My mother was ten years old when the great depression ended. Though she was quite young her memories of that time in our history remained vivid until the day she died. This is a recounting of some of the memories she shared with me over the years.
My mother grew up on her grandparents farm in Ohio during the 1920s and 30s. She was a young child when the the banks crashed in 1929 starting what was soon to become known as the great depression. She does not remember the crash at all, but some of her memories of the years following that event has given me an insight into a event in history that few who lived through it will ever forget.
Living on a farm in Midwest America during the 1920s meant my mothers life even as a young girl was pretty much taken up with schools and chores. She remembers gathering eggs one weekend morning when she saw a man walking down the road carrying a suitcase. As he drew nearer she saw that it was her great uncle Harry, her grandfather’s. Brother.
Uncle Harry was always a favorite of my mothers, she loved it when he came to visit driving his big blue car in which he would take the entire family for rides, telling stories about his work in the city of Indianapolis. But, on this day Harry wasn’t driving his car, he had taken a bus to the end of their road and walked the 5 or 6 miles to the farm. Still, she was glad to see him and ran to greet him hugging him fiercely as he put down his suitcase and reached down to pick her up and return her hug before urging her to return to her chores.
That night at dinner her grandfather announced that Harry was going to be staying home for awhile. That was my mother’s first memory of the depression.
In October of 1929 700,000 Americans found themselves out of work by 1933 the count had risen to 16 million though my mother never knew the numbers of those who lost their jobs during these years, nor the exact number of those who became homeless, and traveled the roads in search of jobs and food she saw many of the faces of these men, women, and children who passed by the farm. Some stopped looking for work, and she remembers though her grandparents did not have much themselves, her grandfather would always find something for a man to do in return for the a hot meal for him and his family.
She recalled her grandmother getting up early on Sunday mornings and starting a big pot of soup using the vegetables from her garden and whatever scraps of meat she had and then after church sitting it up outside on a table with all the bowls and cups she owned and handing out soup to the tired and hungry people who passed by on the roads. My mother recalled those Sundays as a day of washing dishes from “Noon to Dusk” as her grandmother would ladle out soup to strangers and even neighbors who had once made fun of them for being poor dirt farmers.
While on the farm there was plenty to eat and even enough food to share with those who had none, in cities far away from their little farm in Ohio, people were fighting one another over scraps of food thrown away in restaurant garbage cans and standing in bread and soup lines for sometimes days at a time to get a bowl of watered down soup or a slice of bread.
While she set snug her grandmothers cozy kitchen warmed by the heat of the old wood stove she heard stories from people who gulped down meals her grandmother offered about people without heat or light and others who had been evicted from their homes with no place to go.
She recalled how some of these people often looked tired and worn and how even the children looked older than their years, laughter gone from their faces and their lives. As a child she did not understand that this look was the look of despair. That while she was safe and secure on that farm, with food to eat, and a roof over her head that there were little girls playing a new game called “eviction” in the streets of New York, Chicago and other cities across the country.
Sheltered as she was by the worst of the circumstances that surrounded the country she did not know that in 1931 more than 20,000 people would commit suicide when they could not bear to face one more day of hopelessness.
My mother recounted to me once a story about an older girl who once made fun of her because she only had one dress to wear to school, coming to the house one night and begging her grandmother for food. How angry my mother felt when her grandmother gave this haughty girl most of their own dinner she had cooked leaving my mother and the rest of the family to eat cold biscuits and milk for dinner that night.
Years later while working in a restaurant my mother again met that haughty girl. They were both grown and the woman stopped to talk to my mother telling her how much that meal had meant to her family. The woman recounted how her father had lost his job, had sold off most everything they had, and when things did not get any better how her father went to try and find work leaving her, her mother, and two brothers with no money or no food. How they had not eaten for almost a week, when her mother had sent her to the farm that night when she could no longer stand her young sons crying from hunger. “Your grandmother did more than feed us that night.” the young woman told my mother. “She gave us hope at a time when we had none.”
It was then that my mother finally understood the enormity of the depression and how lucky she had been and how protected from the ugliness of life that the depression brought with it. Millions of others were not so lucky.
