My parents were born during The Great Depression and have many tales to tell about their early childhoods. My mother's mother, Catherine Saint Bonnet Shaffer Currier (b. 1914), has also written and spoken some about The Great Depression from her own perspective (as of this post, she's still alive at 94 years old). Here's one short account that covers from about 1929 to the mid-30s, from when Catherine was fifteen to maybe about twenty years old, living in the Pocono Mountains region of eastern Pennsylvania (courtesy of Barbara Marie Shaffer France, my Mom). There's understandably a lot of emphasis on food. Also, I should point out that her father had died in The Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918; he'd died in his thirties, when she was four years old.
I was in junior high during the start of the real Depression. We weren't like the Grapes of Wrath people altho' we had hard sledding. We had it a lot better than many people. To this day I save every drop of food. The kids call me a tightwad.
Mom cleaned rooms at the college (now East Stroudsburg University) and Curt, Elsie and I lived at home as Gramps took the three eldest to live with him. . . Nights Mom sewed for the rich kids.
Many a meal was tomato on bread or Mom would buy hamburg[er] at 3 lbs. for a quarter and make a pepper pot which which was onions, potatoes and boiled hamburg. This would last for several days with dumplings on the first day.
We ate lots of pasta or eggs. Each Sunday was chicken day. Mom stewed a chicken and made lots of gravy and soup stock with half for broth for noodle soup. The first day we had chicken with potatoes and vegetables. The second day we would have gravy bread with slivers of chicken and if any gravy was left she baked it in the macaroni.
Mom remade our clothes from my sister Dot's hand-me-downs, the Elks gave us shoes and the rich kids made fun of us.
No matter how little we had we always fed the hobos. There were many. We later learned they marked the good houses with an X.
Mom couldn't quite pay the rent so she had to ask for welfare. In those days they listed the welfare recipients in the paper.
Then Mom got a job cooking in a small restaurant so we had it lots better as the owner let her bring the leftover food home. Such as spaghetti, vegetables and lots of cold fried eggs. To this day I love cold fried egg sandwiches . . .
We lived near a milk bottling plant so all the neighbor kids would take containers to get daily skimmed milk as it was being dumped in the sewers and the boss said it was a crime so called us to get it. After a few months someone complained we would get germs and so made him stop.
The huckster that came to the restaurant would give Mom leftover fruit and vegetables at the end of the day, three times a week and we got so much we shared with neighbors. Every holiday the huckster dropped off a bushel basket of oranges, grapes and apples at our house. We shared.
We had a little sunshine in our lives. Every Tuesday was payday and Mom took us for a five cent ice cream cone, three big scoops per cone. Every Saturday she gave us a dime to go to the movies. We saw a short subject, news, an animated cartoon and a cowboy movie.
Our Saturday night supper was tea and cream cheese crackers.
This doesn't sound so bad, does it? You will have to find an Okie for real poverty.
Today's Rune: Partnership.
7 comments:
Before my Mom died a couple of years ago I took her own oral history of those same years.
At 81 she was bit a younger than your Granny, Erik, but from reading this account I would say that her experiences were quite similar. In some parts of Detroit there was a block by block sense of "we're in this together and either we sink or swim." When one neighbor had they shared and when another came into something they repaid the community by sharing.
The enclave system worked well here then, all of the kids were of the same social standing, went to the same schools and there was no ability within them to look down on any.
My mom and dad lived through those years too. Fortunately they were in farming country or actual farmers and had enough to eat. But they scraped hard to find money for things like salt and for clothes. My dad ran a trap line for years to make a bit extra.
My grandparents lived through the Depression, and it deeply affected them. They saved everything. I helped go through their estate, when they died three weeks apart in March of 1997, and there was a huge amount of junk, in with the treasures-- for instance, my grandfather's GED, which he earned in his fifties.
Having spent a portion of my college years desperately poor, and often hungry, I'm the same about food. I have trouble throwing out even small amounts of leftovers. And I never, ever say no when someone on the street asks me for a meal.
My Mother-In-Law (in her mid-eighties) has shared similar stories. Even to this day, she will try to save whatever she can. I once saw her washing out a used sandwich baggy; The Great Depression must've really impacted her to do such a thing. Let's hope for a better 2009.
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