The Great Depression

We are now officially in a recession and if things get worse, we will be in a depression. I was born in 1925 and the Great Depression came in 1929. I was four years old. Aunt Ruthie also came in 1929,(she was NOT the cause of the Depression) Uncle Marvin in 1931. Unemployment was in excess of 30% and there was no unemployment insurance. People stood in lines at soup kitchens to get something to eat.My parents (your great-grandparents) married in 1924 and moved into a house at 3326 Ingleside Avenue which my father had built. It had three bedrooms and one bath. My grandmother, two aunts and Uncle Dave lived with us. My father owned a hardware store with a partner. He owned an automobile, a Whippet. We were well-to-do! The Depression brought along the loss of the hardware store. But my father was lucky; he got a job with the Independent Lock Company (ILCO) and kept it for 35 years. There was no minimum wage and 25 cents per hour was a good wage. (In 1941 my first job paid 32 cents per hour. Grandma worked down the street from me. She made the minimum wage, 25 cents per hour.).A workingman’s lunch consisted of a tin of sardines, an 8 ounce box of Uneeda Biscuits (a thick cracker) and a 6 ounce Coke, all five cents each. And if he felt wealthy, he added a Tastykake, also five cents. I can recall eating rice and milk with a piece of bread for dinner.(We called it supper). The butcher always threw in a piece of liver with every order. Everything was homemade. We had two peach trees and late each summer, we made peach preserves which lasted until the next summer. I can recall my grandmother making noodles and grating horseradish on the back porch. The noodles were hung on a line on the back porch to dry. Toys were homemade. Small matchboxes were glued together with a paste made of flour and water. A button was sewed on the front of each box and voila!; a chest in which to hide our valuables. An orange crate, a roller skate and some discarded lumber became a scooter. A string was pulled through a large button and when pulled a certain way, the button spun. We scraped together a quarter to buy a softball and, with a piece of lumber, we played ball on a vacant lot for hours.

Please do not consider this as a complaint. I had a wonderful childhood. I had loving, caring parents and a grandmother, two aunts and an uncle who doted on me. Can you imagine anything more pleasant to a nine year old than lying under a shade tree.on newly mowed grass (by me with a hand lawn mower) with a pitcher of ice water reading “Tom Swift and His Flying Machine”? And I do not mean to intimate that you should not use and enjoy the things now available to you. I do! I could not live without air conditioning or th TV remote. It’s a different world. I just thought that you would like to know how it used to be.