Great Depression Memories

(Memory 1) Gladys Hoffman, 83 and Robert Hoffman, 86

Hulton Archive / Getty

Clinton, N.Y.

Gladys: When neighbors couldn't get a loan from the bank, they'd come to Dad. He sold farm machinery. He never put his money in a bank. He stored it in a strongbox in the fruit cellar, under the apples. He'd loan the neighbors what they needed and they paid him back when they could. If there was a month—especially the winter months—when they couldn't pay, they'd slaughter a cow or a pig and give him a portion. In the summer it was vegetables: corn, peas, whatever they had growing. The main thing was, Dad never wanted them to lose their land. It was their heritage and how they earned a living. They were farmers. We always lived frugally anyway, so in some ways we didn't know the difference. What you ate in the winter months was what you put away in the summer. The biggest thing that happened is when they decided to pave the dirt road in front of the house. It was the Works Progress Administration (WPA). But my Dad was a Republican, and he was just beside himself.

Robert: [My Dad] was on a salary. Sometimes there would be a paycheck, sometimes not. He was on the road [selling knives for Utica Cutlery] a lot and would be out of town for four or five weeks. When he was away, the treasurer for the company would stop by to deliver the paycheck — and if there wasn't one, he'd explain why, in person. People really got together. Everybody realized they were in the same boat. If [my mother] couldn't pay the grocer, he knew that she would the next time there was a paycheck. Everybody was in the spirit of helping out. That's the only thing that saved us.

(Memory 2) Judith Crist, 86

Corbis

New York City

I had a very affluent childhood right up until I was about nine. We lived in several gracious homes, I went to private school, we had a live-in servant and so on. My father had a bulletproof Cadillac he had bought from a bootlegger.

I was born in New York City, my parents were American citizens and they wanted their children born there. As I always say, my mother came home to foal. My father was a fur trader, though, so I spent most of my childhood in Canada.

And then suddenly, our most gracious home was gone. The servants left. I was so dumb that when we were losing the last of our grand houses, I told my classmates that "Gee, bailiffs are coming to our house." I didn't know what a bailiff was or what that meant. I was too damn young. After we lost the last of our homes, we moved to New York to get some kind of assistance from my mother's family. Well, from both of my parents' families. We lived in a small, one-bedroom apartment while my father went out on the road, recouping things. He was a traveling salesman, he always had a new invention. He sold a dry cleaning machine, and a machine for printing things on bags and signs. As I entered my teens, I really felt the blow of the depression.

When I came to New York, I was astounded that not everybody wore fur coats. I was astounded that not every apartment had a dining room. I wore my hair in a kind of Alice in Wonderland style, and one of my teachers told me to tell my mother to braid my hair — so I didn't "pick up things." Lice were not unknown among impoverished families at the time.

I do remember once — my father never quite excused me for saying this — I said to him, "Why don't you become a milk man? Like so-and-so's father, at least he earns $28 a week!" I must have been about 12 or 13 when I said that brilliant thing to my father.

Judith Crist worked for over 30 years as a reporter and film critic at the New York Herald Tribune, TV Guide andNew York Magazine. She still teaches at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

(Memory 3) Lawrence Brown, 80

Walker Evans / Library of Congress / Getty

Carmine, Ill.

I was born in 1928 in Carmine, Illinois, where I live now. We raised watermelons and corn and you just couldn't sell anything. Nobody was buying any of our commodities. I remember we loaded them on train cars and sent them to Chicago to the market. And I can remember we sent them up there with the idea that they'd send us some money back. Well, the sellers went broke and didn't send us the money. And then we got a call from the railroad company wanting us to pay the freight [Laughs]. Back in those days, we didn't have anything to speak of — didn't have electricity, didn't have indoor plumbing. We didn't even have a radio. I remember my mother wanting a telephone, and dad didn't think we could afford it. They had a heck of an argument over it.

It was rough, but everybody was in the same boat. Nobody had anything. Every room had a stove then, we didn't have furnaces, you know. And a lot of people didn't have wood and couldn't afford coal. People were actually burning their corn for heat. You couldn't sell it, so might as well do something with it. We came home one night and somebody had broken into our house and stolen all our food. They didn't want money, they just had to have food. We had livestock so we always had meat. We were pretty self-sufficient in that way. The people who were really hurting, I think, were the people who worked in the cities. The people who had jobs at manufacturing plants that went broke. Dad kind of griped about it, said, "All those guys who went off and made a lot of money in Detroit or Chicago or Toledo, now that they lost their jobs, they come back and try to get a job on the farm."

Back then, I was so young, I really didn't know much. I was just 6, 8, 10 years old when the worst hit. But I'm worried to death about the economy now. We've always owned ground and I've invested money and I've really taken a beating in this market like everybody else. When we put in the crop this year — my son does the farming, I'm retired — it cost him a fortune because herbicides and fertilizer and machinery costs are so high. And our commodities — corn, soybean and wheat — have lost half their value.

(Memory 4) Fran Suddath, 84

J. Gaiger / Topical Press Agency / Getty

Jackson, Miss.

My daddy's company went broke, they went bust on everything. His job was taken away, so we moved in with my grandmother in another town. I was young, maybe six years old, so for me, my life went on and I went to school. My daddy tried to find work, but he was an accountant and it was a very difficult time for accountants back then. He lost his job in 1930, and was out of work for 5 or 6 years. He would get up and go downtown every day to see if there was anything available. There usually wasn't.

When I was in senior high school, I had one wool skirt in the wintertime and two blouses that went with it. I would wear one blouse and wash the other one out in the sink so I could wear it the next day. One girl in our high school, she just had the most wonderful clothes. Everything she had was marvelous. But her daddy owned the newspaper, they had money. The rest of us, we went on with our activities — our dating and dancing —everybody was in the same fix. It was hard.

My mother never went to work. At that time, the only jobs available for women in the workforce were as cooks or janitors or something like that and my mamma wasn't going to do something like that. It wasn't a good era for women to be working. She never worked.

We had no savings. We went through that real fast in the beginning. My daddy took any job he could find, even manual labor, he would take it. The thing about it was that my mother and daddy were so wonderful, they never talked about money or the lack of it in front of my sister and me. They did all that privately. It wasn't until after I was grown and married that I realized how horrible it must have been. But they never let on about it. We just knew that we couldn't have things, and that was it.

(Memory 5) Patricia Johnson, 78

American Stock / Getty

Boston, Mass.

Oh gosh, where to start. I was born and raised in Boston, born in 1930. I am an only child. My mother died when I was 5. My father was an immigrant from Ireland and extremely intelligent and politically active. He was a headwaiter at that time in some of the most exclusive clubs in Boston. He believed in taking me to downtown Boston during the Depression and showing me the devastation. He took me down to Boylston Street, down around Boston Common and showed me the people who were sleeping on the ground, who had nothing to eat, with holes in their shoes, standing on the corner, peddling apples. He explained to me what was happening and obviously it left an impression because I still remember it. People would be sleeping on benches. They'd have holes in the bottom of their shoes and in order to keep their feet off the ground they'd fold up newspapers and put it in the soles. He said, "Patsy, I want you to realize while you lay down at night in a house that's warm and you have food, this is part of the world that doesn't have what you have. And I want you to be thankful for what you have."

As the Depression progressed into 1938, people would be coming around and knocking at doors, asking for something to eat, for a piece of bread or something of that nature. My father left orders that no one would ever be turned away. If anyone ever came to our door and they were hungry, they would be fed. We had a rather large porch and there were always table and chairs out there. My father would bring them out there and feed them on the porch and sit and talk to them in a very casual manner. These were total strangers.

My father used to say, "The trouble with you narrow-backs — that's first-generation Irish — is, you don't appreciate what you've got and the only way you're going to appreciate it is if you lose it." But he also used to say, "There is good in everything if you want to look at it." If we are going through a slow time now, my hope is that this generation will learn from it and become better. Be the people I know they can be. These kids today are so bright and so smart, but they just don't have any sense of responsibility. If this little downturn can wake them up, they'll be magnificent.

(Memory 6) Owen Hassett, 89

American Stock / Getty

Vincent, Alabama

I'm going to be honest with you. My daddy was a section foreman on the railroad. He had an eye problem and had to retire on the last day of 1929. And in the meantime, he had bought a farm about two miles south of Vincent. And we moved down on the farm. My daddy got a pension, and he had an insurance policy. So my family didn't suffer like a lot of people did. But my daddy was thrifty, I'll say that. Real thrifty.

The farm was 275 acres of land and we had renters on the place. There was five of us boys and two girls and we worked just as hard as everyone else did and we made a pretty good crop. We raised cotton, corn, and just other regular thing. I remember one fella, he had five kids, two of them were really small. He wanted to rent a crop from my daddy. And the fella said, "Now you're going to have to furnish me some money to buy me some groceries." And my dad said, "Well, how much will that take?" And the fella, whose name was Leroy, said "Fifty dollars." He lived on only $50 that year.

We had another family that lived on the farm during that time and the father had to go to the soup line, that's what we called it. And he got flour and lard and powdered milk and powdered eggs for his family to live on. They just didn't have anything. They went to Vincent, about two miles and a half up the railroad track from where we lived, used a horse and wagon to head on up there and get their stuff.

When I was in the ninth grade, when school had a month left to go, the county was going to charge five dollars a head to attend. I had two brothers and two sisters in school. And it just came my time to go to work. I worked one week building a bridge. I carried water for the concrete mixer; five days of work and I could pay for all of us to go to school.

Lesson? My daddy taught me more times than once, Just because you want it, that don't mean you're going to get it or need it. Anything that you need, or got to have, you provide for it.

(Memory 7) Tom Abbott, 87

Richfield, Utah

I can remember the bank went closed and he had borrowed money to buy some cows, and the bank went closed and a bank from California took over that bank; and that man come to the house, and I can remember him telling dad he wanted the money. Dad says well he didn't have the money. Says, "I don't have any money." The man says, "Well we loaned you money and we want the money." Dad says, "You loaned me money and I bought the cows with the money," and he says, "Your money is in those cows." And the bank man says, "We didn't loan you cows; we loaned you money." Dad says, "That's right, and that money bought the cows," so he says, "You go up to the bank, you build you a corral behind that bank and tomorrow I'll bring the cows up there; you can have them," says, "You get your corral ready and I'll bring them." And (chuckles) the man says, "Well, we better talk about this."