Remembering The Great Depression

At times my own children would laugh when their grandfather, who had to cope with loss of income, would describe how he had saved a few cents by buying grapes at one store rather than at another and how he had learned to be frugal with his money during times of economic hardship. Careful shopping and learning how to "sock your money away" was his mantra. He repeated this a lot and we simply got a kick out of it. My children ignored it at the time but because of their career choices, being artists of one kind or another, they had to pay attention later on in life.

As they raise their own families they have had to apply these same economies in their lives. The current recession is giving everyone a chance to reflect on these issues. They no longer think grandpa's careful comparison shopping of everyday items is funny. Nor do they think my habit of checking into resale shops and rummage sales is such a bad idea. Now that I am a grandparent, I have been thinking of my experience during that time. Of course, my experience was from a child’s viewpoint. I wasn’t aware of the economic situation. I knew we were in a depression, but I didn’t understand what that meant.

What was it like growing up during the Great Depression?

My parents were both immigrants who came to the U.S. with grand hopes of success. My father was a master tailor and my mother a dressmaker. They married with the idea of working together to build a business of their own. They each were employed in the garment industry for several years and saved their money so they could invest in a tailoring business where they would be able to earn a good living. They bought a store in a thriving neighborhood. Unfortunately, they had the bad luck of opening this tailor shop in 1929 just before the crash.

It soon became clear that my father could not support a family and pay his bills when he "lost" the business. In order to save money my parents moved their shop to another, less expensive neighborhood and rented a basement storefront with a small 3 room apartment behind it. They then had to find new customers, pay the bills and feed a family. There were no food stamps nor was there "welfare" available for us. My brother was a baby and I was born a few years later. The advantage of having a business and home in the same space was that they were always home. We had both parents nearby, although they were too busy to pay much attention to either of us. We learned how to take care of ourselves and remain out of site so our parents could do their work.

We were never wealthy enough to have owned a home, but my aunt and uncle did. After spending the “Roaring Twenties” accumulating their fortune, they built a house that was one of the many that the bank foreclosed on after the crash of October 1929. They never were able to come back from that disaster. I heard about it many times when I was growing up, but it didn’t affect my life so to me, it was just something that happened to them. I was a happy enough kid and the turmoil going on around didn’t have any real meaning for me because I didn’t know what was happening, and if I did, I wouldn’t know what it all meant.

My parents certainly knew too well what what happening, but they never let us know how worried they were. My mom earned some money by making dresses for her customers. She used the left over fabric to make dresses for me. She made shirts for my brother and knitted sweaters for both of us. My brother and I shared an old bicycle although it was mostly his. We could not afford to have a pet, but we once caught a turtle and tried to raise it as a pet.

My parents made sure our family was well fed. My parents scrimped on everything else, but not on food. Of course, the foods my mom prepared were made of basic inexpensive nutritious ingredients, but the secret to her success was that she was a superb cook. She could make anything taste good.

A Frugal Life

My mother cooked lots of meals based on cabbage. We had cabbage stuffed with rice and ground meat and we had cabbage mixed with sour kraut. We ate many meals of baked beans, potatoes and many kinds of soup. In fact, all of our meals included soup a very filling first course. We were served canned vegetables but they usually were upgraded with different sauces. Of course, no person ever refused to eat any food served to them. One was not allowed to not like any food. We were never offered seconds of anything.

Every part of the chicken was used. That included the head, feet, gizzard, liver and neck. We had home made bread and deserts were canned fruit or home baked cakes. My mom made her own noodles and sometimes she made sausage although we thought it was a treat when we had genuine hot dogs. She also cooked hot dog goulash.

My mother and father worked together to can pickles, peaches, plums,and jam when local produce was in season. We bought fruits and vegetables from a produce cart that an enterprising entrepreneur brought to our Chicago neighborhood in a horse drawn wagon during the summer. People still had “ice boxes” rather than refrigerators so they needed the ice.

When the iceman was delivering the ice the kids in the neighborhood scrambled onto the truck and grabbed chips and fragments of ice. We sucked on these with as much enjoyment as any kid now would get out of a popsicle. Part of the fun was “stealing” the ice. Usually the iceman yelled at us as he returned from his delivery but that didn’t deter us from doing the same thing next time he showed up on our street.

When I was a child there were not very many material things I needed in order to have fun. Kids back then played with each other, usually outdoors through all the seasons of the year. We didn't have accessories such as IPods and Video Games. We had to make up simple games using sidewalk chalk, rubber balls, jump ropes, cans, YoYos, Jack-knives and most of all, our imaginations.

Having Fun

Radios were our source of entertainment and information. Families listened to radio dramas for kids and adults. There weren’t separate categories of music for adults and children. Pop music and classical music were expressions of the variety of music available, whether it be vocal or instrumental, opera or jazz. I listened to the Metropolitan Opera broadcast on some Saturday afternoons and so did my parents. We never went to an opera, but we did go to movies.

My brother and I went to the movies every weekend. Movies cost ten cents and we managed to pay that amount, but I knew of kids who would sneak into the theater trough a back door. There may have been movies that were X rated but they were featured in "special" theaters that and not shown in a commercial movie theater. Whenever my parents went to the movies they took me and my brother, too. They usually had a night at the movies when a premium was being given away. It was a frequent enticement to get an audience to go to the movies. The premiums were usually sets of dishes or glassware. In order to collect a complete set of China dishes we had to go to a lot of movies. I still have the dinnerware our family collected. Everyone I knew had the same dishes.

We never wasted anything. Because I liked to draw, I was always coveting any piece of paper to draw on. I made drawings on the backs and borders of school assignments. I drew on shirt cardboard, envelopes, the daily newspapers, walls of our apartment, and any other blank space I could find. I colored the comic section of the paper and drew on pages that were not filled with too much type. I improvised and experimented and learned to create art that satisfied my desire to express myself visually.

The lessons I learned growing up at that time have helped me cope and be an independent self reliant person. I am glad I learned to be resourceful. I believe if there is a good that can come out of the current economic recession, it is that people can learn the lesson of conservation with regard to their personal lives and with regard to the planet we live on.