If you ever felt hunger, you’d never condemn the hungry, by Alan Guebert
Farm and Food File for the week beginning Sunday, Nov. 9, 2025
Alan Guebert
My mother was born into dirt, poverty, and hunger on a tenant farm in east central Nebraska in April 1932. She was the third child–fourth, including her brother Gordon, who died before she was born–of her parents, Lottie and Harry, young Illinoisans drawn west a decade earlier by the promise of a farm.
By 1933, however, everyone–her parents and older siblings Nina and Robert–were living a nightmare. Drought, dust, and desperation were everywhere; hunger, too. “We ate flour pancakes most days,” she once explained when asked why she rarely talked about her early life in Nebraska.
“If it was summer,” she continued, “we’d have garden vegetables, usually cabbage, with our pancakes. If it was Sunday, we’d kill an old hen to boil.”
A couple of years and another brother later, they lost the rented farm and, as Mom explained, “We had a sale and sold everything except for Daddy’s team [of horses] and their harness that he said we’d need when we got back to Illinois.”
And back they came–”crawled” was the verb my mother used–to another rented farm to start over. It was 1937, she noted, “And we had nothing.”
It was a searing childhood; one she never recalled fondly. It was the hard beginning of a difficult life marked with anger, petty jealousies, a quick temper, depression, and alcohol addiction. She survived the Depression but never learned how to carry its scars.
After my father died, I had a long conversation with Mom, one of the few we ever shared, over an angry spat–and a year-long silence–she was carrying on with a close family member. She was 86; I was 63 and here we were, mother and son, searching for the root of her still-seething fury.
A half hour into our discussion she suddenly went back to Nebraska. “I hated being hungry,” she said. “It wasn’t my fault.”
Of course it wasn’t her fault; nor was it her parents’ fault, two of the most humble, hardworking people I have ever known. Harry eventually found a career as a carpenter but died young, worn out by work and worry. Lottie, a youngish widow, learned the drapery business and spent her final 26 years with her needles, Bible, and 1962 Plymouth Belvidere.
Neither ever spoke of Nebraska or the wounds left on them and their children by hunger and failure. It was ever-present on them, however, and they seemed to recognize this painful burden in others.
For example, on an early winter night when I was maybe 11 or 12, someone knocked on the front door of our southern Illinois farm house. The knock scared Mom–Dad was milking cows down the road–because no one ever used our front door. In fact, my father had stuffed newspapers in the wide gaps between it and its frame to slow the winter wind whistling into the house.
My mother sent me and a brother to turn on the front porch light to see who it was. When we did, we saw a medium-built, unshaven man wearing layers of tattered wool and a lifeless face. All he needed, he shouted through the still-closed door, was some food and something to drink.
When I relayed that to my mother she quickly packed two thick peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches, two apples, and a pint jar of milk in a paper sack. She gave it to me and said, “Don’t talk to him; just hand it through the door.” And that’s what I did.
When I returned to the kitchen I asked my mother if she knew the man. No, she said, he was just someone who was hungry and no one should ever be hungry.
© 2025 ag comm
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