Christmas oranges

I saw an orange in a bowl of fruit on Thanksgiving day.

It made me think about stories of the Depression told by my mother when I was little. In turn, that led me to a picture of where my grandmother worked during those hard times.

There was always an orange in my Christmas stocking when I was a kid. I was never overly impressed by the orange. As I turned the stocking upside down to shake out the contents each Christmas morning, my mother would inevitably tell me how a fresh orange was a real treat for her and her brother and sisters at Christmastime during the Depression.

But by the time I was a kid in the late 1940s, oranges were much more plentiful, even in the dead of winter. It would be years before I learned exactly what the Depression meant and before I could appreciate that, back then, wintertime oranges were scarce -- and therefore highly valued.

For my mom, in the midst of tougher times than I had ever known, the orange in her stocking was a prized present because it was meant purely to be enjoyed. It was an indulgence to be savored when what few other Christmas presents she got were practical: socks, underwear, shoes, or a new dress sewn by my grandmother.

Times in Richmond during the Depression were hard, although not as tough as in some other areas of the country. Both of my mother's parents were fortunate enough to have jobs. Her father worked for the C&O railroad. My grandmother, after her five children were older, worked as a seamstress. The sewing skills she had learned from her mother and used to clothe her own brood stood her in good stead. In the 1930s, she was employed by the Friedman-Marks Clothing Co. The company survived, even thrived, during the Depression. Friedman-Marks, the tobacco industry, and the DuPont plant helped to keep Richmond's economy afloat.

(If you're old enough, you might remember the Rockingham men's-clothing store near Sears on Broad Street. Rockingham was a Friedman-Marks trademark. The company went out of business a few decades ago.)

As I grew to be an adult, I finally got it: I realized that my mom was putting those oranges in my Christmas stocking each year as a reminder to herself, and as a lesson to me, about scarcity and value.

Yesterday, I was still thinking about that orange I saw in a bowl of fruit on Thanksgiving day. My curiosity led me online to find out more about the Great Depression and its effect on Richmond. That's where I learned that the Friedman Marks Clothing Co. had been an economic mainstay for so many Richmond families.

And I found a picture of all of the company's employees, taken sometime in the 1930s. They're all standing outside the Friedman Marks factory in Richmond. There are so many of them, and their faces in the picture are small. It's hard to recognize anyone specific.

But my grandmother is likely one of those hard-working seamstresses.

She used her sewing skills during the Depression to help my grandfather put food on the table and to buy what they couldn't make for themselves.

And to buy oranges in wintertime to put in their children's stockings for Christmas morning.