During the 1930s the Great Depression's grip strangles many small companies. Henkels & McCoy escapes this fate by, among other things, ringing neighborhood doorbells and offering to trim privately owned trees for five dollars. Prices are lowered to $4.00 each if the householder could produce another customer, to $3.00 per tree if the whole street signs on. But most people don’t have enough money for food and clothing, let alone tree trimming. Henkels & McCoy crews follow work wherever they find it, often to locations far afield. Jack Henkels' wife, Anne, who turns out to have a real flair for business, manages the office. (Right) A typical Philadelphia "rowhouse" neighborhood of the era, with trees trimmed by Henkels & McCoy for Philadelphia Electric Co., the local utility.

 
Anne and Jack Henkels; vintage stake-body truck bearing a tree for a landscaping project.
 

Link to
An American Adventure
Chapters 4 through 7
(covers the years of the Great Depression)

The Dust Bowl Phenomenon
As if things in the 'thirties are not bleak enough, a long lasting series of droughts, stretching from the Upper Plains to the Lower Plains, bakes large areas of prime farming soil in southern Nebraska, eastern Colorado, western Kansas, the Oklahoma Panhandle north central Texas, and northeastern New Mexico. A series of dry wind storms follow, whipping up the arid dirt and creating the Dust Bowl, a condition of depleted agriculture, hunger, and misery that will last ten years. With no crop to harvest and unable to repay loans, farm mortgages are foreclosed. Dispossessed, many former farmers will head west to California, where they will live the hard scrabble life of migrant workers. They will be treated with scorn and be derided as "Okies," even as they try to rebuild their shattered lives. Their plight will be the subject of many songs and stories of the era, most notably by songwriter Woody Guthrie and by novelist John Steinbeck, right, who wrote The Grapes of Wrath in 1939. The novel traces the westward migration of the financially bankrupt but undefeated Joad family. The hard hitting story will later be adapted to film, with Henry Fonda as Tom Joad.

September 8
"Blondie" first appears in newspaper comic strips across the US in her original role as a dizzy flapper. Three years later Blondie Boopadoop falls in love with and marries Dagwood Bumstead, who was disinherited by his disapproving millionaire father. Americans, caught up in the woes of the Great Depression, immediately took to cartoonist Chic Young’s humorous daily reminders that love, not money, conquers all. Can the Dagwood sandwich be far behind?