Franciscan Spirituality Center
920 Market Street
La Crosse, WI 54601

Steve Spilde: Today it’s my pleasure to welcome Sister Rita Heires. Sister Rita is someone that I’ve had the honor to know for several years. One of the reasons why I am speaking with her today is that Sister Rita is the oldest Sister at Saint Rose Convent. I find Sister Rita to be an amazing person. I always enjoy my visits with her. One of the things I enjoy in visiting with her is her sense of perspective. She’s 93 years old. She was born in 1926. She has actual memories of The Great Depression. She has actual memories of World War Two, especially during this time of the pandemic when this is a very difficult time for folks. Sister Rita has seen a lot of life, and [she’s] seen similar experiences in the past. Without further adieu, I want to welcome Sister Rita Heires.

Rita Heires: Hello.

Steve: Sister Rita, tell me about your family. You grew up in rural Iowa on a farm. Tell me about your family, you siblings, and where you belonged in the family.

Rita: I grew up just on the edge of the little town of Carroll, which at that time had about 5,000 members. My mother and father lived on this farm where we grew up, and the farm was actually my father’s farm. His dad built that house, and just as an interesting aside, it cost $1,600 to build that house. The lumber came from a little neighboring town called Maple River, and it was a lovely house. It was Florentine in style, and [it had] ornate kinds of trim on it. So this is where I grew up, yes.

Steve: And that house was built in about what year?

Rita: It would have to be about 1900, I would say. It’s around that time, yes. My family is composed of eight members, eight siblings, [and] my father and mother, Walter and Rose Heires. My mother’s name was Rose Brooke Heires. We had eight children. The oldest was Dorothy, who became Sister Mary Walter as a Franciscan Sister here at Saint Rose. The second was Helen, who became a Medical Mission Sister from the order in Philadelphia. The next [siblings] were three boys: Carl, Paul, and Donald. And then comes myself and two more boys, Alfred and John. I always call myself “the middle of five boys.”

Steve: In your family there was eight children. Two of your sisters became religious Sisters, so you had that experience. Your family experienced The Great Depression. Your dad was trying to take care of eight kids in the midst of The Great Depression. Both your parents, how did they remain resilient in that very difficult time?

Rita: Everybody was in the same circumstances, which I think gave a sense of support to each other. When the Stock Market broke in ’29, that was a huge loss, and it created a sense of stress on everybody. I think the comforting part was that everybody was in the same circumstances, so no one was poorer, perhaps. I’m sure there was a gradation of poverty, and there were people of great faith. Their faith was very strong to them, and Carroll is a very Catholic town. We always called it the “Sioux City of Iowa.” Sioux City was very, very, very Catholic, as well as Dubuque, [which is] even more Catholic. Iowa has pockets of Catholicity, and [there are] a lot of Methodists, et cetera. We made do with practically anything, and nothing. We always had enough food when we lived on the farm, so it was never a matter of starvation or any kind of poverty that way. But poor in many other ways, we all were. There was scarcity of clothing. We had what we needed, but [we] never let anything go to waste. We had handed down, handed down, handed down, as many families have done in all ages, I think. I would say that my father was always a very serious and burdened man concerned for how to make things mate. And I remember my mother telling me at one time that he said if he just had $1,000 in the bank he would feel so grateful and relieved. That’s not very much. But of course, money went a little farther in those days, too, than it does in this time. With the faith of God, and very faithful to each other, and to all of us, I think that was probably the guiding of it all. And good friends; he was a friend to everybody. That helped, too.

Steve: Basically you’re saying part of what made The Great Depression so stressful was there was no margin, there was no savings. It really was getting through day by day, week by week, and trusting that you would have what you needed for today and you didn’t have energy to worry about tomorrow.

Rita: That’s correct. And following the Depression years, that was mostly ’29, ’30, ’31. And just actually sort of coming out of the economic depression, in ’33 and ’34 in Carroll where we lived, we had a severe drought. I remember my brother telling me – he was old enough to pick corn in those days – the entire farm of corn yielded 90 bushels of corn. The whole farm. Now, of course the 160 acres would have small grain and hay and pastureland, so it wasn’t like it was a whole 160 acres of corn, but can you imagine? That would probably be three wagonloads.

Steve: So as a result of that, survival [and] starvation was actually a concern for your family even though you lived on a farm – has the farm produced for us to survive?

Rita: Right. But again, I would emphasize we had a big garden, and mother would can, can, can. We didn’t have lockers in those days [and] we didn’t have freezers, so there was nothing like that. But they would have hundreds of cans of fruits and vegetables and meat. We never felt starvation. [We had] simple foods and simple meals, and you ate what was on the table. That was for sure. It wasn’t a matter of, “I don’t like this” or anything like that. We were just happy to have whatever we had. It was a struggle, that’s for sure.

Steve: Part of what I’m hearing you say is part of the challenge of that [was] there was the economic depression that started in 1929, and that had started to ease somewhat. But then you had the drought, which added a couple more years of very, very challenging times for people on the farm. And then about the time that started to ease up, then World War Two was looming and began, correct?

Rita: That’s right. I would just add this cute little incident about the whole thing. My two sisters, Dorothy and Helen, were going to Saint Angela Academy, which was a tuition school. I know my tuition was $40 a year. I can’t remember if theirs was less than that or not. There wasn’t money to pay for that, but the Sisters were very happy to receive food because there were borders there also. We raised a lot of potatoes, and when the potatoes were harvested they would take a whole wagonload of potatoes down to the academy and store it there for the Sisters and borders to pay for their tuition. That was another way of bartering and getting the job done.

Steve: You have memories of these times, which was very challenging. And you shared with me too not only raising food in the garden was the difference between survival and not surviving. And yet even then, at the peak of the drought, there was actually concern that the well was going dry. Your dad had to go to town and bring water from town so that the livestock would have water to drink.

Rita: That’s correct.

Steve: So it was kind of challenge upon challenge.

Rita: Right.

Steve: In what ways does that feel familiar now? And in what ways is it very different than what you’re experiencing right now?

Rita: Now we have so many more resources and possibilities of things. I think the challenge is pretty much real regardless of whether you’re looking at what era of time it is. Expectations are higher today than they were then. I think calls upon the same kind of faith and trust, but I guess I would go back to expectations weren’t as great then as they are now. Even to be without air conditioning, we think we’re going to die, don’t we? I remember when my father was very sick. He also had blood poisoning at one time, and he was very sick at home. His brother had an electrical shock, and he brought out a fan probably 10 inches in diameter. And those are the ones we had blowing on him because he was so sick. We slept out on the lawn at night sometimes [because] it was so hot in the house. Expectations are just so different today in the sense we’ve become wimps from what we were then. I don’t decry that, but what a different era.

Steve: What is your sense of how this will go going forward, this time of challenge?

Rita: That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it? It just seems like we have no end time to this, but it will end sometime, I’m sure. Science will come to the rescue again. What is the sense of how it’s going to go? I don’t have the faintest idea. It’s going to call upon the same kind of faith and trust on all of us, as it did for those folks. I guess I keep coming back to the expectations are just so different today than they were then. But we all want happiness and safety and comfort of some sort. I think that’s the million-dollar question.

Steve: What I hear you saying a little bit [is] part of what will change is our expectations.

Rita: That could very well be. I guess the one thing that bothers me or gives me concern within my heart is, are we up to the change of expectations? Or is it cause for suicidal kind of actions [because] it’s so bad? What’s the alternative? I pray for that a lot because I think people are going to feel so cornered. I suppose it depends on