My family and the Great Depression

[HockeyMom]

My Dad was 5 years old in 1929 when the Stock Market crashed. He was the youngest of 4 children living in a 2 bedroom apartment in NYC. His father worked in a grocery store stacking shelves, sweeping, mopping, and taking out the trash. When the Depression hit, he would go through the trash of the grocery store looking for "edible" food for his family. Dad would tell me how he would bring home old moldy cabbage, lard, and stale bread. Grandma would make soup out of this mixture which this family of 6 would eat for days. Dad used to say years later that even though he was Irish, he never wanted to eat cabbage ever again.

He told me how he used to rummage through trash cans looking for items that he could bring home, or sell on the streets. Rope or cord was a good item. He said they would tie the rope around their shoes so the soles wouldn't fall off. The homeless people were beaten and robbed for whatever change or better clothing items they might have. It was not a very pretty picture of life back then that he painted.

One day, Grandpa read something in the newspaper, which he got out of a trash can, that changed their lives. No, he didn't start his own business or anything like that. He got up one night at 1 in the morning, went down to the docks, and waited in line with hundreds of other men. He was one of the last men to get hired to work as a longshoreman. Dad said the money Grandpa made doing that was like being RICH in comparison. He joined the Union and worked on the piers until he retired with his PENSION.

From my Dad's, Mom's, and Grandma's words of their first hand experiences I have a pretty good idea of what happened during those times. I heard their words and saw their TEARS. How many of today's young, arrogant politicians saw or heard from family about those times? Why in the world do they think SOCIAL SECURITY was ever invented in the first place? It was to SAVE people from this ever happening again. As they say, those who cannot learn from history, are doomed to repeat it.

I did not mention my Mom's family. As some may know, Grandma didn't trust banks or Wall Street, and stashed away money. My Grandpa was a Wall Street Broker. The family was fairly well-to-do, before the crash. It hit him very hard, and not just financially. He knew people who committed suicide when they lost everything. I suppose between that and losing all his money, and status, so to speak, he started drinking very heavily and passed away 5 years later at the age of 34. Mom was 10 when he died.

Grandma had very personal reasons to dislike Wall Street. I guess it's been passed down in our family.

[shraby]

1. My Grandma said you'd be surprised at the ingredients you

can leave out of biscuits and still have biscuits...they came out one by one until she found out what will and will not make a biscuit.

On my Father's side, they at one time had nothing but a bit of sugar to eat..he was the oldest, born in 1921 so at a child every year or every other year, by 1930 there were at least 5 kids in the family. Not a fun time.

[newfie11]

2. Mine were on the farm so food was not a problem

But my Mother & Daddy never threw anything away that could be repaired. Something I notice in this throw away society.

[midnight]

3. Through ALEC model legislation the working people are kept in the

dark about the choices that are being crammed down their throats.... Like the country's poor need to eat peas so that the rich can eat everything else....

[sfwriter]

4. My grandfather got into the CCCs...

...after riding the rails for two years starving.

He learned to be an electrician there.

He helped build the atomic bomb.

He worked for Union Carbide and died of a rare bladder cancer after ten years of retirement.

His daughter collected $150,000 from the DOE for his sacrifice there.

She's a Tea Partier who says the government never did ANYTHING good.

I don't talk to them anymore.

[jwirr]

17. How old was your grandfather when he started riding the rails? I

understand that a lot of the so called hobos were teens who left home because the family could not support them anymore.

[texastoast]

25. My dad rode the rails

And hopped trucks that promised a ride to a paycheck working the harvest somewhere. He was born in 1907 and was a young man when the Depression hit. His hoboing stories were my favorite bedtime stories.

My spousal unit's parents were the children of original West Texas settlers. I remember a story my MIL told about a family with eight children riding in a wagon up to their farm when she was a little girl, asking for food. There was none to share, but they were welcomed to stay on the land and camp. The mother of these eight children boiled wild onions that had been gathered in water, and that is what the family had for dinner that night before they moved on the next day.

[sfwriter]

26. As I understand it, that was the case.

He was VERY young.

He started as a teen in the CCCs as a Cook. Learned woodworking and then Electrical work.

[glinda]

24. That was heavy. wow. Sorry.

[sfwriter]

27. I'm not sorry...

I'm proud of him AND my country.

I'll bet my aunt is only one of MANY assholes in the tea party who are now ignored by their relatives.

[texastoast]

5. Lint saving was popular

It could be washed and used like we use cotton balls or for filtering, padding, and other purposes. String was another big collectible. The printed muslin that packaged flour found its way first into a useful article of clothing and later recycled into a quilt or apron.

These things I know as my mother told me so. And I still have one of those flour sack aprons.

How easy it was to learn to waste, as was marketed beginning in the 1950s. And Madison Avenue hasn't let up yet.

[jwirr]

18. The grain bags were used for everything. One of the things I

found interesting and ironic at the Hoover Library were hundreds of those bags with messages on them thanking him for all he had done for the starving in Europe after WWI. considering his role in the Great Depression his role in Europe was a surprise: he sent food in those bags for them.

[pansypoo53219]

21. my grandma was a child of the depression.

we found so many string wads i her hoard. her older sister kept a lot of stuff too. my other grandpa was a HUGE recycler. when i g to estate sales, you can tell who were more changed by the depression. even when i was a kid, my grandma f stretched out the marzetti's coleslaw with milk.

i went to an art center-michael kohler in sheboygan to check out a depression era whittler extrordinaire. he had been thrown out of his home as a teen. american experience had a great doc on the teen train hoppers.

[senseandsensibility]

6. I'm glad that he finally got a good union job

and a pension. I wish that was possible for more people today.

[nadinbrzezinski]

7. And we are at the edge of something similar

I am so glad my dad did not live to see this... to be honest.

[madrchsod]

9. we are well over the edge...

the tipping point was somewhere towards the end of the 70`s.

[madrchsod]

8. during the 30`s my dad worked for the ccc/wpa

ronald reagan`s dad and his brother moon worked in the ccc/wpa office.that`s when ronny became a democrat.

these stories will fade away as our generation goes on.

[Waiting For Everyman]

10. In the 1950s, it was common to see a framed pic of FDR on peoples' walls.

That's how grateful they were.

I remember seeing that so often when we'd go to visit people when I was a child. That very same area now is a red county. It's really sad.

[jwirr]

19. My signed framed photo of FDR is hanging right over my shoulder

as I type. I fancy him reading what we are talking about here on DU. I will starve before I give it up.

[texanwitch]

11. I father was in the CCC's in 1939, he was the head of his family.

The $25 that was sent home to his mother and little sister saved the day.

Befoe the CCC's he worked at whatever job he could find.

I am glad he has past away, this would kill him with stress.

My father had a decent SS check plus a pension.

He also had a pension from the from the Veterans, service connected.

He earned it all.

Damn these Republicans for stressing out people for pure greed.

[izquierdista]

12. First hand accounts?

Here, listen to Clara: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51VhG8MKxJY

If you know someone real obtuse, she's got 25 more videos on YouTube that they can watch. My father lived as though the Depression could come back at any time; he saved everything -- bent nails, old newspapers, all sorts of coffee cans and plastic cups full of stuff in the garage. My mother figured that it was over and occasionally went through and cleaned things up and threw stuff out. But she was still frugal and knew where every penny was being spent. I don't think anyone who lived through the Depression fell for Republican lies. The only reason Eisenhower won was (1) he was a war hero and (2) he completely accepted the reforms of the New Deal. It wasn't until Nixon's Racist "Southern" Strategy that enough people fell for their lies for them to get their foot back in the door.

[demmiblue]

13. K&R (and bookmarked for further reading)! N/T

[jwirr]

14. Thank you. I have an old NYC newspaper bound into a volume

about the depression. One of the first things I got from reading the articles is that it was very hard to live in a city. My grandparents and parents all lived through the depression in farm country. One family owned their own farm which they had homesteaded in the late 1870s and they had 8 children. They seemed to have survived and managed to keep the farm. There were stories about how grandfather helped out many of the neighbors. The other family were what you would call share croppers and they did not fare so well but they did have access to food and shelter.

I would always make a dinner called a seven layer dinner when my father visited. He loved it and would say, "We were crazy during the depression." What he meant was that while the family went hungry his parents had to sell garden produce to pay the share fees. They had what they needed at their fingertips but it was sold. In the recipe for that dinner was all the things they had raised on that farm.

[NBachers]

15. My dad was 16 when the market crashed in '29. Those days scarred him; he feared that they'd return

He spent his formative years growing up in the Depression.

He was a successful businessman, but he always felt like those days would invade his life again.

He killed himself during the Nixon administration.

He despised Nixon.

My great-uncle Walt Tedens owned a drug store in Manhattan during the Depression.

He allowed people in need to defer paying him. Eventually, he had to go out of business.

[grasswire]

16. I had a book that detailed hundreds of letters sent to the Roosevelts.

It was revealing and heartbreaking. Americans then didn't have so much *stuff* as we have accumulated over the past thirty years. Men, women and children were particularly short on clothing, wearing rags, without winter coats, with a blanket for the baby, and so on. Mothers wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt begging for her castoff clothes or a layette for baby to wear. Children wrote begging for a job for father.

[jwirr]

20. That must have been heart breaking for the Roosevelts to read

those letters but it gives us some insight as to why they were so determined to help the poor.

[grasswire]

22. FYI Here's info on the book

http://www.amazon.com/Down-Out-Great-Depression-Forgotten/dp/0807858919/ref=sr_1_20?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1312082571&sr=1-20

The Roosevelts received 5,000-8,000 paper letters each day.

[jwirr]

23. Thank you. Maybe before I buy it I will see if the library has it.