Nightmares of the Great Depression

Many of us may be old enough to remember hearing stories about the Great Depression. Stories of survival and hard times told by the old ones that had lived through it. With talk of a coming depression some of these stories may be jogged from the memory. Feel free to share yours, heres mine.


In the late 80's I was out in the country to do some fishing at a place near a bridge that had produced some results in the past. As I got out of the car and headed down toward the river, I notived an elderly couple picking up walnuts from underneath a large walnut tree there. They were cleaning the nuts of their hauls and placing the nuts in burlap bags.

A conversation was struck. I asked the man if he were gathering the nuts for a cake or something. He said that he did use the nuts for differnet things but didnt really need to be out there collecting them. He told me that he and his wife came out to that tree every year to collect nuts in memiorial and thanks to God for what had sustained them throught the depression and that he had done that every year to from the depression to that time.

He said he knew were every fruit tree was within 5 miles of his home back then. He and his wife and kids had lived on dried fruit and nuts durring winter for a number of years. He also said that he never had more than 5$ at any given time for about 5 years.

When I was an undergrad. I took a class in gerontology and had to write a paper based on an interview with someone 65+ on their life story. Of course, I had a sit down with my grandfather. He talked about childhood, and the war, but refused to talk about the depression. Said it was a time he didn't want to remember. Apparently, even more so than the war...

ETA:
I forgot about this, which I always thought was both endearing and kinda sad at the same time. My grandfather (when he was young) said that he used to crawl behind the large stove in the kitchen to sleep at night. It was the only warm place in the house.




[edit on 24-2-2010 by LadySkadi]

I have a similar story. I grew up in a smaller town where everyone pretty much knew everyone else. Well there was a well known little old lady who had survived the depression, but while living through the depression they had a shortage of funds among other things like everyone else. The thing she spoke about the most was her families shortage of coffee throughout the depression. They would brew 2-3 pots with just adding a little fresh coffee to the old grounds. Well after the depression she swore she would never be without coffee again.

Low and behold when she had passed away in the mid 90's, when her family went to figure out her estate, to their surprise upon entering the cellar there were shelves upon shelves stocked from floor to ceiling of nothing but coffee. It seems everytime a store had a sale along with a printed coupon she would buy 2 or 3 cans of coffee, put the receipt taped to the first can and put them in the cellar. Funny thing is as it turns out in her later years she stopped drinking coffee all together, but continued to purchase it none the less.

my wifes' great-grandparents had built their own home pre-WWI and paid for it outright i.e. no debt. apparently he was a well liked boilermaker and keep the office buildings heated during the winter in Milwaukee. Being liked didn't help him keep his job though. He ended up moving his mom (my wifes' great-great grandmother) his wife and two children into the 20x20 crawl space and renting out the first floor, converting the attic into a second floor and renting those spaces to people who had kept their jobs in the buildings he worked at, but lost everything else. Also, they never turned away people asking for food, she says they had regulars who would only come buy once a week. She thinks it was their pride that kept them from coming by more often, maybe, I think its because they didn't want to wear out there welcome. Either way i don't think that kind of restraint would be possible nowadays

My grandmother always told the story about the depression, it goes like this.

There were 6 kids in the family and 1 being only a year old, they were all hungry all the time. One night at supper my great grandma brought "dinner" to the table. It was a pancake, made out of the last bit of flour and some water. That night no one but the baby ate, she got the whole pancake. That night the older kids came up with a plan so they could eat the next day.
They each went out and gathered whatever they could find to make a stew. Well my great uncle came home with a skunk! They cooked it up and all eat skunk soup.

Those were some hard times and I have learned a lot from my grandmother about how to cook depression food, as she calls it.

It scares the living daylights out of me, could we realy be heading back in that direction, could this be worse that the first great depression?

What scares me , is compared to then, the total lack of compassion people feel towards one another. With so much violence, I do not see people helping each other, but rather killing, burning and getting what they can to survive and to hell with everyone else.

That is what scares me the most.

Great thread! When I was in high school we moved back to Texas and we were going to move into my great grandparents house. It hadn't been lived in for about 5 years since they died, roughly the same time they came into this world. The house was built in 1900 and had an interesting history.

While I was checking out the property I walked into the garage, it was a pretty large garage with wall to wall shelfing. At least 50 percent of the shelves were still stocked with preserves my great grandmother had canned during the depression.

It was an interesting sight for sure due to the age of them all and sitting out in the Southeast Texas heat. My uncles had vague memories of those times since they were young kids.

What a sweet story OP.
The one story that sticks out in my mind is the one my great uncle tells about his sister who was my dear grandmother. It stands out because she was very much a lady and her actions in his story are funny.

There were 9 kids and two adults. They lived outside Atlanta Ga. at the time. The two oldest (my grandmother and her brother who tells the story) were the only ones working. My great uncle came home very late one night drunk as a skunk. He had to be at work early the next morning. My grandmother beat him black and blue and the next morning woke him up early with a bucket of cold water and told him to get his ass to work because the family depended on them to survive. He said he was sore for days but he never touched another drop of corn whiskey ever again.

My great uncle chuckles when he tells this story and you can see the admiration for my grandmother in the twinkle of his eyes. It is a very endearing to see him light up.

My mother and father grew up during the Depression and WWII, and they were both good and bad times. Many a story I have heard as we shelled beans on the back porch in summer. Rememberances like:

My father's family was so poor, they really did sleep 3- 4 to a big ol' feather bed to keep warm, in the mornings a light dusting of snow had blown in along the walls. My father carried bisquits to school with a slab od sweet potato in them so other kids thought it was cheese and wouldn't make fun of them.
My mother's father, worked a farm in the morning and evenings...literally from before dawn to after dusk, during the day, he worked for the county on a road motor garder... often his day was 16+ hrs long.
Everyone had chores, firewood, cooking, gardening, hitching up the mules, milking cows, plowing fields, barning tobbacco. There was preciuos little time for fun.... maybe on Sunday afternoons. They took a half day off on Xmas day.
My parents ate anything they could find...opossum, turtle, all kinds of fish netted in the riever in spring, usually dried beans or bisquits and gravy. Hog killin' time was a time of plenty...usually in the coldest of winter...December/Jaunuary. Anywhere from 6-8 hogs would be killed and butchered... the best cuts were cured for country hams, the sow belly/fat back/bacon/streak o'lean was salted down and preserved and eaten all year until gone.... scraps and shoulders were ground into sausage. The organs were made into hoghashlet. The head went to headcheese, of course there were chittlins and brains and eggs...nothing was wasted. the fat/lard was saved and used to cook with or used to make soap.
They had to go to the country store to use a phone, traded eggs for coffee, used hand-me-downs for clothes from one of 16 brothers and sisters to the next. In winter my grand father would walk 5 miles to a lumber mill and work until almost dark, then walk back home to finish chores, eat, and go to bed... both grand daddies made moonshine to help ends meet, but only when they needed the money.
Each fall, the crops were brought in...tobbacco, corn, my aunts and uncles picked 100 lbs. cotton for about 1 dollar per day... they would load the crops on wagons and eventually a truck, haul them to town and sell them. My grandfathers then paid any bills, bought 100 lbs of beans, 100lbs, of flour, 100 lbs of salt/sugar, maybe some new shoes for the oldest children...and if any was left, my father and his siblings would go to the picture show for a nickel a piece. Highlight of the year.
As much as life was golden at times, all my uncles,aunts, my mom and dad talk about it being a dark and hard time. Hunger, sickness, lack of nything at all was most common.
My parents are now 81 and 76, in pretty good health, and to this day....still waste nothing. My mom still saves mayonaise jars, has a cloth remnant box for rags and making quilts, they can can and preserve everything out of a garden and then some. Always have a well stocked pantry. And even still save and invest a portion of their retirement that they saved and invested.
I thank God that they instilled those same values in me, as in tough times like these, I would be up the proverbial creek without a paddle had they not.

My grandmother's family did ok during the depression but she told me of sharing food with neighbors. She also saw kids without shoes.
I really think living through a depression sounds more like what my mom went through. My mom had holes in her shoes and her clothes were always too small. She lived in a small house with 5 other siblings. They had 3 small bedrooms with no heat at times. Her mom grew vegetables in the garden.
My sister's husband lived out in a shack with 4 siblings with no running water, no electricity. One time a man ran in with a gun; shot their dog for food.