Hard times

I’ve been dipping into various parts of Studs Terkel’s Hard Times:  An Oral History of the Great Depression. It’s been several years since I read the whole thing.

It contains many short accounts from a wide variety of people...some of whom did all right and even lived comfortably during the Great Depression. Others barely scraped through.

I also went back to a local history book put together by my grandmother and some other people in the Seventies. One of her friends wrote up the Great Depression section, giving an account of moving to the country from the city. They sold their few appliances, as there was no electricity to run them with. Their water source was a spring. For a time, they didn’t have a car, only their two farm horses. There was a grocer who did a delivery route through the area. She said that they mended and patched and wore their clothes until they really were just “threads”.

My grandparents were set up a little better in household and farm. My grandma said once that they had everything that they needed, although the fabric for their underwear came from feed sacks or some such that were sent to them by a cousin.