Something to Remember If You Work In The Oil Fields.....

I lived in West Texas before, during, and after the boom this comment talks about.   Do not believe anyone who tries to tell you that "This time is different", "This time we won't have a bust", "This time this town is big enough to generate money without oil".   In a comment on Belmont Club,  a user by the name of "Charles42" sums up WHY this time is no different than it ever was:

"In 1980 oil was equivalent to about 106@ barrel in current dollars. Reagan took off price controls and eliminated the excise profits tax in 1981. That knocked the price of oil down to $60@barrel in today's dollars. In 1985 he talked the Saudis into increasing their production. That knocked the price of oil in today's dollars down to roughly $30@ barrel in 1989. That falling oil price bankrupted the soviet union and gave the USA a strong eonomy during the 1980's and 90's. The price of oil bottomed in 1999 in today's dollars at 19 dollars a barrel.
The same thing is going to happen 10-15 years from now as fracking increases supply of oil and rising sales of natural gas trains trucks and buses and electric cars curb the demand for oil....."

(Click through the link to read the rest)

Those who are wise will save their money and avoid debt, will live as frugally as is possible in a boom town, and will be very careful about buying real estate at the boom-economy's grossly inflated prices. The oil business is a good business, and there is room for hard workers in it, but work smart, and look out for yourself - and remember that oil is always a boom and bust gamble in the end.

Hope at a Hard Time

"On Christ the solid Rock I stand - all other ground is sinking sand. All other ground is sinking sand."

It's a scary world, tonight. Those of us who have lived and seen how civilizations can crumble, who know the danger signs, who remember the ingredients that generated the good life we've shared across the world, and who remember the hard aching slog to pull out of the mire back onto solid ground: we had hoped to spare our children the toil, but it looks like our efforts have not been enough to push back against the entropy.

Our liberal friends don't understand the despair we feel, and like they did after all the other encroachments against American liberty, they roll their eyes and dismiss our worries as unwarranted silliness. The less charitable, incapable of compassion, continue to project their own feelings onto us: they think it's all a game, that we are just being competitive and write us off as poor losers; they project their own secret "isms" onto people who actually live in unity with true equality, they refuse to recognize that the only place bigotry still exists is in their own hearts and minds.

It tempts one toward despair.

But for just such times as these, God tells us: "FEAR NOT. ALL SHALL BE WELL."

I receive the David Wilkerson Devotionals each day, and these have truly been a God-send, a treasure trove of reminders that God's ways do not depend on human organization or plans. Here's a snip from one called "The Impossible Mission", that tonight, especially, has given me great relief and comfort:

"We must realize that Jesus was talking to ordinary, insignificant, uneducated men and women. He was placing the very future of His Church on their shoulders. They must have been overwhelmed.

"Can you imagine the conversation that must have taken place once their Master ascended to heaven? "Did I hear Him right? How could we start a worldwide revolution? We're penniless and the Romans are beating and killing us. If we are treated this way here in Jerusalem, how will we be treated when we witness and preach in Rome?”

"Another might have said, "How does our Lord expect us to go into all the world with the gospel when we don't even have enough money to go to Jericho? How are we to learn languages when we haven't been educated? This is all impossible."

"It was indeed an impossible mission. Yet our challenge today is just as daunting!

"If all who read this message would allow the Holy Spirit to make this word real to them — to seek Him for His burden and guidance — there is no telling what kind of harvest the Spirit might reap. The truth is, the greatest works for eternity are done not in mass crusades, but with one saint reaching one lost soul."

This bears repeating: "The truth is, the greatest works for eternity are done not in mass crusades, but with one saint reaching one lost soul. "

That is where we came from. Constantly, all of Christian history rises from this. We must know that this pattern will continue into the future as well. God loves His people, and this, today, is an opportunity to strengthen our faith, to look to today with confidence that tomorrow is in the hands of our great Good Father, who will fight for us on our behalf. We need merely stand faithful in Jesus.

Be of good cheer! Hold fast the faith! God will not allow your foot to stumble!

Incandescent Light Bulbs, and What Went Before

Why do incandescent light bulbs matter so much?  There are many reasons our government should never ever have ventured to ban these miraculous Edisonian inventions, not least of which is that they embody, in the history of their invention, in the way they changed our world, all that is best about the modern, industrial, fossil-fueled, coal-powered, broad-shouldered, optimistic, brightly-lit, global Age of Western Civilization.

Rita, who lived in my house during WWII, in the 1940's, told me it was the first house her family had ever lived in that had electricity. They had always lived on a farm, and the rural electrification project still had a long way to go before completion. She said her mother hurried to get it connected. When her father came home from work the first day, he took a match to light the kerosene lamp that sat in the center of the table in the kitchen. But her mother said "Wait. Look." and reached up, and pulled the chain that turned on the bare bulb that hung from the ceiling. An incandescent bulb, that lit the entire kitchen. Compared to the old kerosene lamp, it looked like the sun.

If you ever wondered what people did at night before electricity, what it was like to eat supper by lamplight, to study by an oil lamp, these photos were taken by the Works Project Administration (WPA) in about 1939, in Oklahoma, in a setting and house very similar to what our little "Cottage at Pecan Corner" was like at the time.

This is what the world was like before the incandescent light bulb. And what it will be like again without oil, coal, incandescent bulbs, and working power plants.

Considering Hiroshima in context with Unit 731 and the realties of 1945

The United States stands for the liberty of the individual to set his own course, to profit from his own decisions, to be responsible for his own mistakes. We are a nation that respects and admires our ancestors but we do not worship them, and we do not apologize for them.

This is what "created equal" means, this is what the end of slavery insured: that each person's birthright is freedom. We are not responsible for the debts our mothers leave, nor are we entitled to status or nobility. We never blame people for the actions of their ancestors - nor do we expect recompense from relatives. Fairness and equality will not abide feuds.


To assure that we can never be pushed back into serfdom again, and to aid others to gain their own God-given liberty, the United States stands against tyrants. We go to war to protect liberty and American interests, and in the process liberty has spread to many nations - including to Japan, which at the time of WWII was still under the rule of an Emperor, its common people in thrall to warlords, still trapped in ancestral roles.

When they tell you that America saved the world in WWII, they are not exagerating. Here is a part of the war you may never have heard about before:

Manchuria 731st Unit - Mass Grave Discovered
31 July, 2010

Ground-zero of Imperial Japan's germ war
By Peter J Brown
Asia Times

"In 1989, a mass grave was unearthed at the construction site for a National Institute of Health facility in the Shinjuku section of Tokyo. ...

"These were all probably the unfortunate victims of a string of medical experiments performed on living subjects in Japan as well as in Manchuria and China by the Imperial Japanese Army. ... The infamous Unit 731 created in 1932 - aka the "Kwantung Army Epidemic Prevention and Water Supply Department" or simply the "Manchuria 731st Unit" - was also headquartered there.

"...Ishii Shiro, the director of Unit 731 who died in the 1950s, was once described as the "Japanese Mengele", a reference to Josef Mengele, the German SS officer and a physician in Nazi concentration camps who was also known as the "Angel of Death". ...

"Shinjuku was the source of [germ warfare] agents that infected thousands of people in China. Estimates of the total death toll in China range from anywhere between 250,000 and
1 million. ..

..."Details from this period were suppressed during the Cold War. The US government cut a secret deal with these Japanese doctors, giving them immunity from prosecution in exchange for their medical data," said Chang in 2004. [2] ..."

....

As early as 1941, US and Allied intelligence picked up information that the Japanese military were deploying germ warfare in areas of China they had occupied several years earlier, releasing plague and cholera into communities, and researching delivery methods.

Despite the astonishing betrayal of Pearl Harbor, Japan had been our ally during WWI, and it was difficult to conceive that the Japanese people would tolerate or allow this insanity, or the atrocities their armies were inflicting on captured civilians that became symbolic of the Pacific War. By 1944, it became clear that disease sources were being produced and stockpiled in multiple locations in Japan and China, including in Japanese Universities and hospitals.

By 1945, the United States and the Allies had gained detailed and certain knowledge of Japan's accelerated release of biological toxins in China and extreme brutality against POWs and civilians in all the areas Japan controlled from Indonesia to Manchuria. The Allied forces had grave concerns that Japan was planning a final, last ditch assault of massive biological bombings - an event that would have had catastrophic consequences for the entire world. Given the propensity for their military to fight to the death - in the battle for Iwo Jima, Japan's entire fighting force of 22,000 men all chose death over surrender, killing 7000 Americans and wounding 19,000 before they were through - an invasion of D Day proportions was untenable.

It became essential to end Japan's capacity for warmaking as rapidly, and distantly, as possible.

The scope of this use of biological weaponry must have made MacArthur's hair stand on end. Remember that this occurred so close to WWI that the same men fought in both, within the early years of the scientific revolution that advanced the military literally from horseback cavalry to intercontinental flight, from gunpowder to the hydrogen bomb.

After the war, the US military determined that despite the moral desire for a public trial and punishment of those scientists who carried out these experiments, it was more essential for the sake of humanity and US National Security to document and preserve the intelligence and data the Japanese scientists had amassed, particularly in light of Russia's capture of several highly placed scientists from Unit 731, and the USSR's subsequent post-war hegemony.

Had the US not coerced the scientists into documenting fully and completely all the germ warfare data and research they had done, America and other countries would have been at grave risk that others would use this kind of deadly assault against us. As difficult as it may have been for decent people to let evil walk, in doing so they put a lid on biological warfare that has remained effective for seven decades since.

To learn the truth of any historical matter, go to contemporaneous sources.

Many of the now-declassified documents on Unit 731 and Japan's Biological Warfare activities are found in the pdf document available from the AII POW-MIA InterNetwork archive [5/27/16 URLs no longer work. Here is one US Gov website with PDF lists and other links:  100,000 Pages Declassified in Search for Japanese War Crimes Records . From the page: " Select Documents on Japanese War Crimes and Japanese Biological Warfare PDF file is a selection of 1,400 documents related to Unit 731 and biological warfare experiments and attacks in World War II. It includes images of about 25 documents in the holdings of the National Archives and will be the starting point for any researcher interested in Japan’s wartime human experimentation programs.   ].

Some claim that the US should not have used the Atomic bombs to stop Japan - after years of direct conventional warfare had not convinced Japan's military or Emperor to give up its desire to conquer all of Southeast Asia. Perhaps learning the experience of China, and of the Dutch in Indonesia, will provide necessary balance and perspective.

All things considered in the full context of the time, using "The Bomb" was a difficult action - but ultimately probably the most effective for preservation of life in Japan, China, and the prison camps of civilians held by the Japanese throughout Indonesia and Southeast Asia, as well as of our own troops. We all pray use of atomic weapons will never be necessary again.

That war was over before I was born. I hold deep respect for those who preserved liberty for America and the world. I will neither second guess them nor justify those they fought. Just as today our newest Greatest Generation takes the necessary actions to preserve liberty, so that Greatest Generation did what they had to do, they succeeded, and our lives are good because of it.

But I will also not seek to shame or punish the innocent or forget the first principles of freedom. All men are created equal.

We, whether Americans or Japanese or any other nationality, who were not even born then, owe no apologies or reparations to anyone, and none are owed to us.



~


PS Thanks to Pat at And So It Goes In Shreveport, whose link about Hiroshima reminded me to write this.

8/7/10 Update: Via Chicago Boyz (a great blog of cultural/political commentary) comes another set of declassified documentation - this being wartime radio intercepts - that further highlight the facts on the ground in 1945, as told by Richard B. Frank in the Weekly Standard:

"The intercepts of Japanese Imperial Army and Navy messages disclosed without exception that Japan's armed forces were determined to fight a final Armageddon battle in the homeland against an Allied invasion. The Japanese called this strategy Ketsu Go (Operation Decisive). "

Be sure to also review the comments for links to additional archival documents from the time.

*Photo is the remains of a "Brewster Buccaneer" Scout Bomber, on Parris Island SC. Used for training, this plane crashed in 1943. Both crewmen survived and the wreck was towed to an out of the way location where it remains today.

Three Forgotten Direct Causes of The US Financial Meltdown

We are hearing a lot about how things fell apart, causes and potential fixes. But I am not hearing anyone talk about the two most significant changes to the law that, I think, led directly to our current ongoing crisis. The third is occasionally mentioned but never acted on. Regardless of how these came to be, they are all easily correctable right now - if Congress were willing to act.

(1) Loss of State Anti-Usury Regulation Authority and Failure of Congress to Restore These Protections

"Usury" is the charging of excessive interest on loans. "Anti-Usury Laws" are those that prohibit predatory lending by setting maximum interest rates, protecting borrowers from the servitude of debt that occurs when loans are compounded by such high rates of interest they can never hope to repay them. Until recently, most states had such laws, maintaining an
equitable balance between borrower and lender that let lenders profit fairly while also assuring citizens the means by which to raise their standard of living over time as they gradually paid off their debts.

In 1978, in Marquette Nat. Bank of Minneapolis v. First of Omaha Service Corp (439 U.S. 299),
the Supreme Court decided that interest rates and late fees charged by banks and credit card companies were determined by the laws of the state in which the bank was chartered, and that the state in which the bank offered loans and credit had no power to limit the interest charged.

They said the National Banking Act, passed in 1863 as a wartime measure to move control of money from the states to Lincoln's Federal government, and raise money to fund the Civil War, by creating "national banks" that centralized a national currency, intended that only the state in which a national bank was located could limit the fees it levyed.

Thus, by deciding to incorporate in a state with unlimited interest, lenders were free to impose any rate of interest they could get away with, and any amount of late charges they wanted.

The Court specifically said in their decision that it was up to Congress, rather than the Court, to decide whether to change the old law to reflect modern times and restore equal right of banking regulation to all states. Congress failed to take up the Court's implicit suggestion, even though the states had been freely regulating interest rates without objection for a hundred years, right up until the Court's pronouncement.

In other words, after 1978 the wolf was given full charge of the sheep fold. Credit card marketing, issuance, lending and collection practices became ever more predatory. Congress continually bowed to pressure from Banks and Wall Street and looked the other way while our formerly thrifty society descended into the bondage of debt.

There is a very simple fix. All it takes is a repeal of the portion of the National Banking Act that allowed this catastrophic and unfair situation to occur. No need for thousand page bills and new regulatory bodies, no reason to allow the lobbyists to rig the law. It's easy and understandable, it would restore balance, as each state's people could determine for themselves what is fair to all concerned.

Instead, Congress made a big deal about controlling the credit card companies this past year, proudly passing the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility, and Disclosure (CARD) Act, with the immediate result that credit card companies spent the next 9 months before the law went into effect raising rates and dreaming up new fees to impose. There's nothing in the bill to prevent the credit card company from charging 30 per cent interest, or from doing any number of despicable things that give them an average revenue of $100 per card per month... on 1.4 billion cards every month.

But Congress, still unwilling to lead us back toward sanity and thrift, refuses to acknowledge, much less fix the root problem.


(2) Short-Sighted Full Tax Exemptions For Short-Term Residential Profits: The Tax Relief Act of 1997

The right of the ordinary person to own a home of our own is a fundamental part of the American Dream that was not possible in the feudal societies of the Old World. Immigrants fled the kings of Europe, the tsars of Russia, the emperors of Asia; they fled the Collectives of communist states, the haciendas of Mexico, the castes of India: to claim their place in a society
where the ordinary man could expect the rule of law to stand with him in protecting his home and his capacity to own it outright.

Thus, throughout our history, our politicians remembered and our laws have rigorously protected access to private property ownership and the residential homestead as a necessary component of liberty.

Before 1997, our tax laws encouraged long-term home ownership and upward mobility of all income groups, by allowing people to sell one home and use the profit to buy another without paying taxes, and after age 55 to sell their home and move to a less expensive one without tax on any profit to free this money toward quality of life in retirement.

In 1997 that all changed, when Congress passed what now known as "The Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997" More information, details and language on Public Law 105-34 here.

Whatever the original good intentions may be been, the main effect was to explode the entrance of investors into single family homes, using loopholes to gobble up residential properties, artificially inflate their value, and sell to unsuspecting families led astray by concurrent changes in lending practices.

The act allowed for "residential" real estate profit to be tax-free if the owner had owned the house for 5 years and lived in it for two. Combined with a rule called the "1031 exchange", investors posing as "homeowners" have been able to constantly buy, rent and sell property without ever paying a dime of tax.

This activity of well-funded investors in a candy store of tax-free profit, buying up every empty house on every block, sight unseen across state lines, demanding ever-expanding prices when selling (unopposed if not actually abetted by Real Estate brokers), artificially inflated demand and drove real estate prices all over the country far beyond their actual value.

Ultimately, the profiteering has made it harder and more expensive than ever before in our history for the ordinary person to afford to buy a home of their own.

Without the foolish, short-sighted provisions of the Tax Relief Act in 1997, the artificial inflation of real estate values would still be a limited, regional phenomenon, and as such would have been recognized as temporary.

Sub-prime loans would have been limited to the same small percentage of loans they historically occupied - less than 5% - and that portion of this crisis would never have occurred.


(3) The third item is another that is easy to fix, if Congress wanted to fix it: reinstate the portions of the Glass-Steagall Act that were repealed in 1999.

In the late 1990's a number of "banking reform" measures removed limits on the way banks and their investors operated. Many of the restrictions tossed aside had been in place since the 1930s, and had heretofore prevented the abuses and failures that led to the Depression. Most importantly, these old regulations assured stability by controlling speculation, limiting risk,
and reducing potential for conflict of interest.

Less than 10 years after repeal, ungoverned banks had once again raced our economy off a cliff.

Without these restrictions, banks immediately moved agressively into the speculative investment activity previously denied them, consolidating into massive conglomerates that could capture every phase of any financial transaction, including insurance and securities.

This relaxing of standards and legislative abandonment of regulation allowed banks to effectively write their own laws, free to pursue novel structures in lending that maximize profit in a full circle - these new types of financial instruments were not well understood by those issuing them, much less by the customers they sold them to.

Innovations in mortage lending destroyed the previous mutually beneficial relationship between homeowner and lender that held the lender's interests in line with the borrower's over the long range life of the note.

Thus, the traditional mortgage process offered substantial protections to the buyer, including:

(1) protecting the buyer from overpaying for a property by insisting on accurate, 3rd party appraisals. If the appraisal came back below the sales price, the bank could refuse the loan, the buyer could escape the contract, and the usual effect in practice was that the seller would agree to lower their price to the actual fair market value in order to make the sale;

(2) protecting the buyer from purchasing a substandard property that was not safe or sanitary to live in. Banks rightfully required property inspections to be sure the house had glass in the windows, a roof that didn't leak, plumbing and electricity that worked;

(3) protecting the buyer from being unable to pay their property taxes, and from losing everything if the home was destroyed by fire or flood, by using a system of escrow that collected a small amount from each monthly payment towards those charges, which the bank was then responsible for paying each year;

(4) protecting the buyer from risking losing their home by taking on too much debt. Banks, desirous of attracting savings accounts as well as loans, encouraged thrift, and were careful that a family would still have a reasonable percentage of their income left over after paying their monthly mortgage. This prevented buyers from paying so much for their house that they could not afford to maintain it, or to pay for other essential living expenses.

With the passage of the Gramm Leach Bliley Act, this was erased and replaced with a hive-like system designed to pre-empt repayment, exponentially multiply fee-taking, and to profit more from default than from compliance.

So. Lenders sold ugly mortgages, and re-financing schemes, and quick-change credit cards and insurance and checking accounts and car loans, then packaged all those loans and debts up into ugly investments and sold them. Then when it all fell apart, they repackaged it all again and sold it to Congress, who gave them a whole new stack of money and several new laws so they'd keep on selling ugly mortgages, and credit cards and car loans.... and insurance.

Despite a seemingly wide acknowledgment that we need to reinstate Glass Steagall, Congress has yet to do anything about it.


Conclusion:

In the end, the repeal of Glass Steagall was only able to destroy our economy and our wealth because the Mortgage Cancellation Tax Relief Act had thrown open the doors of our homes to the wolves, and because of Congress's failure to restore the equitable right of each state's people to prevent usury and regulate how lenders and banks operate within their own state.

Had it not been for those two invitations to rapine by our Congress, the home we live in would still be understood as a long term investment for our old age, more of our population would be homeowners with equity than renters, and our individual states would be able to do what Congress has been unwilling to do: housebreak the wolves, no matter how big they are.

Oh It's A Wonderful Life! Still!

Guess who the two newest fans of Frank Capra's "It's A Wonderful Life" are? That would be a 10 year old boy, and a 12 year old girl, who each sat glued to the tv all the way through the movie.

We didn't really expect either to sit through it, and didn't make a lot of fanfare when putting the movie into the dvd player. Our grandson watched it first, and didn't fidget at all. He loved it. So we tried it again when our granddaughter came to visit. She pronounced it her new favorite Christmas movie.

This movie still makes my eyes well up with tears at certain happy moments. Each year that I watch it, one or another little detail will have a bit of special meaning. Whether it is ZuZu's petals, or George Bailey hitting the cigar lighter, or the tinkling bell, or Auld Lang Sine, the story is always fresh and new in some way. Gosh I miss Jimmy Stewart (James Stewart, the actor who played George Bailey). Remember The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance? Now THERE was a movie - James Stewart, John Wayne... oops, that's another post... heh!

We were surprised, that sophisticated, tech-savvy children were as enthralled as audiences have been for the past half century. I don't know if either of them have ever seen a black and white movie before, but it didn't matter to them - they were caught up in the story.

"It's A Wonderful Life" still makes magic. Watching it during the Holidays is one of our little traditions. The grandkids are really glad we shared it with them!

"Empty Bowls" Event For Food Pantry

Good Samaritans Ministries, the local food pantry where we volunteer, partnered with Howard Payne University students to sponsor an "Empty Bowls" fundraising event last week. Local artists and potters made and donated bowls and local restaurants donated soup to fill them. People who attended the event got to keep their bowl, each one-of-a-kind.

I had first heard about Empty Bowls a few years ago and was excited one would be held here. I did not get to attend, but I sent a donation with a friend and she picked out a lovely pottery bowl for me.

For this event in Brownwood, 90% stayed local and a 10% tithe was given to Heifer International (even Christian Organizations practice tithing in grateful thanks for their blessings). I haven't heard the final totals yet, but know it was in the range of several thousand dollars raised!

Empty Bowls events raise money to fight hunger and increase food security. You can learn more here. They have a list of events so you can see if there is one coming up near you.

You could even help put together an event for your town. As unemployment climbs, local needs for food are also going to rise. The lovely thing about Empty Bowls is that it isn't a beaurocratic thing: you can host an event and have all the proceeds stay local, for your Salvation Army, Community Food Pantry or Angel Food Ministries or other local way of helping make sure everyone has enough to eat.

Maple Furniture and Llama Fur

Picking up on the post below about the Little White House, here is one of our beds. This one is quite similar to the beds in FDR's getaway home, and it dates from the same era: my grandparents bought the suite for my mother when she was a young child.

Actually it is Nick's bed - he has the dresser and chest of drawers that go with it, but uses a different bed. The dresser you see here was Thelma's (my mother in law).


The quilt was a mark-down somewhere (tip: always buy "all cotton" when it comes to quilts - cost is a bit more but it is so worth it) several years ago, and the shams I bought last year at Walmart. That cute little bolster I found at a yard sale. Check out the detail on the ends:



That is just printed fabric on the ends but it looks embroidered. Isn't it pretty?

And the Llama pillow... well there is nothing softer than llama fur, so that is a sneaky way of getting a stuffed animal on the bed in a home that is between cats! :-)

FDR's Little White House: A Simple American Home

Last summer, we went to the Little White House, in Warm Springs, Georgia. This is where President Franklin Delano Roosevelt spent much time during his presidency, and where he passed away in April 1945.

The thing that most struck me about this house is how very ordinary it is. Anyone's grandmother could have lived here. There was no ostentation, no luxury. It is a simple home with maple furniture, twin beds, well-read books near the fireplace, and the comfort of homeliness.


The kitchen had no cabinets, only open shelves along the walls. The things we would put into cabinets were stored in the pantry/closet - it was lined with shelves and is shown in the first picture, above.

They told us the living room is exactly as it looked the day he passed away. The nautical decor was a favorite of his, as he was a Navy man.
President Roosevelt's bed, on which he was lying when he passed away suddenly from a stroke. The room is very small, with a single bed, and the furniture you see is pretty much the whole of the room. It is located right off of the living room.
This was Eleanor's room, with a pair of twin beds. The guide told us that their children especially enjoyed coming to The Little White House, and would stay here in Mrs. Roosevelt's room when they came.
The Dining Room is not separate, the table is simply across the room from the living area, with the hutch sitting opposite the fireplace shown in the living room photo. Even so, the whole room is rather small. The proportions of the furniture help keep it from feeling crowded.


This unfinished photo is the one for which President Roosevelt was sitting when he passed away.


There is a small garage apartment over the garage that is labeled "servants quarters", but these were a cook/housekeeper, and a driver/butler whose assistance was necessary to our paralyzed president.

The live-in housekeeper was not unusual even for middle class families who didn't have a grandmother living with them in those days when labor was cheap and goods expensive. Without the labor-saving devices that became common after WWII, help of some kind - whether family or hired - was essential. Notice in the kitchen photos how bare of "things" the kitchen was. Yet nearly all food was made from scratch or preserved at home, so much more time was involved in the preparation.

Oh, he and Mrs Roosevelt had luxury in their lives - both were from wealthy families and they did live in the White house, after all. But this little place where he escaped for treatments at the natural hot spring spa up the road in Warm Springs, and where his children came to spend time with him after they were grown, is by far the best example of an American Home of the era.

Although I am not decorating my little cottage in this same style, I do find much inspiration, and comfort, in these rooms.