Does your family remember the Depression?

[hedgehog]

My parents did relatively well during the Depression since both had fathers who were able to work in the steel mills. Even so, I grew up aware of the Depression and aware that despite hard work I could lose everything should the economy collapse. Other people seem to be totally unaware that bad things can happen to good people.

[bleedingheart]

1. yes...very much so

my grandfather took his life because his little store was being run under by the new "chains" like Krogers and he had suffered for years by giving credit to those in need...but by 1940..he couldn't take it anymore and hung himself.

[twilight_sailing]

60. credit

My grandfather too ran a little grocery store and lost it by giving credit during the Depression. He drank himself to death and died in 1939.

[bleedingheart]

67. and when he died, the customers who had been given credit

all came to my grandmother with the money they could scrape together and they kept paying until their old accounts were settled. Meanwhile they felt bad that he resorted to something so drastic, but he wasn't going to call them in on their credit because he felt bad for all those folks too....

[liberal N proud]

2. My parents grew up during the depression

They have always interjected things they learned from that experience into everyday life. They taught us those things in order to help us appreciate what we have.
I just hope it is not lost on my kids, they just look at me like I am silly when I talk about the days that people had nothing.

[Sequoia]

3. Yes. My dad mentioned it often.

He wouldn't eat blackberries because that was on of the staples he and his siblings ate and they grew up on a farm. He said it was just terrible.

[Flirtus]

30. my mom won't eat tuna or green beans -

I can't stand peanut butter! Just got too much as a child.

[KoKo]

79. No margarine.....just butter.......n/t

[H2O Man]

4. Both of my parents

experienced serious poverty during the Depression. It had ways of showing up in both their conscious and unconscious behaviors.

One of the things that my father did was save nails. He ended up comfortable financially, but after he died, I helped clean out a large collection of coffee cans filled with bent nails that he should have tossed out. But he had the old "they might be needed, someday" attitude.

[whistle]

5. Yep, 2001 through 2003 under Dubya, 1987 stock market crash

....under Reagan/Bush I

[no_hypocrisy]

6. My father was under 10 during the Depression.

His family was below "modest" economically. What I don't understand is how he can designate the homeless men who came to the door, looking for food as "bums". Many men lost work, and their opportunity to work, lost their homes, had to leave their families, and had to wander like migrants. They often were one meal away from starvation and death. Where is the compassion and understanding, especially when one was witness to this time in history?

[Pyrzqxgl]

71. My Dad was a hobo during most of the hardest times of the Depression

His stories of riding freight trains from city to city looking for work sounded Romantic to me growing up in the more stable 50's & 60's but it sure couldn't have been easy on him. He was shot at, nearly froze to death, and chased out of many small town just for the offense of trying to earn enough to stay alive. He carried his Hobo Union card with him to the end of his days.

[Fierce]

7. My parents were born at the end of the Depression

but you better believe that what my grandparents and great-grandparents went through affects me.

[Mnemosyne]

10. My parents b.1933 and 1935, both

pack-rats! Mom just cannot throw things away easily and I'm sure it's because of their parents experiences then. Dad's gone, but you should have seen the auction!

[asjr]

36. I understand the pack-rat syndrome. I was

born in 1932 and actually remember the Depression years. Somehow my Dad always had work and we didn't go hungry but there were some really bad times. My children can't understand my being a pack-rat but I feel sure it started back then. We never threw anything away that might have some use later on.

[myrna minx]

63. My mom was born in '36 and is a total pack rat.

She passed her pathological frugality onto her kids. She cannot bring herself to even recycle margarine tubs. It is a built in defense mechanism to when there was absolutely nothing at all. :-(

[Arkansas Granny]

8. Both of my parents used to talk about it from time to time.

My dad was pretty fortunate in that my grandfather had steady employment during that period, but my mother was not so lucky. Her dad died during the depression and things were really rough for a widow with 2 children. She always suspected that my grandmother went without food on several occasions to insure that the children had something to eat, and that wasn't much.

[Skidmore]

12. My parents talked about it also from time to time.

Mom used to tell me how hard things were and that most of her dresses were made from feed sacks or flour sacks. My dad's family had a very hard time. It was a large family of 15 people and they were dirt poor. People survived because they still had the skills to make their own and grow their own. I'm not certain how many people in this technocrazy society we have know how to do anything without having some electrical or gas powered gadget to assist them.

[KoKo]

26. I don't know what folks would do today if we had another 30's type Depression

either. I guess those of us who had parents or grandparents who tried to tell us and pass along survival techniques might have to teach those who think "It can't happen here," who will be clueless. :-(

I hope it doesn't get to that...but with all these job losses and almost nothing we have left to export except WMD...I worry about what people will do when the Mortage and Real Estate jobs vanish along with the Ford/GM and Pharmaceutical jobs (Pfizer laying off huge parts of sales force because another promising drug killed folks) and all the rest of the bad news.

We might have to survive by selling on E-Bay...

[OzarkDem]

28. I think I know

what I would do if we had another depression. I inherited a portion of my great grandparents farm and would probably move back out there and live the way they did, though it might take me a while to get the hang of dealing with livestock.

One thing I did learn from my parents and grandparents was how to get by with next to nothing. I had a garden and canned a lot of our food for many years. I still have my canning equipment and lots of jars!

[Cleita]

45. I'll bet all the landfills that have all our discarded junk will be

mind for anything that's usable or that can be sold.

[Coyote_Bandit]

50. My parents

and grandparents saw that my brother and I learned these skills. We learned how to garden, how to preserve produce, how to pluck chickens, how to dress game, how to cure meat and many other things. Still, those skills are difficult to implement on quarter acre lots. The effects of urbanization in our society are far reaching.

[Skidmore]

51. We learned those skills too.

It has taken two generations for my family to overcome the effects of the Depression. As a family, we were finally starting to prosper..then 2000 happened. Knocked us back a bit.

[Coyote_Bandit]

53. I have to say

that I am glad I learned those skills. I am a well-educated, single, 40 something long-term unemployed professional female. I am semi-vegetarian and have my own small backyard garden. Those skills have proven quite useful.

If I could figure out how to make a living in a rural agricultural area I would be delighted to leave the city. Would actually prefer it.

[Captain Hilts]

9. Yes. And the Johnstown Flood of 1936. They never really recovered.

Too proud to ask for aid as it meant 'being on the dole'.

[Broken_Hero]

11. my grandmother does...

but her family was more subsistence minded(as in, living off the land), and it didn't hurt that bad.

[HereSince1628]

13. Well, they lost one farm, one nursery (specializing in bulbs) & one divorce

It made my parents truly nutty about money.

[Jade Fox]

22. "nutty about money"

I relate to that statement very much. My parents were children during the Depression, and that experience has affected our family so much in ways not always clear. It made my parents, particularly my father, nutty about money and material things. The saddest part was the false power he gave to money: he believed that having it would insure happiness, and was deeply confused that it did not. I believe that has a lot to do with why my dad died at the relatively young age of 65.

[HereSince1628]

52. 7 people lived on my mom's minimum wage job while my father banked his

earnings. The joint arrival of my younger brothers (twins) and the late 50's recession had scared the crap out of him. He was convinced the return of the Depression was always lurking just around the corner.

So, he raised five kids who were convinced they were dirt poor white trash, wearing second hand clothes and with him always ranting about how we shouldn't expect his help with life. His favorite tirade was how he'd never support educated idiots whenever any guidance counselor sent a note home suggesting one of us had SAT or ACT scores that indicated we'd do well in college.

We took this all in as being normal, never expected anything, and were never surprised until he died.

We found out that at 83 years of age his annual income was more than twice the income he retired with at 65. Yet he was still enforcing the same discipline on himself and my mother, he died at home rather than going to the emergency room which might have saved his life because an ambulance was too expensive. I don't think he'd willingly parted with more than 2-bits in over 40 years.

[Coyote_Bandit]

14. My parents

were both born at the beginning of the Depression. And I was fortunate to be able to spend a lot of time with all four of my grandparents when I was younger. Both of my parents were born and raised in poor rural agricultural areas. One of those areas was very remote and had no electric service available until the mid 1960's or so. Rampant poverty still persists there today. Today, my parents are well off financially but I can still see the effects of being raised in utter poverty. Their lessons were something they tried to pass on to their children.

[Bobbieo]

16. I remember the depression very well. That

is when I learned the value of a penny.

[Coyote_Bandit]

47. You have reminded me of an older gentleman I know

who lived through the Depression (not a family member). He worked long hard hours, lived frugally, and is now a multi-millionaire. He is delighted to find loose change lying about and will stop and pick up those pennies. If you were to talk to him he would tell you about wearing hand me downs until adulthood and often going without shoes. During much of his childhood his family was so poor that he did not have any underwear. To this day, he does not dispose of anything that might have any possible future use. Oh, yeah, and he is a lifelong Dem.

[xxqqqzme]

15. my dad remembers, my mother not so much.

My mother's family owned property and rather than evict tenets, my grandfather 'employed' them as gardeners, housekeepers, cooks - whatever he could think of to keep the property occupied.

My dad's family was not that fortunate. His father was a house painter - not a skill in demand during lean times. My dad always insisted we all eat a slice of bread during meals (there was always a slice sitting on our plates when we sat down) sorry but a slice of wonder bread wasn't appealing to me even @ 8. I asked my mother once why the bread dictate. She said during the depression, my dad's mother gave the kids bread to eat before dinner so the little food they had would go farther.

I still don't eat bread, unless I bake it and rolls in a basket at restaurants go untouched by me. Funny how those things carry over from one generation to the next.

[GliderGuider]

17. Yes. both my parents went through it

My mother lived on a farm in Manitoba, and the few stories she tells (like eating the seed grain) are numbing. As a result she has been very frugal and self-denying her whole life. My father grew up in the Ukrainian community of Brandon, Manitoba. It was a tightly knit community, and I think fared better than most because of that. He remembers being very poor, but not desperate.

One thing the experience gave them both was a lifelong commitment to socialism.

[laundry_queen]

66. My grandparents

went through similar experiences in the same area. My mother, while she grew up in the 50's and 60's, also grew up dirt poor on a farm. She remembers, as a small child, picking blueberries for hours and hours in hopes that the American tourists would come by and buy a basket for $.05. The rest were taken home for canning. My grandmother, who grew up during the depression (born in the '20's), keeps everything. They were never hungry, however, because they were very good at living off the land - hunting, trapping, growing gardens, berry picking, canning and preserving. But she does remember, in the winter, at 40 below, putting pieces of cardboard in her boots to block the snow from coming in the holes. And she remembers wearing dresses made out of flour sacks as well. It's no wonder she has boxes and boxes of magarine tubs and used tin foil & plastic bags.

[twilight_sailing]

70. hunting, trapping,

My Dad tells me that during the Depression you were lucky to see so much as a single squirrel in the woods. People were HUNGRY. Anything edible went into the cook pot right quick. ;)

[OzarkDem]

18. Both parents grew up during the Depression

My dad's father was one of those men who lost their job, couldn't support his family and had to hop freight trains to other cities to find work. Grandad ended up getting killed during a robbery of a card game where he was trying to win enough money to rent an apartment and bring the family back together. He was the only one killed in the game because he refused to give up his money. My dad spent most of his childhood living with my great grandparents while my grandmother worked in town. They talked of the hobo's who would come by the farm offering to work for food. My great grandfather (he was chairman of the county Dem party) spared what he could. Being a farmer at least meant you could feed your family, but not much more.

My mom's dad was a tenant farmer in the Ozarks. They were incredibly poor during the depression with no car and little food, no health care. My grandmother made clothing for them from the feedsacks that came from livestock feed. They often didn't have shoes to wear. My grandfather would hire out the children to work in other farmers fields, pulling weeds and hoeing corn. Their typical lunch was a sandwich made from bread and bacon grease. Mom's health was so bad that she lost nearly all of her teeth by her 18th birthday.

Both parents worked hard to make a better life for us. They succeeded and were thrilled to be able to afford a nice house in the suburbs later and send us to college. They both died before they were 50, probably because of poor health and nutrition during the depression.

[blogslut]

19. yes

Both my folks are gone now but yes, each grew up during the depression. When we held an estate sale for my mother's things, nobody would buy her collection of expoxy-repaired china or soddered-together silver.

As for me, I can't throw plastic containers away and I always use paper towels twice and I go to the Goodwill because I actually prefer used clothes. There's nothing more wrong to me that a perfectly useful item - tossed away because it is not new.

[catabryna]

20. Definitely not my parents...

but I remember my grandparents, before they passed away, talking about the depression when I was growing up and I truly believe that their experiences and their political leanings as a result of the depression helped shape my (and their) belief that people need a safety net available when things take an unexpected turn for the worse. There, but for the grace of God, go I. Or, anyone for that matter.

I do definitely see that "it can't happen to me" mentality and it just makes me scratch my head and wonder how they can believe that. Life is a crap shoot!

[OzarkDem]

25. FDR was such a hero to them

The programs he put in place to help people find work and support their families during the Depression were a lifesaver. In many rural Ozark homes you would find portraits of FDR on the parlor walls for many years after he was gone.

[foreverdem]

43. My parents and grandparents

My mom was a child at the time, but she told me the story about my grandfather being offered 2 jobs, one at a bank and one for the gas company. Even though the gas company job paid a little less, the hours were better. Well, when the stock market crashed, the bank who had offered him the job closed and never reopened. My mom said her family would have been homeless had he taken the bank job.

My dad was a kid but used to do odd jobs like errands for people just to make a few cents.

[leftofthedial]

21. my mom grew up during the depression

most of the older generation are now dead

[magellan]

23. Yep, we were talking about it over Thanksgiving

My grandfather lost his job in the silk mills in NJ. The whole family turned to raising chickens to sell the eggs. My dad remembers candling the eggs and delivering them on his bike.

[EFerrari]

24. My mom and her siblings do. They were living in Mexico City

in exile and my grandmother had to try to get into radio quiz shows to win prize money to buy bread. I have a picture of my mother during that time. She's sitting in a public park with her sister. They are both too thin by about 20 lbs. It was a terrible time.

[Hoosier Dem]

27. It impacted my family a great deal...

My parents were too young to rememebr the depression, but my older relatives remembered it for the rest of their lives. Two examples:

My great-aunt is almost 90 and, to this day, her favorite breakfast food is toast spread with lard :puke: I asked her once why she ate it and she said "Well, during the Depression, we couldn't afford butter do I got used to using lard since it was always available. This generation also throws NOTHING out. For example, they'll keep eating a ham for a few days until most of us would say "There's not much left, toss it out." Not these folks: the hambone is then used to make ham and navy bean soup!

Growing up, there was an older gentleman in the family we all called "Uncle Joe". He was about my grandmother's age but had a different last name than anyone else in the family. As an adult, I found out the story behind "Uncle Joe". One day, during the depression, a teenager came to my great-grandmother's door and asked if there was anything she needed done in exchange for some food. Turns out, he was 14. His mom had died when he was little and his father had lost his job and told him "Son, I can't afford to keep you, so you'll have to make it on your own." Well, my great-grandmother couldn't tutn Joe away, so she took him in (despite having nine children of her own) and made him a part of the family. Joe grew up with the family, served in World War II, retuned home, and led a wonderful life with his sweetheart Anna until she died after 55 years of marriage. Uncle Joe passed away a couple of years ago, and will be missed for a long time.

[hedgehog]

77. My uncle had a similar experience.

He lost his family at a young age and ws raised by a neighbor lady. The funny thing is that he had an unusual name and never knew where his family had come from.

[Frustratedlady]

29. Absolutely. My parents often brought it up...

especially when we bought a car or something. The Depression made quite an impression on them, although they didn't suffer like many people. They were farmers and had plenty of food, my grandfather was a cobbler and repaired the family members' shoes, Mom canned and preserved whatever she could.

I don't think many families could do that, today. Those of us who are older could probably adjust, but it would be rough on those who don't cook from scratch, sew or work a garden.

I hope we never find out.

[ThomWV]

31. More On My Father Than My Mother, But Both, Definitly

And of course my grandparents.

My father was from Cleveland, where it hit hard. My mother was from the south, where the family had never had jack shit anyway, so it wasn't such a shock for that half of the family.

[never cry wolf]

32. My dad lived through it, my mom never really knew

My late dad talked about it often. He was born in '24 and his dad was a mostly unemployed carpenter/cabinet maker in Chicago. His mom had to work as a seamstress in a factory to make ends meet. He'd tell me how his dad taught him to walk with his head down on the chance he may find a streetcar transfer or the odd coin. Grandpa made most of his own furniture as they could not afford to buy. I have a desk he made. It is beautifully done complete with a secret compartment for important papers and cash and drawer bottoms made from old signs. (He scrounged for material everywhere.) It is my prized possession.

On a side note, Grandpa was a WWI vet who saw alot of action. He participated in the Bonus March on DC and heard Smedley Butler speak. He also joined the communist party and hung posters and such for them in the 30's. He introduced my dad to their presidential candidate. Good old gramps was a lefty activist, tee hee.

My mom grew up downstate. Her dad had a doctorate in agronomy and was a VP of Funks G Hybrid corn company and traveled the world developing and selling specialized hybrid corn seed. She never knew there was a depression except for remembering her mom feeding alot of hobos that wandered by from the train tracks near their house. She, of course, is a huge repuke, listens to rush religiously and thinks Spiro Agnew is a God.

[bikebloke]

33. I remember my grandmother stories

My father and siblings were children. Then my grandfather died young from a gassing in the Great War. Perhaps that's where I picked up my frugality (and thus my father called me "jew boy"). I hate to throw things away in case parts can be salvaged in the future for some repair.

During that period, my grandmother inherited some land in Fairfax County. She couldn't do anything with it, so she gave it away. Now it's probably worth millions...until the upcoming depression reverts it to worthlessness again.

One thing I always heard from people who lived through that era in the DC area, was to get a job with the government. Any job to guarantee survival.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

34. I remember the depression.

[Greybnk48]

35. My Aunt still fixes creamed peas on toast

which she calls her favorite "depression dinner." Her husband refuses to eat it.

[Pyrzqxgl]

73. shit on a shingle my Dad called it.

[tenshi816]

37. My mother was born in 1933

By the time she was born as the youngest of five children, the family had moved from Georgia to a tiny mill town called Honea Path, South Carolina, where my grandfather had gone to work at Chiquola Mill, a textiles manufacturer there. In 1934, there was a national textile strike and at the Chiquola Mill, there was a management-organized shooting of strikers, killing seven people, wounding fifteen more, and effectively breaking the strike. No one was ever charged in the killings. Not long thereafter, my grandfather (having seen the handwriting on the wall) took his growing family back to Georgia to, once again, try to make a living at farming.

My mother's early years were horrific. My grandparents split up when she was 18 months old, and my grandfather took the children away from my grandmother because she couldn't support them (she had no skills to get a job and no safety net to help her support five little ones under the age of 10). My mother never saw her mother again and it had a massive negative impact on her later development (she subsequently became a pretty awful mother herself, for one thing). My grandfather remarried almost immediately and his new young wife brutalized my mother and her older brothers and sisters. By 1939 there were four more children born into the family and they were nearly destitute. All of the kids dropped out of school by the time they were 14 to go to work.

I don't remember the Depression because it was decades before I came along, but my parents and grandparents sure did. My grandfather never stopped blaming Herbert Hoover and would've cut off one of his limbs before ever voting Republican. Ironically, all of my mother's siblings who are still living (and their families) are now all good fundie Repubs. <sigh>

[Lars39]

38. My dad was born in 1926, mom in 1934.

The only way I know to describe how they lived in rural TN at that time is to compare their lifestyle to 'living farms' of the 1800's, except the living farms portrayed seem prosperous to how my parents lived. :(

[tenshi816]

41. Your family sounds like mine.

Parents both born in 1933 and grew up on farms in Georgia. My dad used to say that they got one new pair of shoes a year when school started in September and my grandmother used to tell the kids "don't let your feet grow". If they outgrew their shoes, they went to school barefoot. I type these words knowing that they're true and yet still know that it's something that I can barely imagine happening. When my father tells stories of his boyhood, in my mind it conjures up those old 1930s photographs taken by the WPA of migrant worker families.

When my parents were young, the schools in their part of northeast Georgia used to close down for a couple of weeks when it was time to pick the cotton and all the kids worked alongside the adults until it was done, then the schools opened back up.

Edit: typo

[Lars39]

46. Shoes and school were often considered a luxury.

Both my parents picked cotton as children and young adults. Absolutely horrible poverty.:(

[slackmaster]

39. I had an aunt who used to rinse out kitty litter to reuse it

My mom loves to remind me that she and her siblings ate mostly cabbage soup for several years, until they started collecting their father's military allotment in World War II.

Hell yes they remember the Great Depression.

[gollygee]

40. My parents were both born toward the end of it

so they don't remember it. But I certainly remember hearing about it from my grandparents. Though both sides seemed to do relatively well through it.

[Cleita]

42. Every one I knew who lived then is dead meaning mostly parents

of my peer group and me, and we noticed a psychosis that those who had lived through it developed. We called it a depression mentality, whereby everything was saved and reused. Yes, today this would be called recycling but it was really an illness, that caused a packrat mentality. Our garage and closets were full of saved things, that "you never knew when you might need it".

I mean it just wasn't clothes and other household goods. It was every magazine and newspaper they ever bought; every jar that could be reused; every piece of string wrapped in a ball; every piece of Christmas wrap. My husband once remarked that my mother's house looked like a museum because of all the junk filling every shelf and table, things she never would never throw away.

It affected us kids because if we didn't fold the wax paper our school lunches were packed in and bring it back with our lunch boxes we were scolded. Although most of us had plenty of clothes, we were expected to wear the same clothes for a week to school to save on laundry soap. Although most of us were raised after the reforms FDR brought in and WWII, the new affluence our parents enjoyed didn't change the mental scars that the depression left on them for their lifetimes.

[KoKo]

55. What's scary is how bad it must have been for so many to have induced

this psychosis. I know what you mean about the "saving and reusing" everything. It went overboard into obsession.

It's hard to think about a time like that ever coming again that would cause such disturbance. Hopefully getting Bushies out is a step so that we don't suffer like so many did during the GD.. :-( I helped clean out a couple of relatives houses and realize that they lived very frugally long after it was over...and they were good people...but ohhh the stuff that had to be discarded. It was sad having to donate and throw out what had been so carefully recycled.

[shanti]

44. my parents grew up on the west coast

(southern cal and central washington state) and were pretty much untouched by the depression - they both lived in the "country". i remember asking them both this question and that's what they said (they're both in their 70's). however, my father IS a major cheapskate to this day!

[WolverineDG]

48. Every time I go clothes shopping

I hear my mom's voice "How many things do you have that that can go with?" She would constantly remind me that she had 2 dresses, 2 sweaters, & 2 pairs of shoes--one for everyday & one for Sunday. And she was one of the "lucky" kids in Houston, because many of her friends only had 1 of each.

And both my parents were bad about throwing things away--"packrat mentality." Cleaning out my dad's house after he passed away was a freakin' nightmare.

My cousins & I are battling that mentality & force ourselves to throw stuff away.

Depression era dish that my mom used to serve: Fried Spam with pineapple on top & fried grits.

dg

[warrens]

49. My mom just died this summer

But her father was ill through most of it and died in 1942. She rarely mentioned that time period...it was not good. Her mom was a Canadian school teacher, and with prices through the ceiling, her salary was just enough to get by.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

54. My father was an "Okie" who migrated to California.

He and his brother were actually "Arkies" who fled the poverty in Arkansas in the '30s. They worked at any job he could find. Finally both ended up on the docks in San Francisco and joined the ILWU. My father was blacklisted and moved to L.A. with a piece of knife in his head that a strikebreaker had stuck him with.

He was killed when I was 4, but I heard about him from other family members. He was a socialist, a drunk, and mean as a rattlesnake. But, in some ways a "good man". A hard man in hard times.

[WI_DEM]

56. My grandparents did, and I had many wonderful talks with my grandfather

about those days and his reverence for FDR.

[dysfunctional press]

57. my aunt was a child of the depression.

she was an orphan, adopted in the mid-20's by a very wealthy family- when the crash came, her adoptive father lost it all and shot himself in the head. my aunt and her adoptive mother mostly lived in churches for the next 8 years or so, with her mother doing work for the room and board.

[Not_Giving_Up]

58. My grandparents have told me about it

They were both in rural areas at the time, my grandmother's father owned a logging company, and they managed to do alright. My grandfather grew up on a farm, and they also did alright. They always have money in the bank, but there was usually a good sized stash of cash, just in case something wild happened.

[kskiska]

59. My mother says she didn't know there was a depression

Everyone she knew lived the way she did. She lived downtown over a furniture store in a sort of melting pot neighborhood of Greeks, Armenians, Hungarians, Italians, etc., and hardly anyone was well off. Her mother was widowed when her Armenian father died prematurely at age 35, and they lived on welfare and his Army pension. I have pictures of my mother and grandmother sadly standing at the gravesite. It looks like something out of "Paper Moon".

[Spirochete]

61. The ones that would are all dead

but none of them ever forgot it. They all would try to feed any guest the entire contents of their refrigerators. I got the idea most of them suffered through very short food supplies in those years.

[On the Road]

62. My Parents Were Born in 1929 and 1932

so yes, they both remember the depression.

My paternal grandfather owned a small industrial locker company in NJ which went bust after 1929. He had to move in with his brother, who was paymaster for the Newark post office, a good job to have in the 1930s. He and my grandmother both died during WWII from unrelated causes.

My maternal grandfather owned a fencing company in Cincinnati with about 40 employees. I'm sure the depression hurt business, but he and my grandmother survived and were pretty well off.

Both my parents have the depression mindset of frugality and financial conservatism.

[annabanana]

64. My father's family's circumstances were much reduced.

My mother's family hid the reality from the kids. . told them that moving to the tiny place in florida was for "Gramma's health"... Mom didn't figure it out for years.

[montieg]

65. My dad was born in 1919. He still has the receipt from the Ag

Dept where they slaughtered 50 head of my Grandfather's cattle --while people were starving--- to try , unsuccessfully, to drive up the price of beef. Pushed them in a big hole and covered them up. That night my granddad's friends dug them up and worked all night into the next day processing them for people all around here (west Central Texas). They were tough people. I'm not sure Americans could make it through that today.

[TheBaldyMan]

68. Both my parents were born in the late twenties and grew up during the depression and WWII

both served in the armed services at the tail end of the war, Dad in the Merchant Navy at 16 and Mum in the WRN at 17.

Both came from large families so it must have been tough and neither would recommend a return to the bad old days of the thirties.

[blues90]

69. yes , my parents were born in 1917

I heard all about it and it was some pretty scary stuff even though they talked about it years after and made it sound at times like joking matter most likely their way of getting past it all .

They had their first child my older sister in their 30's so it was quite a while after before we came along .

Now days I can't imagine what this would look like since so much has changed with jobs and the much larger population . I see something like this coming since the dollar is in big trouble .

[madokie]

72. Are you kidding me. hell I can hardly throw out the trash

let alone something that can maybe be used later. The depression was fresh on my parents minds when I was born, them having gone through the depression here in OK

[applegrove]

74. That generation understand that in wealthy countries nobody should

ever have to beg for help feeding their children. And many did during the depression. Even if you were lucky enough to have a job at the time...you knew people who suffered terribly. People who were willing to work at anything and couldn't find a way to keep their young families from starving.

That was quite a generation. They knew stuff about the world. And gave us the New Deal.

[SoyCat]

75. Yes. My mom was born in '30 and my father was born in '26.

Their experiences formed their personalities. My father became an entrepreneur and my mother a mega-budget conscious planner. My dad is no longer living but my mom is still quite careful with money.

[Odin2005]

76. My grandmother (b. 1923) lived through both depression and dust bowl.

She is the daughter of Norwegian immigrants who settled on a farm in Minnesota.

[KoKo]

78. Kick for more memories....good thread! ..

[Skittles]

80. my mother was a WWII kid (Brit), dad a Depression kid

I got a double-whammy

My dad could not tolerate any kind of waste or excess and would never allow disparaging remarks about poor people to go unopposed.......yes