrose Park is where a lot of the boys lived.

“Who do you know in Melrose Park?”

And I said, “Oh, I live next door to Mickey.” Mickey was a boxer, and he worked for them. He rode shotgun when they would change jukeboxes in taverns and different places of business; he’d stand by the door and they’d go take that jukebox that was in there and throw it out the back door and put theirs in there, and then they were in.

One time the FBI men came to my house and they wanted to use my upstairs for surveillance, and I says, “I live next door to that guy in the mob.” I says, “Don’t you care about my life? I can’t let you endanger my life.”

And he started, the neighbor next door started to have slot machines and parties in his garage, poker games and stuff, and they finally caught up with him, but he didn’t go to jail. He got out of their business and he ran a shrimp boat business along Manheim Road which is a large highway.

Aaron Elson: Was that Mickey?

Smokey Stuever: Mickey. And I had to put up with him all those years. And one day he was drunk enough to tell me how he made his money to buy that house. He took a floozy that was floating around the taverns and trapped an official from Melrose Park to go to bed with her and he took pictures of it, and so it was quite a payoff, like fifty grand. And that’s how he got his house. And I had to do a lot of repairs in that house, he had so many plumbing leaks and everything.

Aaron Elson: Now, this was all before the war or after the war?

Smokey Stuever: After, this was all after the war. Even today, there’s no syndicate connection, it’s a private business, but I have two grandchildren that are in the music business and when they play, they play concussion, the drums and different instruments, and they play at a place called Tommy Guns, and there’s a guy at the back door and you have to go through the alley underneath the el to get in it, and it’s like the old days on that style, but it’s legal.

(to be continued)