Born in the Depression, my father watched as the world changed

Marshall Helmberger

My father, Richard Helmberger, died this past Monday, July 29, less than a month shy of his 100th birthday, one of the last of the generation that came of age in the Great Depression. He was born Aug. 26, 1924, in a farmhouse outside of Gary, S. D., the middle child in a family of 13 kids born to John and Mary Helmberger. It was subsistence farming for the most part, on land they could only afford to rent, with much of the production going to feed their family. They moved a few years later to a sandy farm just outside of Perham, which is the only home my father really remembered. It was the same life, however, only a change in scenery. They made a little money on occasion, as my grandfather broke wild horses for cash and sold excess milk and cream, and a little meat, from the farm. In the summer they sold produce to a resort on nearby Big Pine Lake.
We have a family photograph, that would have been taken about 1936. My grandmother would have still been in her late 30s but the toll of a very hard life was unmistakable in her face, her hands, and the posture of a woman much older than her years.
My father remembered sleeping three or four kids to a bed, in part to stay warm in the upstairs of an uninsulated farmhouse where frost would form on top of the covers on cold winter mornings.
My father, at a young age, proved to be a good shot with a .22 and the family kept him in ammunition as he brought home many squirrels and other small game to help put much needed food on the table. I still remember him talking with reverence about the squirrel gravy his mother made, to help stretch those precious vittles a little further. My father’s skill as a marksman served him well later as he achieved an expert rating with a rifle during his stint in the Army during WWII.
Despite his humble beginnings, my father lived during a period in American history unsurpassed for the opportunities it made possible and he and his siblings all found their way out of poverty and to varying degrees of success in life.
Many of those opportunities were made possible by federal policies adopted under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and the former president was, not surprisingly, revered within the Helmberger household. While my father was too young to work in the CCC or the WPA, his older brothers were able to earn money during desperate times thanks to programs like these.
My father was, later, able to take advantage of the GI Bill, which Roosevelt signed into law in 1944, to earn a business degree and later start his own independent insurance agency in St. Louis Park in the 1950s. His brother John also used the GI Bill to obtain a PhD in economics and he spent decades as a well-respected professor at the University of Minnesota in the Twin Cities. Two other brothers followed John’s path, one becoming a professor of agronomy at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, while the other researched and taught geophysics at Cal Tech, and was later inducted into the National Academy of Sciences.
This was an era when we, as a country, believed that investing in the next generation was sound policy and, while it left some groups out, it resulted in the largest expansion and fairest distribution of wealth and opportunity in world history. Somewhere along the line we forgot about that success and the generation that we lifted up to better futures through funding of things like education, rural infrastructure, and affordable housing.
My father’s lived experience was reflected in his political beliefs. He was a dyed-in-the-wool New Deal Democrat and he became particularly active in DFL politics in the 1960s and 70s when he helped organize opposition to the war in Vietnam and, in 1968, served as treasurer of Eugene McCarthy’s presidential campaign in Minnesota.
The century that my father witnessed was a period of unprecedented change and I’ve often thought of how disorienting the world must have seemed to him in his later years. When he was a boy, they hitched the horse to a buggy or a sleigh when they headed into town and horses pulled the plow my grandfather used to till his fields well into the 1930s. My father was in his late teens when Roosevelt’s REA finally brought electricity to their Perham farmstead. It was only later that they managed indoor plumbing. Antibiotics were unknown and polio was an incurable scourge. Space travel, which had been the sole purview of comic books or science fiction when my father was a child, would become a reality with breathtaking speed. Less than 45 years after his birth, we had put a man on the moon.
The changes, at times, were more than my father wanted to recognize. While computers came into common usage by the late 1980s, my father, by choice, never entered the Computer Age. He preferred the familiar, like hunting and fishing, which occupied much of his life into his 80s. If he wanted to communicate, he picked up the phone.
He remained in excellent physical health into his late 90s but began to experience severe short-term memory loss at about 95. Four years ago, we determined he could no longer live independently but he resisted any talk of assisted living. And as one might expect from his life and his age, he was as stubborn as a mule.
So, in the fall of 2020, my sister brought him north to Tower, ostensibly to enjoy the fall colors, while we swooped in right behind with a U-Haul and loaded up his belongings and set him up in a house two blocks from our office in Tower, with a variety of live-in support from then on. And that’s where he lived for the past almost four years, remaining in relatively good physical health up until the past couple months, when he went downhill pretty quickly.
In so many ways, he was a remarkably lucky man, who outlived all of his siblings, except for one younger brother, and enjoyed a warm house and several dishes of ice cream every day, which seemed to be his biggest source of enjoyment in his final year. He grew up in poverty, but that was hardly unusual in his era, and like so many of the Greatest Generation, he made a success of himself, raising a family in a middle-class Twin Cities suburb in a comfortable home with a good public school just a block away. It was far more than a poor kid born in the 1920s on the South Dakota prairie could have ever expected.