No, Really. It's a Depression

It was my great good fortune to be a son of depression parents. My mother and father were born in the early 1920s. They were observant, sensitive, thoughtful parents who took the time to tell stories. They reflected on and spoke of their early years often to their sons, sharing the hopes and fears of their upbringing as we grew up ourselves. They showed us how to observe the world around us. One set of grandparents were loyal Democrats, the other staunch Republicans. These were tremendous gifts for this future historian. I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, but through the stories I heard I knew what it was like to grow up in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. My father and my uncles served in World War II, so I read everything I could get my hands on about the war because they wouldn't talk about the war very much. My parents lived a frugal lifestyle carried over from their days as children and teens in the dark days of the depression of the 1930s. So I began to read widely to understand how such a national calamity and such a brutal war could have happened. I wanted to know how my parents came to be the way they were, and how my world came to be.

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