Really hard times

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Great Depression facts

The stock market crash of 1929 heralded the start of the Great Depression, although other factors, including the cost-of-living increasing more than wages and changes in industry due to new technology.

Approximately 7,000 banks went under due to poor investments, millions of Americans lost their jobs and farmers facing low prices lost their farms to foreclosure.

Despite government efforts such as the programs of the New Deal, the Great Depression didn't end until the 1940s, with the creation of thousands of jobs associated with World War II.

Source: www.ohiohistorycentral.org

An only child, Marjorie Bee, 83, remembers that life wasn't all that bad for her during the Great Depression, from 1929 to 1941.

"My dad was a truck driver for the concrete company and always had a job. We had our garden, and mom canned everything she could get her hands on," Bee said. "My clothing was mostly made of feed sacks given to mom by farmers. Some of the material was pretty."

The family lived on the west side of Marietta near the railroad tracks.

"During the Depression, it wasn't like it is today with the economy. It was a lot worse," she said. "There was almost no traffic at all. There were a lot of bums along the railroad, and mom would feed them on the back steps."

Except for stories handed down from parents and grandparents, no one under 70 years old knows exactly what it was like to live in America after the overwhelming economic collapse of 1929.

Events of the past few weeks have sent shivers down the spines of even the most optimistic of Americans. There has been much talk of recession and even another Great Depression.

Charlie Hill, 81, of Oak Grove, isn't buying the gloom and doom.

"Some are calling it 'Hoover days' now, like the Depression we knew, but it's not as bad now as it was back then," he said. "It isn't going to happen again."

The very first thing Hill remembers about the Depression was being hungry when he was at school, when there was almost nothing to eat for lunch.

"I ran down to my grandma's and she would always have soup for me," he said. "We were all poor back then."

Born in 1927, Hill attended Norwood Elementary School during the worst of the era.

"I had two pair of pants that I wore the whole school year," he said. "I remember then when I was in middle school, one kid came in with a new set of clothes on every day. I resented that. My pants were dirty and old."

His father only worked half a day.

Clyde Stollar, 83, a friend, said his most vivid memory of the Great Depression was hard work.

"Dad bought a farm in the '30s and all six of us kids, even my sisters, had to work hard to keep it," said Stollar of Marietta. "We had food, a garden and all, but it was hard. We ate a lot of peanut butter sandwiches, I know that."

Children today could only imagine what it must have been like, that when Christmas came, there were often no toys under the tree.

"An orange and some fruit maybe," said Betty Robinson, 86, of Marietta.

Robinson said for a holiday or special time, her mother would kill one of the chickens.

"I can't imagine being able to do that now. I don't think I could," she said. "Everybody came in to eat and that one chicken fed everybody."

She doesn't remember ever being hungry.

Dennis Morris, 101, of Marietta was a young man when the Great Depression happened. For his family, living then and owning a store in tiny Constitution, just outside Marietta, "hard times" came a year ahead of everybody else.

"We owned a general store and closed it in 1928," he said. "My dad and mom bought a house in Marietta (112 Scammel St.). My parents put all their money into the house, but they still had a mortgage."

Once times went sour and money began to dry up, he said they could no longer make payments on the house.

They bargained with the lender bank and negotiated paying only the interest, rather than have the house sit empty.

"President Hoover set a relief program and my parents were on it," Morris said. "My mother was too proud to go down and sign up, but my father said having food is better than starving."

Morris' brother was two years older, had a teaching job, and helped his parents with house payments. Morris had saved his money from teaching in a one-room school for a college degree and was attending Ohio University in Athens.

"Mom and dad didn't have furniture for their house when they moved to Marietta in the spring of 1928, so I took part of the money I saved and bought them furniture," he said.

During the hard times, everybody in the family helped out.

"I told my mom I'd give them the rest of the money I saved for school, but mom said my education was far more important for me," Morris said. "She said, 'We'll struggle and get through somehow.' I always respected her for that."

After graduation from OU in 1931, Morris got his first permanent teaching job at Macksburg High School. His parents were still trying to cope.

"They were (spending most of their time) in one room, the living room, with a 15-watt light and the radio," Morris said. "I found out they were behind in the utilities - gas, electric, and water - so I went to a banker I knew well, Edwin Strecker, for a loan."

He had no collateral for the loan, so Strecker finally said he would back the loan. Morris agreed to pay back $20 a month.

"Mr. Strecker was a God-save, an angel for me," he said.

Although she was very young during the worst of the Depression, Lois Lonaker, 76, a Depression baby, remembers her father working for 50 cents a day to feed his family of six children.

"He worked for local farmers and he would either get 50 cents or a sack of potatoes," Lonaker said. "For Christmas, we got a piece of fruit, and we didn't get shoes until it frosted."

Her mother ordered clothing and household items from the Sears & Roebuck catalogue.

"A lot of women back then tore up old sheets to make dresses or used a feed sack," she said. "I remember one Christmas someone put a sack of flower on our front porch and mother cried."

Lonaker, an active and involved senior today, doesn't expect many younger Americans to understand what an actual depression is about.

"People can't appreciate what the Depression was like until they are hungry," she said.