Depression Parents Part II

Last week I waxed somewhat nostalgic about my parents who experienced the depression of the 1930s in their teen years. As they began their 20s, they experienced World War II. When the war ended, my dad was 24 and my mother was almost 23. When my dad came home from the war in Europe in December of 1945, their firstborn was 16 months old. My dad had not been home for nearly two years. Already at that young age, they were forever changed by the challenges and the horrors they had seen. The war had terrible and sometimes hidden effects on everyone who lived through it as adults. Even here in this country, far from the battles, the death toll grew with every passing week. Eventually, everyone knew someone who didn’t come back, and very often that person was a close friend or relative. From just their small town and county, more than 200 soldiers, sailors, and marines lost their lives. The trauma stayed with people. They didn’t talk about it much, but it was never far from their thoughts. They reacted to it in different ways, to be sure.

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Battled continuously to keep their heads above water

The Depression, as we called it in our home, affected people differently, too. When I interviewed people for Plum Street I asked about living through the Depression in a small town in the heartland. For those who were parents during the Depression, the immediate impact was often profound. Since they were in their working years, bearing the responsibility of providing for children and other family members fell most heavily on them. It changed their lives. My mother was the oldest of four daughters, all born in the 1920s. Even before tough times arrived in the early 1930s their family was under a strain. My maternal grandfather was a Navy veteran, but had completed schooling only as far as the 8th grade. When my mother was born in 1922 he was nineteen years old. His family had worked in coal mines in Tennessee, but he had little in the way of what we today call marketable skills, and no training to speak of other than his Navy service. He aspired to be a railroad engineer, but had no railroad experience. He was a willing worker, young and strong, with a reputation for honesty, but he began with entry-level industrial jobs in his adopted home town. From there he worked his way up, landing a job with his small town’s leading industrial employer eventually becoming a machinist. My maternal grandmother came from the same small town and same coal mining background as my grandfather. She had also finished the eighth grade to complete her schooling. When my mother was born in 1922, my grandmother was sixteen. Her situation was not unusual in those areas of pre-industrial culture. As she said herself, she and her girls “kind of grew up together.” Things have not always been the way they are today. The Depression arrived in their little town in 1931 and 1932. He was twenty-seven or thereabouts, and she was twenty-four. They had four children ages nine to two. For the next ten years they battled continuously to keep their heads above water. Their daughters went to school poorly dressed and sometimes hungry. There were times when he went to work with bacon grease smeared on bread for his lunch. There were suppers of only fried potatoes. Then their condition would improve for a while and they could climb up out of the hole a bit.

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Those who were only teens during the Depression sometimes felt the pain their parents felt

After ten years of the Depression, the war came. My grandmother took a job as a cook at The Clinic, a combined medical practice and hospital in town. My grandfather went to vital wartime industrial work earning solid wages. He was never laid off again. When the war ended in 1945, my grandparents began to show the effects of their years of deprivation. Domestic production of automobiles and home appliances ended during the war, but by 1946 companies like General Motors and Ford and General Electric came back into the consumer goods economy. People like my grandparents, who had been too poor to buy these goods in the 1930s, and were prevented from buying them in the first half of the 1940s, looked forward to the resumption of production. Their daughters married and moved out. They began to buy new appliances and new cars and new clothing. They got rid of the old furniture and bought new. They took trips. They lived it up. They enjoyed being out of the Depression and out of the war. Twenty years after the war it seemed they were still a little embarrassed to talk about the worst times they had known. My grandmother would agree with someone saying times had been bad, but offer few or no details. My grandfather would respond by making generalizations about how bad it had been, but then I would see him smile a little in a defensive kind of way. “You don’t want to talk about that old stuff,” he would say. Then he would move on to pleasanter subjects. They didn’t want to talk about their trauma, only about how good it was afterward. Those who were only teens during the Depression sometimes felt the pain their parents felt. When my mother and her sisters were told to take vegetables from the garden around to sell to the neighbors, they resented it. My grandmother took in the laundry of the grocery store owner to pay down the debt they owed the store. The girls had to carry that clean laundry two blocks in broad daylight to return it. They were embarrassed. The girls dressed shabbily sometimes and often lacked good shoes. A school teacher offered my mother used clothing, which she accepted. They carried on as best they could, hoping the future would bring something better. Younger children sometimes had no awareness of anything wrong. Some said, “we were poor, but so was everyone else.” Others said “I didn’t know there was a depression until years later.” They noticed the behavior of others more than their own. Others reacted differently. To survive during the Depression many saw their diets grow poor, and some had come close to starvation. They ate less and conserved every scrap. These habits continued to serve them well during the war, when food was rationed. For ten or even fifteen years, they followed a regimen of frugal living. When the war ended, goods were still scarce, so they continued the old habits. Thinking that shortages could return, they continued cutting corners even after shortages had become a distant memory. In this way, the conservation of resources became a way of life.

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The lesson learned was that if people lived frugally and shunned any kind of wasteful living, survival was more likely, even in difficult times

During the Depression and especially during the war, what we would today call recycling efforts became a popular way to raise money and support the war effort. Scrap drives and paper drives became common. People of all ages would go door to door in their neighborhoods asking for scrap metal or old newspapers and magazines. With enough people contributing, impressive quantities of recyclable materials accumulated at scrap yards and in public places. Newspapers happily contributed publicity, and public spirit drove people to greater and greater efforts. Junkyards helped people survive. The lesson learned was that if people lived frugally and shunned any kind of wasteful living, survival was more likely, even in difficult times. That lesson stuck in the minds of many people. Some people took the lessons of their traumas much further. It was a small step from living in fear of a next sparse meal to living that way all the time. There were people in my little home town who continued their conservation efforts after the threats of depression and war faded. They saved everything. They stacked up old news papers in the garage, or in a back room. They bundled magazines and sale flyers. They saved string, metal cans, empty jars, old clothing, dead appliances, and old tires. Some called them hoarders. They did this because of their fears of the past. They were determined they would never have to be in such dire need again. It brings to mind today’s homeless population. Traumatized by deprivation in the near past, clinging to the hope of value in the castoffs of others, they collect plastic bags, old clothes, tarps, toiletries, sleeping bags, and aluminum cans to trade for cash. Other people reacted differently. The Depression made them humble and grateful. It taught them the value of family over mere material things. They lived every day with thankful hearts and the feeling of victory over dark forces. They vowed to pass the lessons along to the next generation. This was how I remembered my paternal grandparents. They had outsmarted the Depression, coming through with improved circumstances and greater hope in the future. They still didn’t like FDR, but they were happy and loving and patriotic, never bitter or resentful.

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Gradually, the conservation and survival ethic waned

Our parents sometimes reminded us of their lessons at mealtimes. When I was first learning to clean my plate, I remember one or the other said “Children in China would be glad to have that.” In my mother’s memory, she might have been glad to have it herself not so many years before. Gradually, the conservation and survival ethic waned. Some of us with Depression parents kept the tradition of frugality going, and we joke with others who had Depression parents when we’re at the grocery store or at a church supper. Others lost the fear they had had of a day when even scraps might keep one alive. Some never had the fear. The postwar “consumer culture” fed directly into their way of thinking. The culture said that if we didn’t buy more new stuff that we wouldn’t keep the economy humming. We knew that wouldn’t matter if the time returned when nobody could afford new stuff. Even today when I see a pair of pants or a shirt hanging in the closet that hasn’t been worn for a while, I still think to myself, There’s a lot of wear left in those. I’d better not throw them away quite yet. I still hear the voices of my Depression parents urging me to be frugal, and to take nothing for granted.

For an in-depth look at the people mentioned in this column, I invite you to have a look at the book I wrote about them. It’s The War Comes To Plum Street, available from Indiana University Press or from your local library.

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