Grandpa Fast Loved Newspapers and Magazines (2 of 15) -

Part 2 of the series about Grandpa David D. Fast's love of periodicals. See Part 1 here.

Farm Journal – Begun in 1877 by Quaker Wilmer Atkinson for farmers near Philadelphia and published monthly. He worked hard to develop it into a national publication with a million subscribers by 1915. It carried practical information about farming and rural life. The sample magazine cover from 1925 is in color, which shows the marketing savvy of the magazine staff. Farm Journal continues today with a wide range of print, radio, television, internet, and data products.

 

Grandpa Fast Loved Newspapers and Magazines (1 of 15)

Grandpa David D. Fast (1884-1974) #112786 was proud of being a self-taught man and was an

avid reader. Even though he only completed eighth grade, he believed that education and knowledge mattered greatly. According to my dad Harold, about 1950 he counted the periodicals to which he subscribed for a total of seventeen. My dad and his siblings could still remember fourteen of them, which are described below. (The cover pictures below are just examples that I found on the internet.)

Because we live in an era of dying print newspapers and magazines, it is hard to imagine how important they were to a ranching family in the Oklahoma Panhandle. In 1950, the average household subscribed to 2.3 daily and weekly newspapers, and this doesn’t include magazines. In comparison, the Fasts subscribed to 8 newspapers! But in 2020 only 39% of households subscribe to a newspaper. Even medium-sized cities had morning and evening newspapers, and many people subscribed to both. Every small town had its own paper, sometimes several. Newspapers and magazines brought the latest information and entertainment to the remotest ranch or farm on the prairie.

Periodicals were a social and family event as well. Families listened with rapt attention while Father read the latest news aloud, shared a humorous joke, or groused about the cattle prices in Kansas City. Or as Mother informed them of the latest “doings” of the neighbors that were detailed in the local columns sent in by township correspondents. Newspaper and magazine salesmen traveled the prairies and aggressively sold their products to every household. If a family could not pay cash for a subscription, they were willing to trade for old batteries, radiators, chickens, anything that could be sold for cash. Print media were the lifeblood of the nation. 

The next series of posts will describe each periodical.

Grandpa's Trouble with Debt

My grandfather David D. Fast #112876 (1884-1974) learned a hard lesson about debt in the Great Depression.  About a year ago, I wrote a post about my courthouse research on his mortgages.  Shortly after that, Adam from Niceville, Fla., in an act that truly represented the name of his town, contacted me to say that he was cleaning up his grandfather's stuff and had found some documents related to my grandfather's mortgages.  He was kind enough to Fedex them to me, postage-paid.

The documents were seven interest coupons on a mortgage that my grandfather made with C. H. Bailey on 28 February 1921.  My grandfather owed $350 interest every six months, and he apparently sent it in with an interest coupon that he cut from a sheet of coupons.  Here's the first coupon in the series:

 I was glad to get the coupons, but they weren't that exciting until I compared the due dates with the dates of payment stamped or written on the front.   The first one, shown above, was paid on time, as was the second one.  But the third one was paid five months late, the next six months late, against six months late, and then seventh one (due on 28 August 1924) was on time again.

Interestingly, my grandfather married on 10 June 1924, and my grandmother, Elisabeth Suderman #55577 (1892-1981), came from a moderately well-to-do farming family.  She had owned land before she married, and I have the impression that they did not tolerate being late in payments.  Since the next payment due after they were married was the seventh one (the first time Grandpa had been on time on for a couple years), I wonder if it was under her influence that he caught up on payments.

In any case, it didn't matter in the end.  Grandpa continued rolling over the principal because he couldn't repay it and finally lost his farm on 4 August 1931 as the falling wheat prices of the Great Depression took their toll.  But read my post linked at the beginning for the happy ending to the story.

BTW, both Adam and I wondered how these items wound up in his grandfather's possession.  He also found documents from other unrelated people in the Midwest in the same stack.  He said that his grandfather was a flea market seller, so I've wondered if perhaps the interest coupons were in an item of furniture that was sold at some point.  But it's all speculation.  In any case, I'm extremely grateful that he contacted me and gave me the interest coupons.

Obituary Scrapbooks

Ouch!  It's been nearly a month since I posted last.  I've been putting siding on and painting the garage that I'm building, so I do have an excuse, but I'll try to post more consistently.

My aunt let me scan two obituary scrapbooks that my grandfather David D. Fast #112786 and great-aunt Minnie Fast #315950 (brother and sister) had kept.  This is a great resource for a couple reasons.

First, they contain obituaries of people I'm interested in but haven't had the time to find - for example, their sister Margaret died at age 29, and I have always wondered why.  Aunt Minnie pasted her obituary into her scrapbook, so I will translate it to see what the cause of death was.  There are lots of other collateral ancestors whom I would never take the time to research, but the obituaries contain brief life histories of them.

Second, these scrapbooks add members to their FAN club (Friends, Associates, Neighbors) and to that of their parents (since they were collecting obituaries, many of them are from an older generation).

Here's a clip from Aunt Minnie's scrapbook:

 

I'm not going to write a formal source here because I don't want to put the name and residence of my aunt online for privacy reasons.

Going to the Courthouse - Land Records - Case Study

Volumes of land records piled high on a counter in the vault in a county courthouse can be a monumentally boring thing.  Or they can bring a family history to life.  Let me give an example of how I found them to put flesh on the bones of my family's history.

By 1921, my grandfather David D. Fast #112786 (1884-1974) was 37 years old, single, and owned a section of good farm land near Hooker, Oklahoma.  On 28 February 1921, he borrowed $10,000 from C. H. Bailey of Hutchinson, Kansas, something that I found in the land records at the Texas County courthouse (Mortgage, D. D. Fast to C. H. Bailey, 28 February 1921, Texas County, Oklahoma, Deed Book 96:128, County Clerk's Office, Courthouse, Guymon).  When I showed the mortgage to my uncle, he said Grandpa used that money to buy new John Deere farm equipment; and here is a picture from a local history book showing my grandfather using that equipment to harvest wheat.

Source:  Hardesty History (Hardesty, Okla.: Hardesty Extension Homemakers Group, 1973) 2.

He never paid off the loan, instead paying the interest yearly and rolling it over in 1926.  By this time he was married with four children.  When the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl hit, he couldn't pay the mortgage; and on 4 August 1931, he sold his section of farm land, which included the family home to the same C. H. Bailey, apparently for a bargain price.  My dad had been born on 10 July 1931, less than a month before the family lost the farm, so it must have been an incredibly stressful time.  Here is a copy of the deed, which I found in the courthouse, when Grandpa had to sell his farm:

Warranty deed, D. D. & Elizabeth Fast to C. H. Bailey, 4 August 1931, Texas County, Oklahoma, Deed Book 170:366, County Clerk's Office, Courthouse, Guymon.

My grandfather lost the farm equipment as well, and the family moved about ten miles away to an old house near Hardesty, Oklahoma, built in the 1880s of blocks cut from soft chalk rock.  My oldest aunt remembers the family belongings piled into a horse-drawn wagon while the family drove their car to the "new" home, known as the Rock House.  The following years of the Great Depression were incredibly trying with four small children and another one on the way and not enough food or coal to heat with.

But my grandfather was an indomitable optimist, and he managed to save a few head of cattle out of the debacle.  He had always wanted to be a rancher instead of a farmer and had made a few attempts to get into ranching.  But now he had no choice since he needed to make a living and all he had left were a few cattle.  He rented some ranch land around the Rock House and eventually built up a good herd.  By the 1950s, he owned 680 acres of excellent ranch land and rented another 1320 acres.  At the age of 78 in 1962, when most men his age were retired or already dead, he built his dream home on his ranch. He lived in it another 12 years, until he died in 1974 at age 90.

Here is the deed, again from the courthouse, for the first 80 acres of land that he bought in 1947, the first time that he had owned real estate in 16 years:

Warranty deed, Minnie Binkley to D. D. & Elizabeth Fast, 27 May 1947, Texas County, Oklahoma, Deed Book 277:451, County Clerk's Office, Courthouse, Guymon.

 Why was it important to find the mortgages and deed in the courthouse?  My aunt had written up her recollections in an excellent family history, but she was a young girl at the time and didn't know many of the financial and business details.  When I showed them to her and to my uncle, it sparked memories of the farm equipment, the bill collectors, and the move to the Rock House.  Neither of them had known exactly why their father had lost the farm, the amount borrowed, the many years spent rolling over the loan without repaying it, and exactly when it had been foreclosed.  But combining documents and memories added to the family history that my aunt had already done.

Courthouse documents alone can be fashioned into an interesting story if you think what it must have been like to experience the events that they represent.  And adding memories and family histories to the mix can make it truly exciting.