Thomas Cave's Tattoo: Roll Up the Rug

"Thomas Cave's Tattoo"

I've started a blog that discusses what I call the New Great Depression - the idea that the next few years will constitute a Depression era, and not simple recession. I believe that to understand it in that way will enrich it, and encourage everyone in this country to make this era a creative period, a positive time, an act of construction, and not a cause for panic, chaos and fear. This is a chance for renaissance.

If the New Great Depression produces art, literature, theater, film, community, and a discovery of human value, as the first one did, who wouldn't want to be a part of it.

I am here to barter, trade, share, talk, listen, discuss, argue, understand, make fun, and make peace with the lack of the old prosperity. It was corrupt, and corroded, and it's gone. The dead weight of spoils has been lifted.

Thank you for listening, ma'am.

"About Thomas Cave"

Mr. Cave is the gentleman in the photograph that graces this home page. The photograph was taken by the American photographer Dorothea Lange, who so powerfully documented the country and its citizens during the Great Depression. I found this photograph at www.shorpy.com, a website with a specialty in Depression images. According to Shorpy's site, the Lange photograph, titled "535-07-5248 and Wife," was taken in Oregon in August of 1939. The gentleman is described as an unemployed lumber worker. His tattoo is his Social Security number, by which he is referred to in the title of the photograph. A public records search conducted by Shorpy's revealed that the number belonged to Thomas Cave, who was born in 1912 and died in 1980 in Portland. His wife's name, Ann Kathryn, who died in 2000, appears on their tombstone, a photograph of which is appended under Shorpy's readers' comments.

Mr. Cave is 27 years old in Lange's picture.

Friday, March 6, 2009

Roll Up the Rug

Breaking news. Real people showed up at Thomas Cave's Tattoo today, and broke up the party. An ex-colleague from the Times, who followed an escaping balloon to Miami, and chased it around the city until it was out of air, wrote me today out of the blue (blue skies of Miami).

"Here’s a picture of my father in the 1930s."

"He graduated from high school in 1929. No work. So he and his brothers formed a little orchestra, and drove around North and South Dakota. Just like O Brother, Where Art Thou. They would spy a radio station (tall tower), drive toward it. Knock on the door. Perform for 30 minutes. Tell people to come to the grange hall, or a barn, that night. People would pay whatever they had, whether it was a chicken (admits four), or some bread, a little money or even a gallon of gas.

Then the Lee brothers would perform: Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue; Little Grass Shack; etc. Lots of foxtrots. My dad was a strings guy: guitar, mandolin, ukulele, banjo.

That’s how he spent the Depression.

My mother’s people had it even worse. They arrived from Norway to Minnesota (in the 1850s) in time to live in a sod hut (the original green building style, you know) and to go through Indian raids (some settlers and relatives were killed), blizzards (including the big one in 1888), a prairie fire that killed more of my relatives; swarms of locusts (1865, 66, 67, 68), financial panics of 1857, 1869 (with Depression), 1873 (with Depression), and another one in 1893. And a couple of flu epidemics.

I’m attaching another photo, of my great, great grandmother, in front of the family house in 1867 in Belmont, Minnesota.

When I feel sorry for myself (house in Miami close to foreclosure, no job, can’t find a job, been looking for almost two years, etc.), son having his first child… on Medicaid … when I feel sorry for myself, I look at those ancestors, and figure I really don’t have it too bad."

Thank you Linda, and, thank you for listening, ma'am.

To see the foxtrot in action, visit "Foxtrot Videos." And roll up the rug.

Thomas Cave's Tattoo