UNITED STATES-A FARMER RECALLS THE FIRST DEPRESSION.
The lessons were simple, but the instruction was harsh.
Perhaps that’s why survivors of the Great Depression remember them so well: work hard; buy only what you need; if you can’t pay cash, you can’t afford it.
"We were stronger," said 83-year-old Doris Forrest of Omaha. "Our parents were stronger."
Most experts agree there are parallels between this recession and the Great Depression. Both were preceded by a housing boom, a long period of cheap credit and, ultimately, a decline in the stock market.
But that is where the similarities end.
Unemployment now is at 7.6 percent nationally, compared with 25 percent at the height of the Depression. Government oversight prevents the failure of most banks, and social programs provide a safety net for the jobless. Unemployment benefits, food stamps and other assistance make soup lines and widespread destitution unlikely.
And while economists predict that today’s recession will lead to a "new frugality" and a return of "Depression-era values," people like Forrest never abandoned those tenets.
As a child growing up in South Dakota, Forrest said everyone in the family was expected to pitch in.
She gathered gnawed corncobs from the hogs’ pen to burn for heat. She carried pails of well water up a hill, across a dirt road and into the house for drinking and washing clothes. She filled lamps with kerosene.
When the grasshoppers came, Forrest helped spread insecticide on the potatoes, because by then no corn remained to save. She still remembers the poison’s penetrating odor.
"You could smell it in your sleep. You can smell it 70 years later."
She learned young what it was like to work, a value she doesn’t see in most children today.
"They have everything given to them," she said.
Forrest wore hand-me-downs from an older cousin, which then went to Forrest’s younger sister.
"And then we sent them back to the original people, because they had a younger one yet."
She still remembers her first store-bought dress. Black with a yoke collar and fringe, the dress was her high school graduation outfit, said Forrest, smiling at the memory of the beautiful garment.
Mary Ann Hyde’s mother, a seamstress, worked magic with clothes.
She could take apart a threadbare coat and sew it back together so it still could be worn, said Hyde, 81, of Bellevue. With 14 children in the family, the coat went from sibling to sibling. Kept alive by deft needlework, the coat was worn and worn until it was worn to pieces.
Hyde remembers the week in 1936 when the family’s world crumbled.
Her father had a field of corn on river bottomland east of Monroe, Neb. Miraculously, it had survived the drought.
Hyde said she recalls her father saying, "With this field of corn, we’re going to make it through these hard times."
On Thursday, Aug. 15 - never will she forget the date - scorching heat descended.
On Friday, the corn was visibly stressed.
"By Sunday, it was so badly burned there was no hope of it being saved."
It was Aug. 18, her father’s birthday. It was the first time she saw him cry.
Her eyes tear up as she reads aloud the story, which she had written recently in her looping handwriting on a yellow legal tablet.
In 1927, Bette Swinnerton said, her father was offered $100,000 for the family farm, but he turned it down. He lost the farm in 1933, because he owed $8,000 on a loan he got to install central heating and electric lights in the house.
The loss crushed him.
"My dad just sort of died," said Swinnerton, 88. "He just wasn’t the same. He never came back from it, it was such a shock to him. I was only 6 years old, and I remember. In my entire lifetime, I never bought anything I didn’t pay cash for."
Georgia Paskach, 91, is the daughter of Czech immigrants who came to the United States in 1907. Her family lived on a farm for most of the Great Depression.
"We did what we could do, that’s the way it was."
Doing "what we could do" meant trading crates of eggs for grocery money ("we didn’t get too much" for the eggs, she recalls), canning garden vegetables, selling hogs when the need for cash was urgent.
Milking eight or nine cows meant early mornings and late evenings for Paskach.
"We didn’t have all that fancy stuff, we were just glad to be able to survive. I know that food was hard to get."
Living on a farm, though, meant Paskach’s family ate better than many. Chicken, pork and occasionally beef were often on the menu for the day’s large meal at noon.
Jack Wetherell would have been stunned at such abundance.
"I had no food many, many times," said Wetherell, 88.
The World War II vet joined the Army in the late 1930s because it supplied steady meals. He had to wait 10 months to get in, because so many other young men were trying to take the same route out of poverty.
Wetherell said it might be good for people today to experience a little hunger and a little hardship.
"I’m glad I won’t be here five years from now. It’s a disaster," he said. "Nobody has any responsibility. Nobody’s gone hungry because somebody steps up and feeds them, In our day, we took care of us."