Care to Share? Stories of your ancestors and the Great Depression

OK, since we all pretty much are resigned to the fact that we are headed towards some very tough, belt tightening times, I thought it would be interesting to hear anecdotal stories of our grandpas, grandmas, great-grandpas and great-grandmas.

Surely we have all had out share of tough times, but it seems like the Great Depression went on and on for some. The purpose of this post is to honor our ancestors who gave us the ultimate examples of prep and survival.

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My Grandpa was a carpenter who was able to keep working steadily through the depression because his reputation for quality went far and wide. He would be the only guy on a job site, building a house, all by himself. Able to feed his 6 kids with no problem.

My other was my Great-Grandpa on my Mom's side. They had started up a bakery business, but when sugar rationing began, their business tanked. It was slow at first, but as people had less and less money, more and more of those pies went on good faith credit and were never paid back. Soon it was impossible to get sufficient ingredients and they closed doors. Grandpa still had some tenure at the Railroad so he started working for them, but soon found out that for some reason they didn't honor his previous 15 years of tenure, and had to start from the bottom up. He was able to make it through by the skin of their teeth. All of their children have stories of how it was, way back when.

Care to share?

My grand father on my fathers side file:///c:/Documents%20and%20Settings/estevens/Desktop/Grandfather%20Stevens.htm
was well off and independently wealthy so my father only knew of the depression from
friends whose families suffered.

My mother was from a Texas farming family and fully understood poor. She did remember the dust bowl. While they had food to eat everything else was hand me
down and of the wrong size. They fed hobos from trains that passed by their farm.
And my mother did hate handpicking cotton as a girl.

Ed

Thanks plantman. I look forward to hearing all the stories.

I think we are heading for our own flavor of Depression, one that most are not ready for or could even fathom. Maybe this thread will be a reality check for all of us.

I need to talk to people I know who went throught it.

I do know that the older generation seems to have a good handle on saving and not wasting anything.

They are also more apt to fix something that is broken rather than buy a new one.

I have heard of people in the Depression wearing the soles of their shoes down to the pavement and either slipping a piece of cardboard in the bottom or repairing them with scraps of leather. (Unthinkable to today's generation of high fashion/ $100/ pair brand-name tennis shoes.)

My grandpa told me at least a few times of remembering being so hungry as a child, he remembers him and his siblings digging in the frozen earth to try to find potatoes that they might have missed earlier in the year.

(Apologies if anyone doesn't like the following since it's not about the Depression but postwar Poland....)

DH grew up in postwar Poland and often put cardboard in his wornout shoes. Practically never slept in a bed by himself as a boy and was often cold, without warm winter clothes. Not infrequently was hungry; bread and milk was a common meal. (Although now he loves bread and milk as a meal!)

Now he can't stand the cold...and can fix anything.

My Mamaw and Pappaw (Mom's parents) did okay because they had a ranch and big acreage at Little, OK in Seminole County. They raised hogs, cattle, chickens, and Mamaw had a HUGE garden, so they always had enough to eat, thankfully. Pappaw ran a side business of selling used cars and tires, and he lost all the money they had in the bank when the banks failed.

But Mom told me that Pappaw had paid cash for their farm and home and that was a big reason that Mamaw married him. Fortunately, Pappaw kept lots of silver and gold coins at home and out of the bank. They helped their neighbors, and fed many hungry people. They were glad to. Mamaw got up at 0400 every day and made pies, bread, fried chickens, rendered hogs, canned TONS of vegetables and fruits and saved every piece of string, metal, foil, etc.

I miss my Mamaw everyday I live - she was my role model and thanks to God she lived for 99 years. Pappaw died when I was 18 months old in 1960, so I really didn't know him.

My Grandaddy and Grandmother (Dad's parents) lived in a very small home in Rogers, Arkansas. They had some land and raised chickens, dairy cattle and a few horses. My Grandaddy worked for the railroad for a time, then worked in the oil fields and he died of a heart attack in 1959 when I was 6 months old.

But I remember Grandmother telling me about the men that would come by their place being hungry and she said she was kinda scared, but she was glad to fry up extra chicken, make extra pies, stew, cornbread, green beans, cake, etc. for them. She had them chop up a few pieces of wood so they could "work" for their meal, but she was sad at how hungry they were.

The Great Depression totally sucked, but thankfully our wonderful grandparents lived through this desperate time, and we have learned lessons from them. I know I certainly have.

My grandmother on my fathers side used to tell me little depression era tidbits. One was just about every family in town had a milk cow tied up in their back yard, and every morning the town herder would collect all the cows, and herd them to the county fairgrounds to graze. Each cow had their own distinctive cowbell on it's neck, so they knew which one went to what family! I have my grandmas cowbell!
She told of wetting dish towels and hanging them over the windows to keep the dust out, and how black they got. She saved everything, scraps of ribbon, string, buttons, etc, and did til she died at 99.

My husbands father used to say they never knew there was a depression, because they didn't live any different! (farmers)
He did tell us how there was no feed/grass for the cattle, so the govt bought the cattle for $10/head, rounded them up to a big ditch by the local town, and shot them all. Made the farmers sick, they thought at least the govt could have canned/butchered some of that meat since so many were hungry!

FIL also told of his parents losing all their money when the market crashed in '29. Apparently the local banker disappeared the day of the crash, with cash in hand, and they never found him.

MIL told of how a neighbor lady had given birth to her 5th child and couldn't feed her, so knocked on the door of the farm across the street and left the baby there. I guess that happened quite a bit at that time.

Blessings, mamaklip

Both parents were in their teens when the depression started. Dad lost his father and Mom lost her mother before the depression. Mom raised a garden to feed younger siblings, grandpa was a carpenter but older and jobs hard to come by. Mom would tell how for a couple weeks one winter all they had to eat were potatoes and grapefruit. Dad did odd jobs while his mother (gramma) raised a garden and chickens. It was hard, but they managed.

They married in '37 and were dedicated gardeners with a milk cow. After the depression and until I was 10 yrs old (1958) Mom would stress out if she didn't have 1000 jars of food put up for the winter. They had six kids (twin and I are the babies) so lots of food was needed. They continued canning "just in case" until they died.

Bump for the A.M. crowd.

My mom was 10 yrs. old when the depression hit. She always said how hungry everyone was. Not starving....but hungry. I remember her telling me that for a treat her and my uncle and aunt would take some bread and fry it in lard for something different to eat. Butter was to expensive to use.

My grandmother made everything homemade....bread, soups etc. Going out to a restaurant was not something that anyone did. Everything was fixed if it got broke. No going out and buying anything new because of the money situation. My mom always said "that it's not how much you earn but how you manage what you earn."

Almost all clothes where sewed at home. All meals were made at home. If we got sick my grandmother would always try to treat us with homemade treatments. If we got a cold we were to "sweat it out" by drinking tea with honey and a tsp. of whiskey in it. I hated that!! If we had congestion in our head we would have to put a towel over our heads and breath in steam from a bowl of hot water with vicks in it. Going to the doctor was not something we did very often.

She also had a garden in the backyard. Everyone worked and no one was lazy.
I guess the thing that my family talked about the most was how hungry they got sometimes and how money was so tight. One thing my mother always said was how much she hated having to use the same towel to dry her face and hands that everyone else used. My grandmother did this in order to save using soap and the expense of doing laundry all the time. My mom would say she always found a corner of the towel that no one used. Laundry was always hung outside on the clothes line. She cooked all food on a wood cook stove until sometime in 1960's. Summer and winter both. It got so hot in that kitchen sometimes!!

teadrinker

My Grandfather [my favorite story]

My Grandfather on my Mother's side was a homesteader wheat farmer
in Eastern Oregon when the depression hit he couldn't sell his grain so
he went to a neighbor and traded some of his grain for some baby turkeys
he raised those on what grain he had and at Thanksgiving and Christmas he would
drive around town and trade fat turkeys for what ever you had that is how he
kept his family going

Ancestors? How about my parents? Dad was born in 1916 on a hardscrabble red dirt hill farm in central Alabama. Mom was born in 1926 under similar circumstances, save that her father ran a small country store as well as farming.

Times were hard for both of them, but they managed to get by. It was fearsomely hard work, with unimaginably small returns- I have receipts for some of the cotton my dad's mom sold at the local gin, and the prices paid were pitiful for the amount of backbreaking work it took to produce the crop. Dad's family grew cotton as a cash crop, corn as animal feed and for corn meal as well as gardening and raising cattle for beef and milk/butter/buttermilk and chickens for meat and eggs.

Mom always said that had it not been for the local bootleggers buying sugar, the store would have gone under 8^). They were the only ones with money to pay for anything. Her father cut timber on his own land for sale locally, as well as gardening, farming and raising cattle and chickens.

Best story from my wife's depression era relatives? When cleaning out one of my wife's great-aunt's homes after her death a few years ago, relatives found a paper bag full of bits of string. The bag was carefully labeled, "String too short to save." That story has always been the essence of the depression era mindset to me.

dd

My Grandfather worked in a furniture factory as an upholsterer. When the depression hit, the factory closed. He found a job on the trains as one of the guys who put out and retrieved the mailbags that were hung on those hooks if it was not a scheduled stop.

On his route, they found a little town out of state that looked promising. They packed up the two boys and all their belongings into a Model A Ford and drove the 300 miles. He usually worked for a furniture manufacturer and did jobs on the side.

When I was a kid in the 50's, I always wondered why they kept a small tin can by the telephone. Each time they made a call, they put a nickle or dime in it. Turns out that at one point during the depression, their phone service was cut off for non-payment. That tin can was there up until the 80's.

Grandma also told the story about her brother-in-law who came to stay with them in Buffalo, supposedly looking for work during the depression. She was getting fed-up because he spent most of his time laying about the apt. The last straw was when he complained that the soup was 'too watery'. He was gone the next day.

Great-great Grandma was from Sweden. They lived in a wooden house that they had built before the turn of the last century. Apparently Betty was a meticulous housekeeper. When she got laid up, my Grandmother went over with a bunch of the Grandkids to clean the house. After Grandma was done scrubbing the floors (bare wood in those days), she threw the bucket of dirty water to go out the window. However, the windows were so squeaky clean, it was actually closed. it took a while to get the window and walls back to their original state. The other Grandkids never let her forget her mistake.

My Dad was a kid when Prohibition started. Even small towns had their own brewries. When the one close to them was discovered to be still operating, the Feds came in wielding axes and smashing the wood kegs. As the beer ran down the street gutter, people with pails were collecting it. The neighborhod dogs got drunk. My Dad said it was quite a sight.

They were living south of the Anthracite Coal Regions in Pennsylvania. Many a coal train ran along the RR tracks then. It was not unusual to see locals picking up stray coal chunks along the tracks to keep warm and cook. The old railroad ties would tend to disappear too.

That area of PA was heavily settled by Germans and Swiss in the early 1800's. The early settlers were Shawnee Indians who had been driven down from NY by the Iroquois Nation. The first Anglos were Brits. Yes, the area was heavy with Tory loyalists during the Revolutionary War, although the newer settlers from Germany and Switzerland were firmly on the side of the Revolutionary's.

It was not uncommon to see English Lutheran churches. The distinction was that their services were not in German. My old home church always had a German pastor. Very strict and no nonsense. If you had questions of faith, he TOLD you what it was all about.

Yeah, thread drift.

My mother was born in 1916 and when she was

six years old her parents along with her brother left everything of their worldly goods they had in CA to take a trip to Florida where they heard jobs could be had. It took them six months to get there in their old car. My Grandfather found work there for a short time; however within six months they headed back to CA. There they began a chicken ranch and within a year a blight hit the chickens and they lost them all. They headed for the Pacific Northwest where Grandfather found a job with the railroad and he worked for them for 6 years or so...long enough to get out of their apt. and into a house in Tacoma. My mother married my father dob 1912 and they lived with her parents in the apt. and later the house. There was a huge garden at the house and on the next door lot and the women canned and preserved every bit of produce that was not eaten on a daily basis. They had chickens for meat and eggs. My grandfather lost his RR job and took off looking for work (again)..while my parents built a tiny house next door. My father became the milkman until he was drafted into WWII. (I think he signed up)...and I remember the war years, with blackout curtains on house windows and standing time in the "lookout towers" watching for enemy airplanes. My grandfather returned and worked for the Brewery and father followed and worked there too. My father became VP for the Western States and eventually they moved to SF. We attended church every Sunday and my grandmother lived to be 82; mother 83 and my father passed at 42; after this my mother worked for Burgermeister in SF as Secretary to the President and eventualy she remarried.

I learned a lot of skills I still use today from those women who peopled my early days...and oh, what I would give to have an out door line to hang my freshly washed clothes on!! God Bless, Mari Susan

Great Stories, Everyone!!

Bump for the Friday night crowd.

My parents married in 1933, in the middle of the depression. My dad told me one time that he and my mother got married because he found out that Ohio Bell was hiring, but would only take married men. Mom was working as a live-in housekeeper, which she hated. Mom and Dad eloped to Fort Wayne and kept the marriage secret for several months, while Dad landed the job. After awhile, Mom moved in with Dad at his parents home. They lived there for a couple of years until they had saved enough for a downpayment on a bank reposessed house costing $5000. It was a modest bungalow-style house on a large lot in a blue collar neighborhood. They lived in the house over 60 years until they became too frail to get up and down the stairs and Dad's Parkinson's got pretty bad. Dad worked at Ohio Bell until he retired at age 65, over 40 years. Mom and Dad were married 72 years until Dad died two years ago at age 93. Mom died earlier this year at age 93. Mom was always very frugal and a prepper. I think it came from the time during the Depression when money was tight and they couldn't afford a lot of food. I remember a pantry room in our basement that was always full of canned goods and root vegetables.

My Dad was born in 1905 and my Mom in 1910......they are the ancestors you speak of here.

Dad's Dad was a well driller.........water type. He had to travel throughout 3 states in his well drilling operations.

While away, my Dad, Grandpa and Great Uncle Pete lived in a tent, summer and winter. This was in Mich. Ohio and into Indiana.

They would be gone for months at a time and once drilled a well, others in the area,would hire them to drill more wells.

Back at home, Grandma tended to a very large garden, and raised chickens,turkeys and ducks. I would guess they had at least 50 acres but almost all was in huge old oak trees.
The soil was very sandy so crops werent real healthy except down by the wet area where they had a couple of acres of blueberry bushes.

When I was a kid in the 40s we always had a huge garden and we lived right in the village. We also had about 50 chickens. Every Spring we would go to the post office and pick up the new chicks. My Dad penned off part of the garage for their coop. We always had eggs and every Sunday......fried chicken.

I couldnt tell you how much canning my Mom did. We had an area off the kitchen in the stairway going to the basement that always had many jars of all kinds of veggies and pickles.
Mom made the bread most of the time for us 4 boys. I dont know how they made it financially. I know for a fact that it took half of my Dad's pay just for food.
Mom was an excellent seamtress and made a ton of clothes and did a lot of patching on our clothes.
One bath a week for all of us.....Saturday night. One reason was the septic field wouldnt take a lot of excess water.
In a way, I was raised just like a depression child.

I still save all kinds of 'stuff'. Sometimes string Dozdoats....

Thing is, I didnt know we were so poor until after I grew up.

My parents were young (teens) during the depression. My grandparents on my mom's side were farmers. My dad's side were wealthy, politicians. Early stories were that my paternal grandmother moved in her lover (second husband eventually) to help with the house while her first husband was dying of parkinsons. Small town, first husband was mayor - the talk that ensued!! Anyway, she was a world traveler and sent my dad to boarding schools for part of his life. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, my mom and her family lived ok because of the farm. They could eat, sell some eggs and milk, made pies etc... It was hard, but they apparently moved in with their parents (3 generations). My mom and dad married. I think the depression wiped out my dad's mom and she took hubby number two to try and keep her style of living up to par.

My relationship with the grandmas was funny. My dad's mom tried to "citify" me and get me into the country club scene. Didn't take. My mom's mom was wonderful. She canned, baked from scratch, gardened. Very talented woman. Her husband was an engineer who was a big-time drunk with anger management issues. He hunted, and also had a smoke house where he'd hang the meat. I learned from that grandma all the cooking, gardening and kitchen witch stuff (herbals). She taught me some of the what I've learned is Ozark magic traditions. They never called it that, but I got a book written by Vance Randolph about Ozark traditions and lo and behold all the things that my grandma did made sense.

My maternal grandparents moved to Branson to retire in the 60's. I went to visit them often and met a lot of the "back woods" Ozarkers. The ones who lived back in the hills that come out to shop at Christmas in ill-fitting overalls. Last of a dying breed. I learned a lot from them as well. I loved Branson back then, biggest thing was the nickleodeon and 5 cent ice cream cones and the movie house downtown. The city ended at the water tower on the top of the hill. The only music was Presley's family. Silver dollar city was a train and a cave. I learned from my grandma how to make homemade noodles, desserts, bake bread, hand wash and line dry clothes, deal with a drunk, be patient and caring no matter the circumstance, make do with anything.

My maternal grandfather was a very gruff man. I think it was because when I was very little, grandma cut off 3 of her fingers on one of his saws. She was cleaning in the woodshop he had in his basement and didn't know the saw was on and running. She went to St. Louis to get her hand operated on. I just remembered her as being normal - just shy a few fingers. He taught me how to fish, how to clean them and how to be stoic and take it like a man. I was taught to hunt at a young age. Went with my father and brother, stomping in the fields in the cold and grey days. My first shot, with a .22 blasted me on my butt. I was only 7 or 8.

I was taught about farms and animals from my grandparents neighbors who had working farms. By the time I was born, my granparents had no animals. I learned not to take a short cut through the field they kept the bull in . I learned not to get into a pen with pigs, ever. I learned horses can kick you the hard way (I still have the scar on my forehead).

I'm glad I took to my maternal grandmother instead of my dads mom. Eek. I would have been some floozied broad in a Hummer bitching about the working class peons crimping my style.

I tried to teach my kids some of the self-reliant things I was brought up with. Now it's grandkids. My, how time flies.


Sage

My dad was born in 1929 and my mom in 1930. Their earliest memories are of poverty and hardship.

My mother hates to cook to this day because she was cooking full meals for her parents and baby brother when she was six years old. Gram cleaned houses from morning till night for the town's wealthy, which was the family's only steady source of income. Gramps used to walk five miles each way, every day, on the off chance he'd be hired for day labor at one of the SW PA area mills. He had to walk...there was no money to pay for public transportation. The hard work had fringe benefits, though...both of my grandparents died in their late 80's. They were strong and sturdy.

Dad's family fared better than most since his grandparents owned a farm, but it was still a struggle. They wasted nothing and ate any part of an animal that was edible. To this day, my dad still loves pig's feet since Dad grew up with them being a special treat during butchering time.

I am fortunate enough to have known my great-grandparents on my maternal grandmothers' side...they died within months of each other, in their 90's, when I was eight. They immigrated here in the early 1900's. Out of ten great grandchildren, I was the favorite...we lived nearby and I saw them often, and as such, was the only great grandchild who wasn't intimidated by their age and could easily understand their broken English and even a little Slovak. I have fond childhood memories of walking their large family vegetable garden with Great Gramps in the summers...I actually learned to walk in 1970 in that yard and garden. That garden fed 12 people through the Depression years, so he was pretty good at growing things. He would hold my hand and tell me in broken English (his native language was Slovak) all about how to grow food, and I had my own personal little watering can...I was allowed to water the plants when we'd walk.

The funniest story, though, has to do with my grampa's distrust of the banks. My Gram and Gramps didn't have much, but what they had was theirs, free and clear. They didn't believe in those "newfangled credit cards" because they remembered having to buy groceries on credit and hated how that made them feel, so after the Depression when they were finally flush, they never owed anyone a dime ever again.

Anyhoo, they had a checking account, but they only put enough in it every month to write checks for the utilities and other essentials. The rest of their paychecks, and later, pension checks and social security, were kept in the house, in cash, because they well remembered the 1929 panic and what they lost. We knew Gramps had a substantial savings, but never knew where he hid his stash...

When he was on his deathbed in a coma from extremely high calcium levels due to bone cancer, we were all in a panic on top of our grief...none of us had ANY clue where his stash might be, not even my Gram. As luck would have it, he came out of the coma for about 12 hours three days before he died. In that time, although he couldn't talk, he motioned my mother to open his wallet. Inside, on a piece of paper tucked in a secret compartment, was a full inventory of all the hiding places in the house where the money could be found. In the same wallet were pictures of each and every one of us that we never even knew he had...my mom sobbed when she found a picture of her when she was a little girl. It's one of the few that was ever taken of her as a child, and he'd carried that picture with him always for 60 years. We also all got to say goodbye...we truly believe he forced himself out of that coma to say good bye to us, and to tell us where the money was hidden, so my Gram would be taken care of when he was gone.

After his funeral, we had a lot of laughs and a mini-wake the day we searched for those hiding places, because some of them were quite hard to reach, lol. As the "smallest" and youngest member of my family ("smallest" meaning that I was 22 years old, 5'8" and 135 pounds...we are sturdy stock, lol!) I got to crawl through the attic and basement of their home of 60 years to reach the hiding places. I had a hard time getting to them; to this day, I'll never know how Gramps reached them in his advanced age!! He was a MASTER at hiding things, and I've learned a few tricks from him that may serve me well in a SHTF scenario (no, I won't share them. )

The amount of money we found was not "large" by today's standards (it would buy you an inexpensive new car today.) But, it was amazing that he had saved so much over the years on so little income, and it meant my grandmother was able to cover property taxes, live comfortably, and keep their home till she died six years later.



edit to add: Lessons I learned from my grandparents and great-grandparents:

1. When it comes to clothes, buy few but buy well so they will last. Mom and my uncle only had five outfits at any point in their youth, but my uncle was voted "best dressed" in high school because they bought good stuff, took care of it, and most important, learned that clothes don't make the man or woman...the man or woman makes the clothes.

2. You can grow a lot of your own food with even a small garden in the middle of town, if you know what you are doing. DH has applied that philosophy to our apartment patio and we had a nice summer harvest from seven square feet of garden.

3. Being frugal and living below your means is a wise way to live.

4. There is value in keeping some secrets and in knowing how to stash things away for a rainy day. (look at gramps...all that money in the house and nobody ever knew how much till he died!)

5. Hard work doesn't kill you; it makes you stronger.

6. Don't be afraid to try foods that may frighten others...things that look scary often taste quite good, especially if you are hungry.

7. Money does not, by any means, buy happiness and is no substitute for love. Like timbo, I never knew we were poor as a child because we had love and laughter.

8. Always make time for the old folks...the lessons and life experiences they have to share are more priceless than rubies and more brilliant than gold.

I don't have time to tell all the stories my dad told me about the depression, but I grew up hearing it every day. My father was born in 1901, lost his father when he was seven and became the man of the house. He lived through World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, Korea, Vietnam and the Gulf War. In 1915. he and his two older brothers drove out west and lived in the mountains for two years hunting and trapping. On the way home, his older brother Roy, died of appendicits.

During the prohibition days, he ran liquor and always stayed one step in front of the law. During the Depression, his family lost their 400 acre farm because they couldn't pay the taxes. The entire family of nine lived in a tent at the end of a dead end street for two years. They lived on vegetables they could steal from a garden and peddled newspapers, sold bread, delivered milk to the wealthy and somehow got by on mush and biscuts and gravy. Meat was a rareity because everyone killed all the game the first coulple of years. I remember him telling me of eating a lot of road kill.

I could go on and on, but you get the idea. Did they make it? Yes. Did they struggle? Like hell. Did he learn anything? Yes. Never trust the government to take care of you. Save everything that can be used again or over and over until it is used up. Trust in yourself. Learn to fight for your right to live. No matter how bad things get, live for today because that's all any of us have, and love like there is no tomorrow. Never leave this world wishing you would have said or done something you didn't do or say. Give blessing for what you have and remember, no matter how bad things get, hang in there, it will get better.

My mother and uncle were children in Brooklyn, NY, during the Depression but she told me they always had food because my grandfather worked for New York Telephone Co. as a manager and his installers were busy because the government still needed phones and they were also busy removing phones from peoples homes. Sad that he had to make a living off other peoples misfortune but she said she always invited her friends over for dinner if their families didn't have enough food which was one way to help out.

My father was born in Alabama in 1912. My mother was also born in Alabama in 1916. I wrote a story some years back about the Great Depression based on the memories of my Mother who shared with me their struggles. It is at this link.


http://www.brendas-garden.4mg.com/depression.htm



Mom is now 91 and lives with me. Daddy died in 1963.

We dont have farms now and are going to mostly be dependant on grocery stores. You cant feed a family from a city lot, and you cant keep chickens or goats in a subdivision.



We will have to learn from those honest single mothers who are able to really make ends meet.

not the welfare mindset that is subsidized by the government to the tune of 600 Billion dollars per year in medicaid, food stamps, housing, and education on how

Small apartments, OLD cars, TWO jobs, second hand clothing stores, caseroles, and lots of hot dogs, clothes lines, no cable tv, dollar Red Box movies, No mall shopping........etc

Loon said:

My father was born in Alabama in 1912. My mother was also born in Alabama in 1916. I wrote a story some years back about the Great Depression based on the memories of my Mother who shared with me their struggles. It is at this link.


http://www.brendas-garden.4mg.com/depression.htm



Mom is now 91 and lives with me. Daddy died in 1963.

Click to expand...

Thanks for sharing that Loon, should be printed and shared to all who have forgot. Especially the younger generation who no longer are taught history in schools.

Thanks to all that shared their family history with us , especially to Loon .
It is hard for us to realize what these strong people did to feed and shelter their families , in the society that we are in now I don't know how a lot will survive another depression.
Spot

My folks grew up in the Depression. My dad's mother went three years with no shoes (only bedroom slippers, and this was in the Midwest), and raised five kids on my grandfather's princely pay of $30/month. She went to a real estate company that owned the vacant lot next door and contracted with them to raise vegetables and chickens on the lot in return for keeping it clean, weeds cut, etc..
Her dad worked (as did everyone in my family) in the packinghouse and used to walk three miles to her house every day, winter and summer, with a little box of meat trimmings (bits that would have been thrown away) for her to make soup, and the three miles back home again.\

Wow, let's keep this going, I know there are a few more gems out there! Great examples and just a variety of emotions reading them! I guess people here do care to share!

I am probably some what late getting in on this post. But let me tell you a small part of my story. You see I was born in 1928, And my parents lost everything in 1933. The banks in Chicago closed and took what merger savings my mom had saved. They tried to stay in Chicago for a year but there just was no work. So with what little money they had we boarded a train for Washington state. WE got off At Wenanchie Wash. And we found a place where they were picking apples, It was early fall. We stayed in a camp that had a tent with board sidings. Dirt floor and a stinking mattress on the dirt.I remember looking up at spiders crawling around. I remember the smell, and we all slept on this one mattress. No pillow and just our coats over us. Out side the camp was made up of folks who were so poor that we had one change of clothes, My shoes had worn out. I remember one tent where a lady was frying potato's and they smelled so good. These were all done on a wood fire out side of tents. I went back to our tent and asked mom to fry potato's, but she said no they had no money for potato's, but eat apples. I ate apples for a week and so did my parents. At night you could hear some of the men fighting with other folks. It was crowded and dirty. There was one out house and it was flithy, I used to wander away to go to the bathroom. There was one water well that you had to pump the water up. Us kids would wander around the camp while our parents picked apples. If you were old enough you picked apples also. When I grew up and seen the movie " Grapes of wrath" I said I lived that. My mom had a baby during those times, but she was so malnurish that she miscarried at about 6 months or so. Dad wrapped the baby in a towel and buried it in the woods. When some one died then they just simply wrapped them in something and quietly took them to the woods and buried them.
I was always hungry, very dirty. But folks were pretty honest then and did not steal anyone's food or what they had. After the apples played out we went on to another crop of celery and then grape picking. I have lots of storys of that time,
Old as Dirt.

My Mom

was dirt poor growing up in the depression, born 1921. She went so hungry for so long she got rickets, which warped her lower legs. They had no milk: for breakfast a glass of water with flour mixed in was all the nutrition there was. No fruits, no veggies, mostly not much food. The best time they had was when relatives who owned a farm took them in for almost a year. They had meat at pig slaughter time, and vegetables to eat and can. I won't go into all the horrid stories, just that being dirt poor is more than only a financial condition: Combine lack of resources with lack of education and that's dirt poor.

My Dad grew up somewhat better, although still pretty poor. But his Mom (my grandma) had some mid-wife and nursing training and was able to get work enough to keep them fed. In those days, out in Colorado, the mid-wife came to stay a spell when a birth was imminent. She took her boys (her husband had died of spinal meningitis when my Dad was two) and, after the new baby arrived, cooked, cleaned and whatever else needed doing she did.

I have many stories of ingenuity and tenacity from both sides.

Pretty tough times for all. We're looking at worse coming.

All my ancestors have passed on except my dad, and he doesn't remember the Great Depression because he was born in 1935.

Thank you all so much for caring enough to share your stories. I can't tell you how much I value them.

Southeat Oklahoma is where my parents were

when the depression started. My father's mother died in 1928 and he was the oldest of 6. He quit school and went to work full time to help his dad make a living and keep all his younger siblings together. He had a sister just two years younger than he was and she became the cook and helped with the babies. My grandfather had a garden and sold some of his produce plus he also sold syrup he would gather from some of the trees around his place. My father would help him plus do any other jobs he could get to help the family.

My mother is the 9th of 10 children and her family were migrant workers following whatever crops they could help harvest in SE Oklahoma and into Northern Texas. Sometimes my grandfather would be lucky enough to get a job at a local lumber mill "spotting trees" (marking trees that were tall and straight enough to be cut down).

When he worked for a lumber mill the mill would usually provide houses for them to live in. When he was not working for a mill, they would live in tents in the woods, winter and summer. They would have 3 tents, each one having a wood burning stove for heat. The big tent would be for sleeping for grandpa and grandma and the little kids as well as for a kitchen so it would have a bigger stove.

My mom told me that Grandpa would keep 2 hogs so he would have one for slaughter and one for selling. And they would each get a new pair of shoes. Even living in the woods he could keep them.

One of my favorite stories from my mom is when one week after grandpa and all her brothers had gotten their pay for the week they put it all together and grandma sent them into town to buy groceries. Well, on the way to town the wagon wheel broke and it took almost all the grocery money to buy the parts they needed. So, when these two big young men finally got to the general store they had to decide what groceries they could afford. They purchased flour and cocoa.

Mom said they ate biscuits with chocolate gravy three times a day for a week. But at least they ate.

Unfortunately, Mom's family did not stay long enough in any one place to have a garden, or at least able to harvest what they planted. She said they would plant but then they had to keep moving to follow the crops.

My parents married in 1934 and in Oklahoma it was also during the dust bowl days. So, as newly weds they were part of the trek from Oklahoma to California looking for greener pastures. They were luckier than some of the characters in the "Grapes of Wrath". Dad was able to find work and eventually able to build their first house on their own farm. But that's another whole story.

It's been great reading of everyone else's families and how they survived the depression. My hope and prayer is that we have the same "stuff" so we can survive whatever is coming our way.

May God Bless us all.

I was pretty young so I don't remember many of the storys my great grandmother used to tell, but I do remember "potatoe soup". She used to always talk about them eating nothing but "potatoe soup". I've come across a few letters from that era also that were in my grandparents stuff after they died. They lived on the west coast while most of their relative lived on the east coast. Many of the letters asked of they could spare some money. I suspect a lot of people had to "pool" family funds to survive.

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I never get tired of reading what these people went through to survive.
Spot

My father was born in 1928; Mom was born in 1936. So all four of my grandparents were raising young families during the Depression. Dad's family followed the crops up and down the West Coast, from California to Washington and back again. When possible Grandpa worked in logging camps or on fishing boats. I don't know too much about their lives except that Dad hated corn because sometimes that was all they had to eat.

Mom's parents were both raised on poor farms in Oregon's Coast Range, near the ocean but inland a few miles. The area used to be called the "Appalachia of the West" because of the poverty there -- most of the land is pretty much on end, except for narrow strips in the bottom of the river valleys. One of the 'houses' Grandma lived in growing up was an old calf shed that her father converted into a house -- a very drafty house. Grandma said one time when she was about eleven, it snowed during the night (snow was rare there) and she woke up with snow on her pillow.

Later, when she and Grandad were raising their family, one year they had a total of $200 income for the whole year. I suppose that might have been equivalent to a few thousand dollars nowadays. They raised all their fruit and vegetables, and they had chickens and dairy cows. The river was full of fish, and down near the mouth of the river they lived on was tidewater where they could dig clams. Grandad hunted (with little regard for game laws, although he and the other men in the area had great care for the preservation of the game stocks), and ran traplines -- the furs brought in most of their cash income, especially after he got asthma and they had to give up the dairy farm. About all they bought was shoes for the children; flour, salt, and sugar; coffee; and maybe a length or two of fabric so Grandma could have a new apron or a new dress. The children got shirts and dresses made out of flour-sacks. They never went hungry, and with plenty of firewood all around for the cutting, they never went cold, either. They did without a lot of things, but all in all it really wasn't much different for them than the way they'd been living before the Depression.

The biggest differences between then and now: first, their families lived close-by, even next door. People were able and willing to help one another as needed, and they looked out for one another. Nowadays, our families are scattered all over (my two older daughters are in NH, I have a sister in WY, my brothers are in AK, and my other sister is five hours drive away here in OR). And many of us have moved so many times that we don't have the connections within our communities that are necessary for surviving hard times.

Second, few people nowadays live on farms, and even most farmers don't grow much of their own food. Back during the Depression, if the farmers managed to hold onto their land, they at least had food to eat. Things are going to be different this time, I'm afraid.

Third, nobody back then had credit cards, and few had much debt other than a mortgage. That one doesn't even need any comment.

I'm not looking forward to the next few years, believe me.

Kathleen

So many americans following the crops to keep food in their own children's stomaches.

My favorite depression story is about my husbands grandfather. Grandma and grandpa owned a gas station during the depression and grandpa had a milk route. He extended credit to most of his customers. After the depression was over almost all those people repaid him. Some with interest, even. That made him for the rest of his life. He died a wealthy man.

The moral to this story is: there was a time in this country when a man could make money and survive while helping others. And not by charging 30% interest, either.

I must have missed this thread the first time. Anyway, here's a piece I wrote for my blog at the request of one of my blog buddies:

My parents grew up in different small towns in West Virginia during the Great Depression. Allow me to explain this deceptively simple statement.

West Virginia is one of the most beautiful places in God's creation, assuming you like mountains. There are literally places where you can come around a bend and get stopped in your tracks by the view. The only problem is that you can't eat the view, and the landlord generally won't accept it as a substitute for cash when the rent is due. Outside of a few areas, poverty is endemic. Visit West Virginia and you're in the heart of Appalachia.

(An aside. Growing up in the '60s during Johnson's "Great Society" and "War on Poverty" (the first of many wars we've unsuccessfully waged on perceived societal ills of one sort or another), I heard the word "Appalachia" constantly in school. One day, when I was about 14 or 15 and in high school, I finally asked my civics teacher where this Appalachia place was, and she described it as the area encompassed by the Appalachian Mountains. She then went on to tell me that it was full of poor people. Silly me, I had never realized my family was poor until that day. We had a nice house, a car, 2 TVs, food on the table and everything else we needed or wanted. It took me a lot of years to get over being poor.)

The West Virginia of the 1880s and 90s was rich in 3 things--virgin stands of timber, coal and people who would work for relatively low wages cutting the timber and mining the coal. Monied individuals and corporations saw this and ventured into the state, buying large tracts of land and starting lumber mills and coal mines. In the process, they started a system that trapped many of these people into working for "the company" for their entire lives--which oft-times were relatively short. Lumberjacking and coal mining aren't the safest occupations now, and a hundred years ago they were a lot worse.

By the 1920s, things were in full swing. Even though it wasn't an ideal life, the steady work of the lumber camps and the mines, along with the really choice jobs of working on the railroads and company offices and stores provided a life of relative plenty for a group of people who, a generation or two before, had largely been subsistence farmers. Times were good.

October 28, 1929 changed that. Black Monday was the lead-off event in a series of world-wide economic upheavals that came to be known as the Great Depression.

Most West Virginians didn't see what was so great about it. They were too busy losing their jobs as the ebbing economy killed the demand for lumber and coal. Their spare time was taken up trying to figure out a way to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table. For many, but not all, things were bad.

My Dad's family was lucky. His father was a conductor for the railroad of a very large lumber company. His $5 a week job kept him, my grandmother, my aunt and my Dad in a nice company house and fed. Well, that and 2 large gardens, some pigs and some chickens. Their entire yard (which was a 50' x 100' lot, less what was covered by the house and outbuilding) was gardened, along with another 2 similar sized lots on the next street over. My Dad and Aunt had chores to do before and after school. My grandmother saw to the running of the house, which was a full day's work in a time before washers and vacuums. Grandpa worked, then came home and worked.

My Dad's family was fairly well off, as things went.

In a neighboring town, a very young girl, who would one day become my Mother, had it much worse. Her mother had been widowed earlier than most, and was left with 5 children (it had been 6, but one died very young of what sounds like some sort of flu-like virus) to feed, with no job and, as I understand it, not much help from anyone. Like my paternal grandparents, she gardened and raised such animals as she could.

Eventually, she was lucky enough to remarry. The man was, by all accounts, a son of a bitch. The sole story I can recall about him is that he disciplined my uncle by locking him in the crawlspace under the house for whatever infraction took his fancy. Unpleasant. This continued into my uncle's teens. One night after a high school football game--he was a local football hero in his day (later dying of a combination Black Lung (from his time in the mines) along with a dose of lung cancer), he declared my uncle late, and attempted to lock him under the house for the night. My Grandma took exception to this, picked up a shovel and threatened to kill him on the spot. My uncle did not spend the night under the house, and her husband did not spend the night in it. Fairly shortly thereafter, he died of a heart attack. As far as I know, he fathered no children by my Grandma, and that is probably for the good.

He did have some redeeming virtues--he worked and brought home a paycheck. He also found out how to get "the commodities"--food given out by one governmental agency or another. Sort of an early form of the butter and cheese giveaways of the '80s. Between his pay, gardening and the extra foodstuffs, the family survived.

Well, almost all of them did, at any rate. There was my Uncle Gerald, who died at 18 in my Mother's arms. He was afflicted with some sort of wasting disease that left his limbs twisted and useless. In and our of charity hospitals for most of his life, he managed to have, by all accounts, a bright and sunny disposition. And by all accounts, the family was never the same after his passing.

Eventually, my Grandma went on to a third marriage, to a man who was a kind and gentle as her previous husband was mean and ornery. An engineer for the Western Maryland, he died before I was born, also of a heart attack.

There's a lot more, but that's the short version. There are many more stories, and one day they may see print. Mostly, unless you were rich, it was a struggle of some magnitude to survive. Then, as now, money made life easier.

Something of note. In a lot of survivalist discussion boards, a lot of comments are made that "I'll hunt and live off the land if things get bad." Don't plan on it, Sparky. In the 1930s, in a lightly populated area with more than abundant wildlife habitat, deer, turkey and pheasant were hunted out by the end of the first year or so. Likewise for the native trout population in the rivers. In the area my Mom and Dad grew up in, the deer have never made a comeback, and neither have the trout. Turkey and pheasant have, and the trout fishing is good, as long as the State of WV hatchery stocks the river in the spring.

This little piece of information has always stuck with me, and is one of the multitude of reasons why I am the way I am about preparing for hard times.

The Freeholder, I agree with you about not relying on wild game in hard times. There are deer all over the place in our area -- sometimes I see as many as twenty (mule deer) out in one of the alfalfa fields between here and town. I see way too many of them dead alongside the road, too -- and since the state of Oregon doesn't allow road kills to be salvaged, they stay there until there's nothing but bones and hair left. But I guarantee that if people start getting hungry, those deer are going to disappear in a matter of weeks. That's when I'll have to move my goats and chickens into the attached garage....

Kathleen

The oldest living person in our family was born in '34. So I really appreciate all of you sharing these bittersweet stories!

My mother is alive and well and will be 98 in March....just last night we were talking about the depression and the years before it happened......her first memories are at about the age of four.....her family (Mother, Father and my Mom) lived with her Aunt (who was sixteen the year the Civil War started) while their house was being built....it was a one room cabin with a loft for sleeping and a fireplace in which to cook....her memory is sharp even today and most evenings are spent listening to the stories of the "old days"...prepping as we know it today was a way of life for her family....and the knowledge she has passed down has certainly made food storage, preservation and "making do" an easier task...

One of the things she talks about often is that each year a different family would be responsible for making the 100 mile round trip to obtain salt for the various families....when my Grandfather's turn came he would usually take one other man from the community and head off with the team of horses and the wagon...

The stories of the Civil War are especially interesting since her Aunt was a teenager when it started....

There are many stories to tell and will be glad to share them if you like....regards to all