I interviewed my great grandmother Helen Costa. She was 14 in 1930 when the Depression began. Her birth date is August 23, 1913 and was born in Proctor, Vermont. She grew up mostly in Vermont and the moved to Manhattan, New York around the 1950’s.
Life for her during the 1930’s was difficult. My great grandmother had to take care of five sisters and take responsibility raising her mother’s children. She had to make sure that all of her sisters were ready to go to school and fed on time. Every morning they would receive the Hungarian newspaper. About twice a week, the bakery would come to the house and that how they would get their bread. Everyone in the neighborhood had a garden and grew vegetables like tomatoes, carrots, and potatoes. In the 1930’s the whole community was mostly in the same predicament as neighbors including food and money.
The depression caused a limited source of food. The food available was ham, chicken; eggs and sometimes she would make beef stew. Almost everyone owned a pig which is where they got their ham from. My grandmother said she would wake up in the morning around five and hear the squeals of her family killing a pig. This was done early, so her family was able to start on lunch early and it would be ready for lunch or dinner. Everyone had chickens, and when the chickens no longer laid eggs, they would kill and eat the chickens and make chicken soup. This was about the only food that was available to people in the depression during the 1950’s.
In Vermont, her neighbors were not as bad as the ones in New York. The neighbors in Vermont weren’t as close as the neighbors in New York. She never really had any problems with neighbors in Vermont. Her neighbors in New York were the worst. All hours of the night she would hear the neighbors making noises, slamming shoes, and doors. They would also have card games until two in the morning, and never had any consideration for others.
There weren’t too many things to do for fun around the depression. When there were things to do there would sometimes be contests. My grandmother was actually in a contest, and it consisted of twenty five women. The contest was based on beauty, and who had the most points won. My grandmother ended up coming in twenty third. Also, there would be some small parks, and they would walk around with friends in groups meeting guys. There were small amusement parks that only had bumper karts, and a lot of games like darts. The only games they would play with their time were and marbles and hopscotch.
She didn’t have too much trouble with her neighbors growing up in Vermont and New York. Where she grew up was very noisy especially at night. Vermont and New York never had the population they have today. There were les jobs and not as many buildings. Vermont made mountains into neighborhoods and New York built more buildings. Another way it changed is the ways of transportation. Many used to walk and now take cabs, cars, and subways.
The great depression affected everyone and was difficult for most. It was difficult for her to find food and her family always ran out quick. Everyone had to give hand me downs for clothes because there was no money to buy any. Depression is what every person had in common, along with feeling overwhelmed. One of the worst parts of the depression was the KKK because they slowly started to emerge in come together as a group. Having the KKK was the last thing everyone needed. They didn’t like blacks and hated people for their religion. My grandmother had to stop schooling at either grade to help her mother take care of her sisters. Every where they went they walked and never had money to pay even if a ride was found. In a way she was a second mother to her sisters. She can’t recall anything about the WPA or FWP.
There was some ways that my great grandmother would try distract herself from problems during the depression. She tried to cope with the depression by always trying to stay busy. When she couldn’t cope she would cry a lot. She stayed busy by working and hanging out with friends. Living in the depression did affect the person she is today.
My great grandmother was affected by the depression. The depression made her more appreciative of what she has today such as food, money, cloths, and family. When she buys food she gets food she needs, nothing that is unhealthy. She doesn’t care too much how clothes look, as long as they do the job of keeping her warm and comfortable. Last, she is glad to know if she needs anything there is family that will help. During the depression everyone was busy and never had money to spare in case of emergencies.
Interviews of Lucille Adamatz and Eugene Fucci, by Chelsea Linsenbigler
Getting the life stories of those who survived the depression was incredibly interesting. I interviewed a quiet, 88 year old woman from the Haddam Senior Center named Lucille Adametz. She was 8 when the depression hit, and her younger brother was 6. They lived in Higganum, CT on their grandparents’ fruit farm with her parents. Her father was a construction worker, and her mother stayed home to take care of herself and her brother. She remembers her neighbors- one raised cattle and beef and the other grew vegetables. Between the 3 of them they would trade and barter their goods, so money wasn’t a huge issue to get food. She remembers walking down the streets and seeing the bread lines- although she claims in Higganum everybody knew everybody. If you needed help your neighbor would help you, and you would do the same for them. “That was the great thing about living in a small, close town. Everybody was your friend” Ms. Adametz told me. Her worst memory was not being able to have friends over because they couldn’t afford to feed them. “We couldn’t even give them a cookie if we had them because we didn’t have any to give” she said. Her family cut back on everything clothes, to food. They didn’t have money to go get a sweet candy for $.01. Lucille Adametzs’ strongest memories was seeing all of the men from the WPA building bridges and roads in her town, and playing with tinfoil, thread, and spools because they couldn’t afford real toys. Ms. Adametz made it very clear that she never felt poor; that she was the same as everyone else. The thought of her family being poor never even crossed her mind.
I also interviewed my step-fathers mother, Jean Fucci. She lived in Auburn, NY at the time. She lived with her mother, and sister. Her mother ran a convalescent home in their home, since Ms.fucci told me that there were no such things as retirement homes back then. Her mother didn’t make a lot of money, and they were on welfare. They could only go to one store, and couldn’t get luxuries like candy or new clothes. Hand-me-downs were all they could wear. She remembers walking to school in the morning, walking 2 miles back for lunch, walking back after lunch, ect. As Lucille Adametz told me, Ms.Fucci didn’t feel poor either. She also told me that she felt the same as everyone else. Sadly, that is all Jean Fucci could remember.
Laura W. Sullivan writes about her grandmother, Mary Ryan Wetherbee
Our grandmother was the kind of woman who took in all of the various friends and relatives who were unemployed. She had to feed her own family and all of the extra people with whatever she could come up with. She had a recipe that called for 2 apples and a few other basic ingredients. This resulted in a very rich dessert that made 16 people happy.
Dish Night—Memory of the Forties by Janice Vecchitto Thomas
This is something my mom and her sisters would tell my siblings and me when we were young, and they still reminisce about it today. Back in the mid 40’s, my mom and her sisters would go to the movies at the encouragement of her mom. Now why would their mother ask they go to the movies? Well, once a week they would have something called “dish night”.
On “dish night”, the movie theatre would give out to each paying person, a china setting, a serving bowl or other accessories to complete a set. Every few weeks, they would rotate what they were giving out. My mom remembered the pattern was called Blue Orchid. My grandmother wanted them to go often as she wanted a service for twelve. My mom also said they would give out the dish once you paid your admission. She remembers hearing crashes throughout the movie as some people would break their dish or accessory piece. Her sisters told me that when they were invited to other people’s homes for dinner, those same dishes were at their house also.
My mom mentioned just the other day, when she would frequent tag sales years later, she would see some of those dishes which brought back memories of those days.
On “dish night”, the movie theatre would give out to each paying person, a china setting, a serving bowl or other accessories to complete a set. Every few weeks, they would rotate what they were giving out. My mom remembered the pattern was called Blue Orchid. My grandmother wanted them to go often as she wanted a service for twelve. My mom also said they would give out the dish once you paid your admission. She remembers hearing crashes throughout the movie as some people would break their dish or accessory piece. Her sisters told me that when they were invited to other people’s homes for dinner, those same dishes were at their house also.
My mom mentioned just the other day, when she would frequent tag sales years later, she would see some of those dishes which brought back memories of those days.
Memories from Hugh Cox, Trustee for Community Colleges, Dir. of the Valley Railroad Company and former Pres. of Raymond Engineering as told to A.Zyko
I was born in 1928 and lived 4 miles from the center of East Haven Connecticut in a place called Foxon, which had a population of about 200 people. My parents got electricity about 1928. We heated our house with a wood/coal stove. My cousin in North Branford didn’t get electricity until after World War II. In 1936, we got a refrigerator. Before that, I remember my father picking up ice and bringing it home on the bumper of his car for our ice box.
Foxon had its own school, a building with 4 rooms, 8 grades, 3 teachers and one custodian. First, second and third grades were in one room and I could listen to three grades being taught. When I graduated from 8th grade, there were 7 or 8 graduates, only 2 boys because many young men had to find work. I remember being in school when the Hindenburg flew overhead but I wasn’t allowed to go out and see it. I was active in Boy Scouts and 4-H. I helped fight forest fires by carrying an Indian tank weighing 40-50 pounds on my back holding 5-6 gallons of water with a hose and nozzle that allowed you to squirt water on the fire. I was paid 25 cents an hour for this work.
I worked summers on a truck farm and once on a chicken farm. I got paid 1 cent a basket for picking strawberries. The best job of my life was clerking at the general store because I got to do everything from stocking shelves, waiting on customers, pumping gas, assembling the penny candy case, to dealing with shipments. My pay was 25 cents and hour and had gone up to 50 cents an hour by 1946 when I went to college at UConn.
I especially remember 1934 because it was a year of blizzards in Connecticut. There were 12-15 families on our street, which was about a quarter of a mile long. The men shoveled the snow to clear the streets. People were self-reliant and didn’t depend on the government. Volunteers built a community house where we had meetings, barn dances, and talent shows. Everyone had gardens. We had 10 acres and kept a pig and a cow.
When I was about 12, my mother got me to start a newspaper, the Foxon Review which we sold for 1 penny. My mother typed the paper and ran it off on a hectograph. It had local news only but people loved it.
Books were very important to my family and we went once a week by car to the library in the center of East Haven. My father always had a car. He would buy used cars for less than a hundred dollars. The first few cars he got were from the town dump. The cars that were still able to run that were left at the dump, were sold by the man who ran the dump. My father got his first new car in 1940.
My father was a pattern maker and had his own business, New Haven Pattern and Model. Pattern makers would start by making a wooden pattern, then a sand casting and then pour metal into it. The object would be to make a part that required the least amount of machining. During the depression, he was either working at his business or looking for more business. War work came along in the late 30s.
My wife’s family was well off during the depression. The men in the family worked for the railroad and had steady jobs. They would travel free on the railway to Florida on vacation. My wife had a dressmaker. My cousin’s family had a farm and took in wards of the state. They had two pairs of brothers that they took care of and the small income from this helped them hold onto their farm.
I had very little in the way of money or possessions but I got the start I needed and lived a good life. I was the first in my father’s family to go to college. The depression did not hurt me but did a lot to shape my life. It gave me a belief in saving money and a conservative outlook. I am probably better off for not having had so much.
I do remember hearing about the WPA and the CCC during the depression but not about the Federal Writer’s Project. In the Great Depression and in the current recession, if you have a job, you are fortunate.
Foxon had its own school, a building with 4 rooms, 8 grades, 3 teachers and one custodian. First, second and third grades were in one room and I could listen to three grades being taught. When I graduated from 8th grade, there were 7 or 8 graduates, only 2 boys because many young men had to find work. I remember being in school when the Hindenburg flew overhead but I wasn’t allowed to go out and see it. I was active in Boy Scouts and 4-H. I helped fight forest fires by carrying an Indian tank weighing 40-50 pounds on my back holding 5-6 gallons of water with a hose and nozzle that allowed you to squirt water on the fire. I was paid 25 cents an hour for this work.
I worked summers on a truck farm and once on a chicken farm. I got paid 1 cent a basket for picking strawberries. The best job of my life was clerking at the general store because I got to do everything from stocking shelves, waiting on customers, pumping gas, assembling the penny candy case, to dealing with shipments. My pay was 25 cents and hour and had gone up to 50 cents an hour by 1946 when I went to college at UConn.
I especially remember 1934 because it was a year of blizzards in Connecticut. There were 12-15 families on our street, which was about a quarter of a mile long. The men shoveled the snow to clear the streets. People were self-reliant and didn’t depend on the government. Volunteers built a community house where we had meetings, barn dances, and talent shows. Everyone had gardens. We had 10 acres and kept a pig and a cow.
When I was about 12, my mother got me to start a newspaper, the Foxon Review which we sold for 1 penny. My mother typed the paper and ran it off on a hectograph. It had local news only but people loved it.
Books were very important to my family and we went once a week by car to the library in the center of East Haven. My father always had a car. He would buy used cars for less than a hundred dollars. The first few cars he got were from the town dump. The cars that were still able to run that were left at the dump, were sold by the man who ran the dump. My father got his first new car in 1940.
My father was a pattern maker and had his own business, New Haven Pattern and Model. Pattern makers would start by making a wooden pattern, then a sand casting and then pour metal into it. The object would be to make a part that required the least amount of machining. During the depression, he was either working at his business or looking for more business. War work came along in the late 30s.
My wife’s family was well off during the depression. The men in the family worked for the railroad and had steady jobs. They would travel free on the railway to Florida on vacation. My wife had a dressmaker. My cousin’s family had a farm and took in wards of the state. They had two pairs of brothers that they took care of and the small income from this helped them hold onto their farm.
I had very little in the way of money or possessions but I got the start I needed and lived a good life. I was the first in my father’s family to go to college. The depression did not hurt me but did a lot to shape my life. It gave me a belief in saving money and a conservative outlook. I am probably better off for not having had so much.
I do remember hearing about the WPA and the CCC during the depression but not about the Federal Writer’s Project. In the Great Depression and in the current recession, if you have a job, you are fortunate.
Memories of Daniel Saunders, born in Hartford in 1909, uncle to Anne Paluck
Daniel G. Saunders (“Captain Dan”) as told to daughter Dianne Saunders on Christmas Eve 1987, about his trip across the U.S. in 1934 to go to a job on a ship in San Francisco, and about hobos riding the rails trying to get to California.
“We went straight across Canada. We had an old car, three of us. 1934, gee I’ve got a picture of that.”
“Who did you go with?”
“Two other guys that were sailing with me. One kid was – well, it was 1934, how old was I? 25. They were the same age. We had a job waiting for us out in San Francisco. And we went straight across Canada. Those people were marvelous to us. They treated us fine. We had breakdowns, and this and that. Of course, it was a lot different in those days, you know, half a century ago, what the hell.”
“What car did you have?”
“We had an old Oldsmobile. This friend of mine, he bought it from his father. I don’t know, something like $100. It was a lot of money. We paid our share. And that car – the radiator fell off. We come down to Chicago, the World’s Fair was there. We’re going down one of the main thoroughfares, and the right rear wheel come off. And here we are it’s like on Connecticut Boulevard on the main street, the main street. Anyway, we sold the car for $27 in San Francisco, but we missed the ship by 10 days anyway. And we were out in one of the Western states, I forget which one it was. We were going down the highway and here’s a road coming this way and it was just getting dark at night and these two young girls about 15 years old taking their father’s car from one of the ranches out there, and they went right across the road and they hit us broadside and knocked us into the ditch, stuff like that.”
“Sounds like a great vacation!”
“That was a drought year, too, one of them, the Dust Bowl. I told you about this maybe several times, I’ll never forget it. We get out there in the Western States, the wheat growing states, and you could see that the sagebrush and everything else, you know, when it rolls it gets into a ball, a big ball. And they had a drought out there for years, and all the cattle died, you know. You’re going down the road, there’s no interstate roads like there is today, and you see horses out there in the field with the legs sticking up, dead you know, see, and herds of cattle same way. All the chickens dead, and so on. Sand – the topsoil blew off the ground, and blow up against the house, and it might come up as high as the ceiling here, and all the people were leaving these states, Kansas, the Dakotas, and so on, and going out to California. Remember, this was Depression years.
The three of us came along this road and of course the radiator was boiling up. There weren’t gas stations then. Finally, here’s this farmhouse. I was driving the car, one guy was asleep in front, and we had room enough for the other guy in the back. So I stopped the car, and I walked in from the road. The farmhouse was maybe 75 yards in from the road, and I went up, and I knocked on the door. The wind was blowing, Jesus, the sand was blowing all over the place, and it was like the surface of the moon. Nothing was growing, nothing. There wasn’t a blade of grass, there wasn’t a twig, there wasn’t a bush, that’s how bad it was. This woman came to the door, the front door, maybe 50 years old. A weather beaten place. I said “how do you do? We were driving along, and our radiator is overheated. I was wondering if you could give us a gallon of water for the car.” I’m telling you, the woman - she looked at me – I’m telling you the woman looked absolutely drained physically, gray hair pulled tight on her head, and she had on a gingham something or other, and she looked at me and she says, and I’ll never forget it, she said to me exactly, she says “How many are with you in the car?” I said two of my friends and myself. She said “I’ll tell you what I’ll do. You call your two friends up here and I’ll give you each one glass of water, but not one drop for that car.” See.
“They didn’t have any water?”
“No. Everything was gone. Everything – there wasn’t a crop in the fields, there wasn’t any cattle left, there wasn’t anything left. And this went on year after year. And the topsoil all blew away because of the way they used to farm in those days. They didn’t – they call it leaving it lie fallow for a year. You have a crop this year, next year you don’t do it. Contour plowing, and so on, it’s all scientific today, all these farmers know it. But in those days they plowed it up and so on, and then when they didn’t get the rain everything blew away.”
“We just drove that car – it’s remarkable how long that car run with the steam spouting out. And we finally came to this small town, and there was a garage there, and we had to let the car sit. What was in that town? I forget. There was something like a town pump and at certain hours of the day you could get maybe a gallon of water, each one. That’s what we got. You see a car out in the road, you could buy soda, you could pour that in the radiator, any liquid. That’s how bad it was out there.
When we got to San Francisco we sold the car for $27, $9 each, that’s all the money we had. Those freight trains would be running east and west, north and south, whatever. You’d be by the railroad tracks, here come a freight train, and up on top of the freight cars, just like seagulls, or birds sittin’ on a wire, the guys sitting up on top of the cars, women too, kids, sittin’ up on top of the freight cars going west, see, they’re trying to get to Oregon or Washington or California, California especially. California at the state line they used to stop the trains and kick them all off, and then you’d see a train going east, the same thing, everybody sitting up on top of the freight trains. “
“Why’d they kick them off?”
“They didn’t want ‘em. I mean this wasn’t 5,000 people that were on the move. This was 700,000, 800,000 people. Hey, these people just walked away from the farm that the family was farming for 50-60 years, they owned the land. They just walked away from it. Thousands of places out there deserted. Train going south, you see them sittin’ up there. Hey, we had 10,000 sailors in New York City, 10,000 sailors, and there wasn’t $100 amongst the crowd. Down there on South Street at Seaman’s Institute.”
“We went straight across Canada. We had an old car, three of us. 1934, gee I’ve got a picture of that.”
“Who did you go with?”
“Two other guys that were sailing with me. One kid was – well, it was 1934, how old was I? 25. They were the same age. We had a job waiting for us out in San Francisco. And we went straight across Canada. Those people were marvelous to us. They treated us fine. We had breakdowns, and this and that. Of course, it was a lot different in those days, you know, half a century ago, what the hell.”
“What car did you have?”
“We had an old Oldsmobile. This friend of mine, he bought it from his father. I don’t know, something like $100. It was a lot of money. We paid our share. And that car – the radiator fell off. We come down to Chicago, the World’s Fair was there. We’re going down one of the main thoroughfares, and the right rear wheel come off. And here we are it’s like on Connecticut Boulevard on the main street, the main street. Anyway, we sold the car for $27 in San Francisco, but we missed the ship by 10 days anyway. And we were out in one of the Western states, I forget which one it was. We were going down the highway and here’s a road coming this way and it was just getting dark at night and these two young girls about 15 years old taking their father’s car from one of the ranches out there, and they went right across the road and they hit us broadside and knocked us into the ditch, stuff like that.”
“Sounds like a great vacation!”
“That was a drought year, too, one of them, the Dust Bowl. I told you about this maybe several times, I’ll never forget it. We get out there in the Western States, the wheat growing states, and you could see that the sagebrush and everything else, you know, when it rolls it gets into a ball, a big ball. And they had a drought out there for years, and all the cattle died, you know. You’re going down the road, there’s no interstate roads like there is today, and you see horses out there in the field with the legs sticking up, dead you know, see, and herds of cattle same way. All the chickens dead, and so on. Sand – the topsoil blew off the ground, and blow up against the house, and it might come up as high as the ceiling here, and all the people were leaving these states, Kansas, the Dakotas, and so on, and going out to California. Remember, this was Depression years.
The three of us came along this road and of course the radiator was boiling up. There weren’t gas stations then. Finally, here’s this farmhouse. I was driving the car, one guy was asleep in front, and we had room enough for the other guy in the back. So I stopped the car, and I walked in from the road. The farmhouse was maybe 75 yards in from the road, and I went up, and I knocked on the door. The wind was blowing, Jesus, the sand was blowing all over the place, and it was like the surface of the moon. Nothing was growing, nothing. There wasn’t a blade of grass, there wasn’t a twig, there wasn’t a bush, that’s how bad it was. This woman came to the door, the front door, maybe 50 years old. A weather beaten place. I said “how do you do? We were driving along, and our radiator is overheated. I was wondering if you could give us a gallon of water for the car.” I’m telling you, the woman - she looked at me – I’m telling you the woman looked absolutely drained physically, gray hair pulled tight on her head, and she had on a gingham something or other, and she looked at me and she says, and I’ll never forget it, she said to me exactly, she says “How many are with you in the car?” I said two of my friends and myself. She said “I’ll tell you what I’ll do. You call your two friends up here and I’ll give you each one glass of water, but not one drop for that car.” See.
“They didn’t have any water?”
“No. Everything was gone. Everything – there wasn’t a crop in the fields, there wasn’t any cattle left, there wasn’t anything left. And this went on year after year. And the topsoil all blew away because of the way they used to farm in those days. They didn’t – they call it leaving it lie fallow for a year. You have a crop this year, next year you don’t do it. Contour plowing, and so on, it’s all scientific today, all these farmers know it. But in those days they plowed it up and so on, and then when they didn’t get the rain everything blew away.”
“We just drove that car – it’s remarkable how long that car run with the steam spouting out. And we finally came to this small town, and there was a garage there, and we had to let the car sit. What was in that town? I forget. There was something like a town pump and at certain hours of the day you could get maybe a gallon of water, each one. That’s what we got. You see a car out in the road, you could buy soda, you could pour that in the radiator, any liquid. That’s how bad it was out there.
When we got to San Francisco we sold the car for $27, $9 each, that’s all the money we had. Those freight trains would be running east and west, north and south, whatever. You’d be by the railroad tracks, here come a freight train, and up on top of the freight cars, just like seagulls, or birds sittin’ on a wire, the guys sitting up on top of the cars, women too, kids, sittin’ up on top of the freight cars going west, see, they’re trying to get to Oregon or Washington or California, California especially. California at the state line they used to stop the trains and kick them all off, and then you’d see a train going east, the same thing, everybody sitting up on top of the freight trains. “
“Why’d they kick them off?”
“They didn’t want ‘em. I mean this wasn’t 5,000 people that were on the move. This was 700,000, 800,000 people. Hey, these people just walked away from the farm that the family was farming for 50-60 years, they owned the land. They just walked away from it. Thousands of places out there deserted. Train going south, you see them sittin’ up there. Hey, we had 10,000 sailors in New York City, 10,000 sailors, and there wasn’t $100 amongst the crowd. Down there on South Street at Seaman’s Institute.”
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.
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.
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