Memories from Sam Philips, a very dear friend of Lan Liu's who has visited MxCC several times and participated in the library's book club discussion.

I am an 88 years old born-in-America male. I was just an infant and then a small child during the nineteen twenties, the so-called Roaring Twenties, when, in the aftermath of the War To End All Wars, WW 1, most Americans seemed to lose their senses in the flush of victory. The country passed an amendment to its constitution prohibiting the production, importation, sale, use or advertizing of alcoholic beverages of any kind. A huge bootlegging industry of such products sprang up, and crimes associated with it became rampant. Speakeasies flourished, jazz sprang up and became the country’s dominant form of music. New clothing styles and new dance styles and new literature styles and new life styles flew into existence. And I, too young to be aware of any of it, grew in the shelter of an upper middle class family in which, magically, whatever I wanted came to me.
My father was a highly gifted sign writer, and he had built a successful small business around his prolific skills. He had purchased a small but more than adequate house in a nice suburb of fast-growing Los Angeles. Our family spent summers in mountain or sea-side resorts. We even had one of those new-fangled devices called a telephone in our house.
Then one day my father came home from work early. He had a private conversation with my mother, and then, grim-faced he called my older brother and me to the living room, and motioned for us to sit on the couch. My mother was already there, seated on a chair. I had never seen her face look so solemn. Were my brother and I about to be severely scolded for something terrible we had done?
No. Surely my father had something far more serious on his mind; his face was that of a badly defeated boxer.
“Children,” he began,” His voice crackled with despair. He could hardly continue. “The New York Stock Market has crashed.”
My eyes popped wide open. I looked from my father to my brother, and then to my mother. “So what?” I thought to myself. “Who cared about something called stock, whatever that was?” And way off in New York. I knew where that was from my class in school. 3000 miles away. Who cared? Why all the excitement? Crashed? What did that mean?
My father looked at the floor between his legs. His voice trembled, and then, little by little he explained it all to his two children. How new companies got started or expanded by selling parts of themselves, called shares of stock, to the public. How people bought those stocks hoping that those companies would grow and make a lot of money, thus making the owners of their stocks rich. And how, when those businesses lost money, their stock owners suffered losses. And little by little my brother and I began to understand.
My father continued. "I had almost everything we owned invested in the stock market, and now it is all gone. We'll have to move and we'll have to do without a lot of things we've enjoyed up until now."

Now, even though I didn't understand what had happened, I did understand some of its effects on our family. My brother and I rushed to our parents, and hugged them. We assured them that it was alright with us, that we would do whatever we had to to make things work out, even though we didn't know what that would entail.

And so we began our new life in the Great Depression.

Young as I was, I began becoming aware of the world and its many political facets. In Germany Hitler came to power, and I learned what Nazism was, and the difference between it and democracy. In Japan Emperor Hirohito and his chief military commander, Tojo, had already begun their world conquest in Korea, then Manchuria, and then in China proper. In Spain Generalissimo Francisco Franco overthrew the democratically elected government, and installed himself as dictator. In Russia, communism under the usurped leadership of Stalin had taken place. And in the United States, Franklin Roosevelt had replaced Herbert Hoover in the White House, after Hoover's promise after promise of better times vaporized. Tens of thousands stood in breadlines seeking handouts of food, great industrial strikes rocked the nation, violence erupted in states and cities all over the country. Revolution was in the air. Roosevelt and Congress enacted the National Recovery Act, the so-called NRA. It provided money for infrastructure projects that hired tens of thousands of workers. The program was called "priming the pump" because it was supposed to start the stricken economy rolling again. Well, it never achieved that goal, but it offered enough relief to prevent radical solutions from being tried. It took WW-2 to end the Great Depression.

In the meantime, of course, my father lost his business. There were not enough orders for signs for him and others to keep their doors open. He solicited business from local stores in exchange for whatever those stores had to offer. It was a reversion to the barter system relegated to the dustbin many years earlier. We ate in restaurants where my father had painted signs for the proprietor, we got our clothes from stores he had serviced. And what little income he was able to bring home was spent frugally by my mother. But it was never enough.

Finally, when I was in Junior High School, I obtained a job delivering newspapers. I earned a pittance, but it helped the family, and I was happy to be able to contribute. At the same time I discovered that I could run faster than any of my friends, and as soon as I entered High School I joined the track team, and was never beaten in a foot race. But I could not afford to buy track shoes, so my father worked a sign painting deal with a sporting goods store, and he enabled me to get a pair.

Thus it was that we struggled from mouthful to mouthful during the Great Depression until the worst war in the history of mankind put an end to it.