>> Okay. We're going to start.   I'm Jennifer Harpster.
I'm a research specialist at the Library of Science and Technology,
Library of Science, Technology and Business division.
I'd like to welcome you to today's program,
Chicago Victory Gardens, Yesterday and Tomorrow.
Without a doubt, community gardens are making news.
Just recently Prince Charles was in DC,
and guess where he wanted to visit?   That's right, a community garden,
which was actually an urban firm located
in Ladue [assumed spelling] Park, called the Common Good City Farm.
And First Lady Michele Obama also emphasizes community
and school gardens in her Let's Move campaign.
The Library of Congress is no stranger
to the subject of gardening.
Thomas Jefferson, who helped reestablish the library
with his personal collection after the burning of the capital
in 1914, was an avid gardener.
Some of his gardening books such as Every Man His Own Gardener,
and Miller's Garden Dictionary,
became part of the Library of Congress collection.
The library continues to collect a great deal of material on gardening
and horticultures, which in turn provides the researcher
with historical specialized and current content.
Our lecture today will delve into the History Victory Gardens,
and their close relationship with today's community garden movement.
The concept of Victory Gardens was established in 1917,
three years into World War I,
when the National War Garden Commission initiated the liberty
for war garden program.
When the United States entered World War II Americans once again aided
the war effort and planted Victory Gardens.
Today Americans are embracing this tradition and growing food
in community and school gardens, as well as on urban farms.
Our speaker today is LaManda Joy, an award-winning gardener, blogger,
writer, speaker; maybe I shouldn't have had all
that coffee before I spoke, an edible garden advocate.
She's a member of the American Community Gardening Association,
and a member of the garden writers' association.
And the culinary historians of Chicago.
I first met her in the summer of 2010 after we corresponded
through our Ask a Librarian Service.
Her quest was to find primary sources
about Chicago's Victory Gardens.   And the office of civilian defense.
I learned that she started a community garden ,
he Peterson Garden Project, in Chicago, which happens to be on land
that was originally part of a World War II Victory Garden.
She was partly conducting this research
for an upcoming cross-town production, Victory,
a homegrown documentary, which this documentary will highlight past
and present community gardening in Chicago,
and at the same time inspire gardeners
to start their own community garden.
The Peterson Garden Project won first place
in Mayor Daily's 2010 Landscape awards for best community garden,
and was a finalist in the 2010 Green works Community Leadership Award.
We are really happy to have LaManda here today to share
with us the history of Chicago's Victory Gardens
and its current community garden endeavors.
So please join me in welcoming LaManda Joy.
>> Thanks, everybody.   I'm very excited to be here today.
I also wanted to extent a special thanks to Connie and Jennifer
for their assistance with my research on this topic and also
for setting up this lecture today
and it's really great to see all of you here.
My husband's here today and he got me a Starbucks.
And he said now remember how caffeinated you get.
And so if I'm talking too fast I am very enthusiastic about this topic,
if I'm talking too fast just make a gesture slow down, slow down.
I'm sure he'll make the gesture of that happens.
So today we're just going to talk about the subject
of Victory Gardens, my area of focus is Chicago but the stories
and the themes are applicable to most of the major urban areas
in the country so we'll go ahead and get started.
First of all I'm assuming
that everybody knows what a Victory Garden is.
If you don't -- does everybody understand the concept
of Victory Gardens?   Okay. Good.
What you may not know is that the first mention of this
in literature happened in the 1600s in England,
so it's something that's happened for many many years.
It makes sense.
Someone's going to be coming in and pillaging,
we better take care of ourselves.
The supply lines might be cut and may not have help
from the neighbor town, et cetera, which is a pretty common idea.
What you might also know is what I like to call the sound bytes
about Victory Garden, so if you've read any newspaper article
or magazine article or blog post
in the last five years you've probably heard a couple statistics.
One, that 20 million people or 20 million gardens during World War II,
40 percent of the food, fresh produce was produced, et cetera.
Those are what I like to call the sound bytes of this story.
And they inspired me to get interested in the deeper story
of how that all happened.
So we'll get to that in a little bit.
Why am I talking about them?   We're getting to that.
First of all, greatest generation parents.
My parents met when they were 13 years old
at [inaudible] junior high school in Los Angeles.
They say it was love at first sight.
Another interesting thing that happened that year was
that we went to war, it was 1941.
That's my dad, Ken, he got drafted in 1945
and he was a para trooper in the Occupied Forces.
He wanted to be in the demolition squad
but since the war was ending they were getting rid
of the demolition squad so he thought he'd be in the airborne,
and he did that because he got an extra $50 a month
because it was dangerous.
So my mother, Lorraine, was also Rosie the Riveter,
and they had been dating, as I said, since they were 13 years old
and they had talked about getting married
but he never really did anything about it,
and so his getting drafted, his turning 18 when he was going
to be eligible for the draft, him getting drafted was looming,
and so my mother took matters into her own hands.
She planned their wedding.
She sent him an invitation to his own wedding,
he bought a suit and the rest is history.
He also told me once that tall women were really sexy,
which as you can tell is a good thing.
So this next June they've been married 67 years.
They're really incredible people.
So as I said my dad was involved in the war,
my dad had a large family, five other siblings.
That's my dad on your right, my mom in the middle,
on your left is my uncle Arnold, he was involved in Pacific Theater,
he was stationed on an island.
They were sort of waiting to be transported.
He came down with Dang fever, which is a malarial type virus
and won't able to ship out with the rest of his troops
which is probably a good thing
because their ship got bombed and everybody perished.
So he was lucky in that regard.
I also had another uncle who I don't have a photo of that was a bomber
and was telling us how they'd open up the bomber doors
and take pictures fate battlefields.
And I wish I had the photos but he remembers taking photos
of Normandy Beach after all that happened.
If you'll notice on the left that's my Aunt Alice.
She was in the waves.
She just turned -- she just turned 86 and she and I are supposed
to have a phone call about how that transpired.
My Aunt Gloria on the right was also involved in War Work and my mom,
as I said, was a Rosie the Riveter.
As soon as she found out that these jobs were available she went
to Weber Showcase in Los Angeles, it actually still exists today.
And they told her that she was too young, she had to be 16.
So the first thing she did on her 16th birthday, she got up,
took the trolley and got her job as a Rosie the Riveter
and she actually welded bomber doors.
So the very iconic typical bomber door.
She also tells me that there is some magazine from whatever showcase
that had a picture of her in her outfit welding
which I'm really trying to track down,
so we should talk about that later.
So after the war my parents moved to Oregon and you can see them here.
This is 1946, you can see them herein front
of my great grandfather's garden.
So during the war it was a Victory Garden,
after the war it was just a garden.
But I show you this photo because my dad learned how to garden
from my great grandfather and then he in turn taught me.
And he helped my grandfather every year until he died in the last '60s
and then we bought some property in the 1970s when I was very young
and first thing dad did was put in a garden and that's
where I learned how to garden.
So how many of you are gardeners here?
Great. How many of you are edible gardeners?
Even better.
How many of you are eaters, everybody, all right.
Well there's hope for you to become an edible gardener.
So the second part that drove me to this story was I love gardening.
I have a whole family history of it and in addition
to my dad teaching me everything that he knew
from my great grandfather who was a victory gardener,
when I went to college at the University
of Oregon I had the pleasure of learning how to what I called
at the time Hippie Garden from someone that was one
of the original employees at Smith and Hocking.
So she taught me how to compost and how to do raised beds and all
that sort of stuff, which at the time was hippie gardening
and now it's just what everybody's doing.
And I think it's funny that when I went
to college it didn't really challenge my political
or religious beliefs but it did challenge my gardening style.
So I love gardening, I've had many gardens as an adult.
My husband and I, we live in Chicago and for seven years we lived
in the condo with no outdoor space and every spring it became very bad
because there's no community gardens, there's no --
there is a backyard but it was too shady.
And so every spring we have this you know, like, oh,
I want to garden, oh I can't garden.   It was a problem.
So one February, it was February 2006 he woke up one morning
and said should we go look for a house?
It was a Saturday, and then he said, wait a second.
Should we go look for a yard?
I said I think that's a really good idea.
So we went looking for a yard with a house attached to it,
and we found this 3,500 square foot very sunny, no huge trees or condos
or apartments looking into a yard,
and in 2007 we installed our raised bed organic paradise that we
like to call the yard in.
And so I was able to take everything my parents had taught me,
everything I'd learned from my Smith and Hocken friend in college
and everything I learned from all the gardens I'd done up to
that point and started doing this.
And at the same time I really realized this was in 2007,
I started blogging about it, people were really hungry to learn how
to grow their own food, hungry to understand the stories
of seed diversity et cetera.   Hungry to learn how to can.
People were really wanting to know how to do all these things,
and since I had the gift of these wonderful parents
that not only taught me to garden but taught me how
to do all those other things ,cooking, baking,
et cetera I food a lot of joy just blogging about it and sharing it
and that's been a lot of fun.
So the third piece that brought me to this Victory Gardens story
and I say this with all sincerity is community.
I was standing at our local butcher literally Molar Meats,
and I was waiting for my order of chicken and I looked
over at the wall and there was this photo.
And I was like what is that?
And they're great guys, Reuben and Irv.
So we're chatting and they said, well, this is a picture
of a Victory Garden, this is right by their building.
You'll notice in the lower bottom there's sort of a rail.
It was taken in the building right next door to theirs.
The woman that took it worked for a magazine and then lived
in this neighborhood her entire life,
so when she passed way her family going
through her belongings found this picture and they knew that Reuben
and Irv liked to collect these old photos so they went and took it
to them and it was on their wall.
So we started talking about Victory Gardens and how they fed the country
and it kind of I got a little obsessed about it.
Like you notice the big V in the middle, in the flag pole,
so anyway this picture really drove me to all those things collided.
My love of gardening, my love of talking about gardening, my parents,
and it drove me to want t explore this story.
And I'd sent those sound bytes earlier, right?
But really when you get down to it how do you teach an entire city
to grow their own food?
That sound byte is a little tiny veneer along a big deep story.
So that drove me to sort of explore this idea and that's how Jennifer
and we dove into all this funness.
So I'm going to give you a little story about the U.S. participation
in Victory Gardens, it's slanted towards Chicago.
And I am also I think there's a little irony that I'm talking
about World War II and old technology and I'm using an iPad
and an Air Book but that's a different story.
So it's not my goal to dive deeply into World War II but just talk
about the bumpers, you know, the war started in December of 1941 shortly
after the bombing of Pearl Harbor and it ended august 15th 1945
so that gave us four year where we had the big Victory
Gardens movement.
For our purposes we're going to talk mostly about 1942 1943,
because that's the primary material I have from Chicago.
So war on the home front, let's just give you a little overview.
During the latter part of 1941 when the country was actively preparing
for national defense there are already signs of food shortages
and rising prices, especially in fresh vegetables.
Great industries were transformed into munitions plants.
And this quickly absorbed much of the country's pool
of unemployment from the Depression.
An interesting fact is during the Depression there was a lot of food
but not a lot of money to buy it.
During World War II there was more money but not a lot of food to buy.
Part of that's because -- I'm getting ahead of myself.
One of the first industries to feel the pinch of the labor shortage was
that of the fresh vegetable growers.
As a lower-paid field workers found higher paying jobs in munitions
and other war related industries.
Transportation lines were quickly conscripted to move troops
and munitions, which also impacted the delivery of fresh produce
from farms to urban areas.
As one of the bigwigs at the Chicago Victory Garden moment phrased it,
Uncle Sam needs trains for munitions
so we'll have to grow our own carrots.
So everybody got in the action, from the smallest family groupings,
and I hope that the mother is taking the picture
and not pulling the plow in this picture.
People used whatever means they could
to prepare their Victory Gardens.
Here you see the mayor of the Boston Commons, the famous Boston Commons.
Everyone was drafted in the Victory Garden effort.
This was a circus in Chicago, a publicity photo,
obviously, but you get the point.
Religious orders got involved, movie stars, and I'd like to point
out that I normally wear my hair like this when I'm gardening
but didn't have time to do that for you today.
Cartoon characters, superheroes,
I love Robin Shutzing [assumed spelling]
up there, he's working too hard.
Industries, especially garden related industries,
And Victory Gardening became very fashionable.
This is a photo of a window display at Marshal Fields and the sign says
to make your Victory Garden grow wear gay and chic gardening apparel.
Located in the sport department, floor six.
International harvester, Chicago based manufacturer of plows,
now known as Navistar, was a big supporter
of the Victory Garden movement.
And hand in hand with food growing came food preservation.
The growing and harvesting season in Chicago or just a few months
of the year, obviously, and the food storage went year round.
And so canning became what everybody was up to.
Modern freezing techniques were not widely used and tin
and other materials used
for store-bought canned goods were being used for munitions,
and women were encouraged to can, dehydrate,
brine and otherwise preserve the harvest.
One statistic that I found when I was researching was
that five billion pints per summer, let that sink in a little bit,
were canned by housewives, communities,
to store food for the winter.
So you can see from this industrious poster that it was a real war job.
Interesting fact is, this is one of those sound bytes
that should be spread around that's not is that during the height
of World War II we were on 50 plus battlefields across the world
and the U.S. quartermaster was responsible
for 24 million meals a day.
That's a lot of food over there, so of course,
we needed to do a lot over here.
So I'm going to read you a little excerpt from the Times.
This is actually a photo from Seattle.
Americans started gardening.
Gardens began sprouting behind signposts at the bases
of railroad embankments, in school yards
and church yards and in window boxes.
They were tended by housewives who left babies
in sandboxes while they knelt to scoop and sift the soil,
and by little girls who wheeled their trowels and rakes
into their plots in doll buggies.
And by war workers back to the good earth for the first time
since they waded barefoot in mud puddles as children.
So the historic gardening campaign of World War II began.
So the Office of Civilian defense, I mentioned a little earlier
that I got obsessed with this story.
We associate that with OCD, obsessive compulsive disorder.
I'd like to point out the initials of this organization are also OCD
and there's a reason for that but I'll get to that shortly.
Theodore LaGuardia, the flamboyant mayor of New York City,
was put in charge of the Office of Civilian Defense effort nationally.
While the attention of the civilian defense organization was
at the outset centered around the preventative measures again air
attack, sabotage and the like, it was recognized
that the same organization might well function
in the Victory Garden filed, and the OCD administrator
in Washington DC issued a memorandum in 1942 urging local coordinators
to set up the machinery for promoting Victory Gardens.
Some of the duties of the Office
of Civilian Defense were area surveillance, attack training,
scrap and fact collection, war bond sales, morale committees
and of course, Victory Gardens.   Rumor has it that the Office
of Civilian Defense was the brainchild of Eleanor Roosevelt.
She was concerned about the morale of the nation in the shadow
of a potentially long war and encouraged her husband
to put the wheels in motion for the creation
of the Office of Civilian Defense.
Theodore LaGuardia was not pleased with the election leadership
of this campaign and put his duties on the back burner,
and so Eleanor Roosevelt, in an effort not to be seen
as taking charge, was appointed to be his secretary.
And in many ways she directed this national activity from the shadows.
So Chicago, this is a note from the Times, Victory Gardening
in World War II was radically different in character and extent
from the corresponding activity in World War I.
lack of sustained promotion, absence of any organizational scheme
of promoting gardening and generally haphazard
and wasteful methods destroyed much of the usefulness and productivity
of the so-called war garden movement of World War I.
in World War II at least in Chicago most
of these flats were recognized before actual fighting took place.
A thorough and complete scheme of organizational setup,
largely due to the aid of the Chicago park district
and the local Office of Civilian Defense,
there was a continuous program of promotion, stimulation,
guidance and active help.
So this is Mayor Kelly, who was in charge of the Office
of Civilian Defense for Illinois.
He promptly appointed bigwigs at the Chicago Park District
to help with this effort.
Now we were lucky, Chicago was lucky because less
than a decade before 1942 the three park districts that made
up the Chicago area had been melded into one park district
so they had gone through the process of streamlining
and having departments and all that.
And also due to the Depression, Chicago is able
to afford Ivy League landscape architects, horticulturalists,
et cetera, so that the park district was
in fine form during the Depression and when this effort started.
They had the leadership and the organization
to help kick this into high gear.
So the Victory Garden goals and you know that this is written by someone
in the park district because of the last bullet point was stimulate
as many people as possible to apply themselves during their leisure
hours to the production of food plants.
They weren't asking people to quit their jobs, they weren't asking them
to work longer hours, they were saying
when you have some spare time do this.
Provide novice gardeners and those not familiar with vegetable growing
with information to make their efforts most productive,
and here's the park district Voice, lay a foundation
for continued expansion of the program in peacetime.
And the resources to accomplish this were a lot of vacant lots,
backyards, the strong park and school districts, divaricates,
corporate support and a devoted citizenry
of which 90 percent had never gardened before.
They weren't landscape gardeners how had never grown food,
they had never gardened before at all.
So to accomplish this and the other mandates of the OCD,
the city was divided into seven divisions.
The loop, which is sort of that missing area there, division 7,
they decided that that was not suitable for Victory Gardening
by individuals, although there were some parks there
that had demonstration gardens.
But all 77 Chicago neighborhoods were segregated into one
of the seven divisions and each had a division chairman that reported
to the Office of Civilian Defense.
Each neighbor had a community chairman,
their reported division chairman, and each block had a block captain
that reported to the community chairman,
you're getting the OCD part here.
And there were also other committees, advisory committee,
committee of demonstration gardens, general committee,
committee on food preservation, committee on planning
and the committee on kinds of vegetables.
So people were very organized and they really wanted to participate
and there was a place for everybody.
So the black captain duties were to secure land three to four blocks
from homes, prepare the site, arrange for plowing,
participate in the Victory Garden council, maintain enthusiasm
and plan harvest festivals.
If any of you have worked on community gardens today you know
that other than the participate
in Victory Garden council it hasn't really changed.
You want your garden within walking distance of where people live,
you need someone to oversee the site itself, the development of it
and you need to have some fun.
So I'm going to veer off a little bit
and talk about harvest festivals.
I mentioned that International harvester earlier.
If you look on the lower left this was sponsored by them I manage one
of their plows was pulling this.
This is a parade float, interesting you're not from Chicago
but for people that are from Chicago
in the upper right you'll notice it says Streederville,
that's a neighborhood in the loop that's very, very congested now,
just of [inaudible] which I'm sure you all know the magnificent mile.
Here's the Soldier's Field Festival, which was held in 1943,
it was held in exhibit hall underneath the seats
in the south end of the old Soldier Field sponsored by the Chicago Sun,
practically every community
in the Chicago metropolitan area participated.
Hundreds of exhibits of garden produce, flowers
and canned goods were featured.
The park district and commercial growers also participated.
Thousands of visitors participated and pledged
to grow Victory Gardens in 1944.
What you probably can't see is the signage here says Victory
over floods, victory over drought and victory over pests,
that's what the far one says.   So early efforts were taken
to prevent the pillaging of Victory Gardens.
Effective July 24, 1942 the city enacted an ordinance with fines
of $50 to $200 that prohibited entry, pilfering or injury of plants
in any garden which displayed the official emblem
of the Victory Garden department.
In today's currency those fines would be between $650 and $2,600
so they weren't fooling about these gardens.
So how did one know that it was a Victory Garden,
and not just someone's garden?   Well, this is really the genius
that helps us understand those sound bytes a little bit better.
What is believed to be the first system of reporting
and recording Victory Garden efforts for statistical purposes in any part
of the United States was established in Chicago for the season of 1942.
A simple system of distribution, of distributing decals in exchange
for information used for statistical purposes was first established
for the 1942 growing season.
A great deal of labor and energy on the part
of block captains was required to secure these reports,
but the effort was worth it as it provided framework for the metrics
that recorded the success of the Chicago Victory Garden program
and ultimately the national program as well.
So to decalemania.
It's not a big deal now but it was then.
So the word decalamania was everywhere.
T-shirts would have said it, they were nuts about it.
So 75,000 were disturbed in 1942 and 100,000 were distributed
in 1943 and it was simple.   You had your anne, your address
and the location and size of your garden.
That information was then sent to your block captain and sent
up to this, all that whole chain of command
and that's how we started recording that in 1942.
That effort was so successful that the USDA sent
out to all other major metropolitan areas to do likewise
for the continuing growing seasons.
So the person that was in charge of press
for the Victory Garden movement was also the person that came
up with the decals, so you'll notice
that you'll see the decal in a lot of places.
This is a demonstration garden in Lincoln Park,
this was South Longdale community that I was telling you about
and also aside from the poster you saw earlier
where the woman was shooting the Nazi bug on her tomato,
this is the only other instance I've seen of people using --
this may not be a chemical but using something
that could potentially be a chemical.
This gentleman pointing is the man that's responsible
for the information you have today.
He was in charge of PR for this program,
he came up with decalamania, and this is him pointing at a picture
of one of the decals and as I said earlier the successful method
of analysis and organization was quickly noticed
by the National Victory Garden Institute and the USDA and was sent
out to other metropolitan areas as a means for organization
and morale boosting in the Victory Gardeners.
Then again I just like to point out 90 percent
of these Victory Gardeners
in Chicago had never gardened before anthem also were very well dressed.
So of course, that in mind education was a huge piece of this effort.
An extensive program of lecturers were presented
in six different locations throughout the city.
By horticultural staff and the park district, leaders in the C trade
and commercial growers, they served as formal lecturers.
In additional, individual lecturers were provided by garden clubs
and similar organizations.
So in 1943 162 sanctioned garden lecturers,
countless garden club lecturers
and mass meetings showing movies or slide shows.
So if you go to YouTube and put in Victory Garden movie, you'll get one
of these movies that are very interesting to watch
and I like to look at it and think of all these people that what
to not only learn how to grow their own food but want to be part
of this effort sitting in a gym somewhere during one
of these sanctioned lectures and getting their garden propaganda.
Anyway, most of the education dealt simply and briefly
with the fundamentals of vegetable gardening stressing the particular
conditions of the Chicago area.
We were talking earlier about some of the periodicals that are outside,
you know, if you gardened anywhere else you realize
that each area's different, so the material
for Chicago is probably not applicable for California, right,
so they're very place specific.   Here's another one, a lot
of the newspapers distributed these periodicals.
This gardening was not leisure gardening, it wasn't oh you may want
to do this, this was about nutrition it was about abundance
and it was about organization.
So this is one of several plans that I've found
that show here's the thing that you want to grow.
Many of them had accompanying seedless that would talk
about the seeds that were applicable to your growing area.
I did a blog post called the lost Victory Garden list of 1943
that lists the things that were suggested for Chicago.
Here's another Victory Garden for family of five.
You'll notice we've got the pole beans on the left,
so it's not shading anything.
I also learned about New Zealand spinach because of this.
I had never heard of it or grown it.
It's a spinach-like plant that can grow in summer,
which Chicago summers are very hot.   That was one of the recommendations.
I grew it last year if you want to give it a try.
It's available out there now.   Newspapers were also an act.
In early April when gardening activities were at their height,
garden columns were arranged in newspapers.
Weekly features by garden personalities provided the basics
for the army of Chicago gardeners.
15 minute radio programs were aired Monday through Friday,
this medium gave the Victory Garden Department a forum
to broadcast statements or interviews about restriction,
interview the garden authorities, amateur gardeners
who had accomplished interesting or outstanding results
and community leaders who could tell of the enthusiasm
and the generous crops of their constituents were also interviewed.
this particular show was called know your onions.
I also just like to take a little break and tell you some
of the human interest stories, lots of statistics.
But competitive is part of the gardening thing,
so I'm going to read you a few things here.
Rejoice, kids, spinach seeds to be source.
Mother and sons go 13 miles to make a garden.
Big profit on 64 cents.   Two years ago a book came out.
Last year or two years ago a book came
out called the 25 dollar victory garden,
back then it was the 64 cent victory garden.
War gardeners used lights to lengthen days.
The photo unfortunately I can't show you
for this was a very yuppie looking couple that had lights
on their porch that they could shine them so when they got home from work
at night they could do their gardening.
Bedridden, she also aids in gardening.
This was a very interesting story about a lady in the suburbs,
bedridden, who acted as the clearing house, so gardening had
to many beats and garden sea had too much corn.
She was sort of the air traffic controller
that made sure everybody could trade their surplus and make that happen.
Joe Green, busy in his garden, forgets taxes.
And here's the competitive part, the four-foot radish, the 41 inch bean
and the 12 pound cabbage.
The 12 pound cabbage I can believe, the 41 inch bean I'm not so sure.
And finally man who traded very gardening truck
for beer, wife divorces him.
This is a little bit of a trick question
but there was also social media back then.
It wasn't twitter, it wasn't Facebook, it was these kiosks,
they were on every corner and all the notices were put there.
People walked to their neighbor's house, walked to the grocer,
that's how they got their information for a lot of this stuff.
So that was the precursor to our social medium.
Now I have to tell you this, when I gave this lecture for the first time
at the Chicago flower and garden show this family walked in right
when this slide came up and they turned around and walked out.
It may not seem like a very interesting topic but it is sort
of the keystone of how all this happened in Chicago.
My husband is also rolling his yes
because he does not like this section.
But there's a lot of pictures of what I like to call plow porn.
As I mentioned earlier,
international harvester was a Chicago based company
that was very involved in that.
Early in 1942 International Harvester was approached
and they very patriotically and promptly turned over three new plows
for plowing vacant property on city limits.
The park district provided operators fuel
and supplies for these three plows.
Demand for plowing was so intense rules were set up to regulate it.
So the plot must be this big, had to have written permission
from the land owner, someone had to inspect it to make sure
that it was actually a good growing place, surface level, sunny, fertile
and poor families were required to participate.
Here's an interesting picture.   I'm going to read what this says.
This shows the tractor plow provided
by the Victory Garden department Office of Civilian Defense
through the cooperation of the Chicago park district
and the International harvester company,
this Victory Garden is being prepared at the vacant lot
at 5400 Ferdinand Street.
The man with the rake is Frank L. Bennett, head of the Concert Bureau,
who resides in the building shown in the background
and he was the moving spirit in developing this Victory Garden.
This shows the same area included in photo a, expect that now Mr. Bennett
and his neighbors have something to show for their labors.
The garden is located north of Austin community,
where Mr. Bennett is Victory Garden Community Chairman,
he got promoted from Concern Bureau.
It also says notice the shrinkage in his waistline as a result
This photo was taken at the inception
of the community Victory Garden at 50th and Ingleside,
a congested apartment house district in Chicago.
The tractor plow provided by the International Harvester Company,
for the Victory Garden committee is preparing the soil
at an unsightly vacant lot that later will be transformed
into a neat and productive garden.
You'll also notice some people over here examining the soil.
I don't know if you can see that in the photo.
This photo doesn't have anything on the back of it but I do know
that it's Bell and Howard, which is sort of the borderline
between Chicago and Evanston, which is the first suburb to the north.
So this is the before photo, that's the after photo.
I love that so I'm going to show you again.
Here's another one for you originally
from the Green Prairie Acres in the Midwest, Chicago goes back
to the soil as her citizens begin a tremendous Victory Garden campaign.
One of more than 300 projected community gardens
for the north side division six, is this portion
of the Emerald Turf back campus of the campus at Belton and Thistle.
Last year I was speaking at DePaul University and giving my lecture
and afterward the instructor came up to me
and said that's right around the corner.
He said literally it's right around the corner so I packed up my stuff
and we walked around the corner.
There's the photo where it is today, same photo.
Here there's a big soccer filed so there's a little strip of grass
and then there's a spot that's about 15 feet wide, about 25 feet long
and I've been pestering them that maybe we need
to put another Victory Garden in there because it would be good
for the kids to learn about that.   There's the soccer field.
So in 1942 108 separate community plots, some as long as six
to eight acres were put into production.
I'm going to read some more from the Times,
when more than 12,000 city residents become farmers virtually overnight
and all for the same purpose that makes for some facts
The four south side divisions included 66,000 foreign families
cultivating almost 8 million square feet.
The two north side divisions included almost 6,000 foreign
families growing on almost 5 million square feet.
In the suburbs, 14,000 families were issued the emblem
and cultivated 28 million square feet.
The 1943 growing season was unusually wet so plowing
of inspected vacant lots could not start until march 30th.
As may advanced the demand was
so great the park district secured two additional plows
and for a number of weeks there were five plows operating.
Two shifts operated from sunrise to sunset,
including Saturdays and Sundays.
And I'd just like to point out 1,500 separate community plots
and division five was the largest Victory Garden in the nation
So children, we've got children in the action back then too.
Recognizing the rising enthusiasm for Victory Gardens
by adults might demand much of the lawn space in the Chicago parks,
the Victory Garden department suggested in the later part of 1942
that school children's plots be set aside
on park property on the 1943 season.
All parks were surveyed to determine suitable spaces that had good soil
and sunlight and were available
and not interrupting other recreational things.
Working with public schools and youth dears fifth
through eight graders were provided plots in the park property.
I mentioned 1943 was a wet spring, so the poor weather conditions
in 1943 and here interfered with the plan,
and by the time the growing seasons could start many
of the children lost interest.
So inset of 30,000 plots only 14,000 plots were gardened.
We still have the Chicago park district, see what I'm saying?
I had mentioned earlier that parade and other showings
of enthusiasm were recommended.
Anybody ever seen a Frankenstein movie
where the villagers have the torches and the pitchforks
and they're going after the monster?
This is the description, thousands of children
in the upper grammar grades are being assigned garden plots,
5 by 12 in size in Chicago parks this week and next week.
The plan includes a row of petunias and zinnias at the other end
with rows of lettuce, radish, snap beans, korabi,
carrots and beets in between.
The seed packets continue just the right amount of seed for each
of these rows has been provided for the children with the compliments
of Marshall Field and Company.
Here are some of the children marching to their plots
in parade form from Garfield Park.
Special literature and publications were created
and disunited especially targeted toward children.
Four H was a program that was mostly for rural areas but I really
like this photo so I had to show you a local 4H group showing the
vegetables they're going to grow.
This is a program that Sears did where they found girls
from across the country that had been leaders in the 4H movement,
brought them together for an event you can't see it on this map
but it shows the names of all the girls
Boy Scouts got into the effort.
This photo said something along the lines of the boys
like to mark information to their garden
because they felt it prepared them for the military service.
And here's a school program.
one of the many successful Victory Garden projects conducted
through Chicago's public schools was that in charge of Ms. Floursheim,
principal of the Brendan School.   A nearby vacant lot was turned
into a very fine vegetable and flower growing plot.
A special ceremony and party was held
on the day the garden was started and plots assigned.
So this summer, including the hot vacation period.
These youngsters continued to cultivate and insect control.
Because of Ms. Florsheim's excellent leadership,
a fine crop of vegetables resulted.
Now this is the photo that was shown in the newspaper,
but I found another photo.
And I'd just like you to think for a moment trying
to corral all these children into gardening.
This guy in the front I would say he had a sugar high,
but sugar was rationed so maybe it was a molasses high,
but I know he got busted for something.
Of course, the children were as rigorously involved in this program
as everyone else, so they had their statistics that were filled
out by their teachers and then rolled
up to the Office of Civilian Defense.
So we've covered education parks plowing.
I want to talk about the harvest for this overall effort.
1942 12,000 plus family gardens on 509 community plots, 290 acres.
This is just community gardens, this isn't people's backyards or people
who didn't want to be joiners that might have figured
out their own community situation.
1943 53,000 family gardens on 1,500 community plots,
14,000 children's gardens on 908 acres.
So how Chicago did it, just to summarize.
Government support, overarching organizational structure,
donations of space and equipment, mass education via classes,
newspapers, radio promotion, corporate
and individual commitment and recognition.
I'd also like to point out before I go on to the next section of this is
that Victory Gardens didn't stop abruptly when the war ended.
After the war ended we were all over the world helping people,
helping bond out countries, helping people that were starving.
And so gardens became freedom gardens.
So food fights the red menace was one
of the messages that we were giving.
So that happened for two or three years,
and then as the GIs were coming home
and the GI bill was happening inflection started happening
and so they became thrift gardens.
So by the mid 1950s people continued gardening these 20 million people,
the effort and the USDA was to keep people gardening.
Then in the '50s it became the American the Beautiful type
of campaign and people started doing more landscape gardening
than edible gardening.
Then we lose track of any of the efforts that were put forward
on a national level to make this happen.
But it's happening again, and so we're going to keep track of it.
There's a new Victory Garden movement happening
and people are motivated by different things.
We don't have one single thing that we're fighting towards together
but everybody has their own motivation, the economy,
cost of fuel, food safety, environmental concerns, GMO,
loss of seed diversity, self sufficiency and we all know
that home grown food tastes better.
We're in the backyard of an incredible effort by Michele Obama
to get the country growing their own food and fighting obesity.
We also have Tom Bilsak who has started the people's garden project
which I'm sure you're all familiar
with which has been feeding people across the country.
You know, those gardens, the USDA says put them on your property
if you have them or help a community garden and they've given tens
of thousands of pounds of food last season
to food shelters and the hungry.   It's really a great program.
so communities today, people lament the loss of social structure,
we don't have fraternal organizations
or people don't have time to go to church, what have you?
But communities exist nonetheless especially around gardening.
There's a couple things that I'd like to point out that I'd
like to point out that I've noticed in the last few years
about how social media has created new communities around gardening.
The first thing is the number one way people learn about gardening is
from their neighbors, and the number two thing used to be books
and now recently it's been the web, social media,
et cetera I like to point out this book because it's a book
but it also has a social media twist.
The authors of this book reached out to the world via Facebook
and Twitter and said we want to write this book for people
that are new to gardening and we want your input.
And so they used social channels
to collect information and develop this book.
The cool thing about it is they're still active
so if you're reading this book as a new gardener,
and you have a question on page 94 about Brussels sprouts,
you can reach out to these people and they'll answer your questions.
So I think that this sort of thing is probably going to happen a lot
in the future, but this is the first instanced of it that I've noticed
and I think that's a really cool blending
of traditional methods and new stuff.
In Chicago we had a lot of community gardens in Chicago,
we have over 700 community gardens.
And every spring we have a project called
where we go together the One Seed Chicago program.
this year.
This year was the first year where it was all edible,
so how the One Seed Chicago program works is we vote
on three different types of seeds.
Last year it was bee balm, Echinacea and something else.
This year it was eggplant, chard and radish.
And so we had a lot of arguing going back and forth, they had team chard
and team eggplant and actually chard won that was my vote.
This is a really fun thing because everybody gets to vote and learn
about these things, chefs were providing recipes,
everybody gets involved and then
when the vote is actually announced everybody gets a free packet
of seeds.   Anyway go chard, I'm not biased.
The Victory Garden movement, the Fenway Gardens
in Boston is constantly an active Victory Garden.
We have one in Chicago this is called Rainbow Beach,
and this has existed since World War II but other
than that we don't have any exiting Victory Gardens in Chicago.
Let's once back to this photo, I live not far from here,
and my mother says I have more spunk than sense
and I'm sure my husband can corroborate that view.
And this is Peterson avenue where you see
that train, and we live over here.
So one day we were driving down the street and there was an empty lot ,
there's an empty lot on the corner just past that street
and we're driving along and all of a sudden it all clicked to me and I'm
like that's the lot from the picture.
We also got in a car accident,
I'm like that's the lot from the picture.
So I thought it would be really interesting to see
if we could do World War II Victory Garden style,
put in a garden very quickly.
So the game plan was to get some government support,
get some donation of space and equipment,
having an organizational structure, math education, corporate
and individual commitment and recognition.
I took the Victory Garden playbook
and tweaked it a little bit for modern times.
So here we have 1943 what that lot looked like and then last year,
big empty trash-strewn lot.
And so I'd like to say this is actually history repeating itself
but we formed the Peterson Garden Project and this was our plan
for what the garden would look like.
It actually ended up looking very similar to that.
I was a block captain so I took
on my responsibility being the bloc captain and part
of that was morale boosting.
This was at our ground breaking and I made --
that's our alderman laughing at me.
But he's actually doing his part as government support.
We use Facebook and Twitter to reach out to people,
and it was amazing how quickly word spread.
We also put up a banner on the site and we distributed flyers
to the houses immediately around the garden.
And we did that on May 27th, or April 27th we announced the garden,
May 2nd we had a community meeting
where over 50 people showed up, showing their interest.
This was our groundbreaking
on May 20th last year, so not even a year ago.
And then hopefully this video will show, there is sound to this,
I'll talk over this a little bit.
So between May 20th and June 7th completely volunteer,
funded by volunteers, we spread 250 cubic yards so if you know that's
like a mountain twice the size of this room of mulch.
We built 157 raised beds, this is them putting it together.
I was like no way, you've got to put the camera up there
so we could see it all coming together.
So we put 157 raised beds they're all 6 by 4.
We put weed barrier down, each individual gardener
but their own soil in, we have our 10 cubic yards
of an organic soil mushroom compost mix.
Just like in World War II many people had never grown their own
food before, we wanted them to be part of it so you'll see shortly
as they start putting their soil
in that we're using the raised bed method.
Let's see, you'll start seeing how someone's going
to mark it off right here.
So we had classes, on the weekends we had a plant sale.
We were there to just teach people.
Many people had never touched a seed before, we had a huge diversity
of people in this garden, just kind of terrified.
Just didn't know what to do,
so many of these people this is the most satisfying bit of all of that.
Many of those people are coming back this year
and they're taking their neighbor and showing them the ropes.
It's very exciting.
I was visiting a garden the other day and she was telling me
that she was helping her neighbor.
And she said you know, I was terrified last year .
I was like you were.
She was like yeah I was absolutely terrified,
but I'm just telling my neighbor that stuff likes to grow.
I said that's a really good thing to tell people.
She's like you told me that last year
and I'm like oh okay it's right.   Stuff wants to grow.
So that's how it ended up looking at the end of the season,
and accidently in my more responsible sense and thinking it's
like people want to do this, it will be fine, it will be fun,
and it ended up being the largest edible organic garden in the city.
So back to education.
We taught people using a square foot gardening method because the beds,
we wanted them to be manageable, we didn't want huge beds
that people would be overwhelmed by.
So we taught them using the square foot gardening method.
If you're familiar with gardener supply they have an awesome kitchen
gardening tool, planning tool drag and drop where you can put the size
of your bed and then drag and drop all the stuff you want to grow
and then it will print out a guide for you.
So we asked all of our gardeners to do that, decide what you want
to grow, plan out your dirge and that's your homework
and then they would come and we'd adjust.
Maybe you don't want all your tomatoes in a row,
it might shade this or you really don't need 12 pepper plants
in a 6 by 4 bed.
The different advice that we would give people, it was very successful.
Also community building and morale was important
so we took opportunities to let people educate each other
in a fun environment so this was our seed swap that we did earlier
in January, this was before the One Seed Chicago vote was announced
so I have a little subliminal advertising for chard there.
We did a deviation, we keep it very patriotic and we're doing it again
like we did in World War India.
Again we just try and make it fun for the community to participate
so we really didn't want people running in and picking their lettuce
and running out, we wanted them participating in this community
so we have these events, we have a stage in the garden
where we'll have musicians.
We have lots of fun reasons for them to feel community oriented.
We've got a lot of support
and I mentioned during World War II that was important.
These are some of the people that have been interested
in helping us with our garden.   As Jennifer said earlier,
even before this garden started our production company contacted us
about telling the historical piece and using our garden as a pivot,
not that our garden is a point but as a pivot
for how communities are coming together to do this in Chicago
and hopefully inspire other people in the country as well.
We're hoping that that will be done in January of 2012...
so here's a little recap, these are my parents.
They've been married 67 years, my dad just turned 84.
I'd just like to illustrate
that in their lifetime something has happened that I
like to call the big duh.
Everything that they knew and did and still do is what we want
to do now, and there's not enough people that know how to garden
and there's not enough people that know how to can.
And sadly there's not enough people that know how to cook.
So I feel that we're in a place now where if any of you know how
to do any of those things it's very important to be able
to pass that on to someone.
We did that because I'm obsessive compulsive
as you can tell, and because we love it.
And so we have a great history here in this country
and I think we get distracted by the media
and hearing all this negative stuff.
But there are gardens like this happening all over the country,
and communities coming together and embracing how we've done this before
and how we want to do this in the future.
And so I'm going to leave you with one last sound byte.
There you go, JFK said one person can make a difference
and everyone should try.
So I wasn't expecting this to turn into what it turned
into because I was just one person.
I wanted to try and make a difference and I know all of you
as gardeners or friends or neighbors can also make a difference
so I would encourage you this summer to help someone learn how to grow,
help someone learn how to can, help someone learn how to cook.
And so that's what I have to say today.
I really appreciate your time and if you have any questions that you'd
like me to answer I'd be happy to.   Am I running out of time?
Thank you.   >> Do we have questions for LaManda?
>> Yes. I'll start.   >> Go ahead.
>> I will start with you so.
>> [Inaudible] to turn a level of city support providing in terms
of inputs [inaudible] water to [inaudible].
>> None. They did the plowing, many organizations like Marshall Fields
or different seed companies donated seeds,
but the city itself did not fund any materials.
They went with the park district to do the education,
but it was mostly done by individuals and corporations.
>> Now how did you do water?
>> I have no idea how they did the water.
Are you talking about the water in our garden?
>> Yeah.
>> In Chicago we have a system of aldermen that are in charge
of the different neighborhoods and they have a thing called menu money
which is sort of a pool that they're allowed to take out of --
to do various things so our alderman used some of his menu money
to put in out water supply.
and water is the biggest thing with any community garden.
Many people would like to have them but unless you can get an alderman
to pay for it or you do a fundraiser you can't and we've learned
that if you put the garden in --
we're putting in another garden this summer on another lot not far
from us and in a very congested never, but we've learned
that if you start doing the work people get really interested.
But if you start from a theoretical perspective,
we're going to do this next spring it's harder to do.
So my point is it's hard to get people to donate money
if they're not actually doing the activity,
so unless you get the alderman to commit to that,
it's kind of hard to get those going.
>> I wanted to ask about [inaudible] Victory Gardens
and how the USDA actually discouraged it
so if you could talk a little bit about that because they thought
that homeowners were squandering all the resources
and [inaudible] professional growers, aka farmers.
>> Yeah, that's absolutely true.
The comment was Kathy has said that during her research she found
that the USDA was not positive about the home Victory Garden movement.
To the point that they discouraged Eleanor Roosevelt
from having a Victory Garden at the White House,
but after the first season when they realized how effective it was,
what a morale boosting activity it was then they jumped on board.
It's a funny story, isn't it?
They really just did not want people --
and they thought people would be wasting seeds and not be
that productive and so they wanted to funnel those resources to farms.
>> [Inaudible].
>> Where did you get your photographs and other material.
>> Oh, that's a librarian question.
Yes, I got some from the National Agriculture Library,
some of the archives, some here and some from resources
in Chicago and some online.   >> Great. [Inaudible]
>> [Inaudible] that receive [inaudible] do you know?
>> You know, I can't' really answer that.
>> [Inaudible] society [inaudible] World War I there was a huge amount
of Victory Garden, some petered of
and some resurged in World War India.
>> The National Gardening Association started in the 1920s
and then that was one of the biggest associations in the country related
to gardening and then that become very active
in the Victory Garden movement.
>> [Inaudible] garden and they're all in the middle of blocks.
I don't know why but some
of the blocks [inaudible] there's no houses just empty blocks.
[inaudible] community gardens and you're right about water,
if you don't have water you can't garden.
>> Forget it, yeah.
>> All of these gardens get it from the neighbor who has
to [inaudible] to the garden.
They run a hose from the backyard [inaudible] spigot
and then we use a system of [inaudible] and hoses.
So we hook up the hoses when we want water and then we pay [inaudible].
>> Oh, that's a good solution.
We have a woman that lives across the alley from the garden,
and she's we call her the garden mom because she's always there.
And they won't turn our water on until after the frost date
because they don't want any pipes breaking,
so her hose reels right there
so when she knows people are there just runs it across the street.
For a garden of that size it would be too much
for that small water supply but it's a great way to figure it out.
Any other questions?   Thank you for your time.
>> You can see the book outside it you have it.
>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.