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Lois Barbour Rose recalls her family being so poor during the Great Depression that her father climbed down a well to retrieve her lost shoe.
Waldo Beck's father moved the family to Fredericksburg after his baking business failed during the Depression.
Members of the Civilian Conservation Corps gather in Rainier National Park, Washington, in 1933. The CCC put millions of Americans back to work.
Fred Bell went from millionaire to selling apples on a San Francisco street corner during the Great Depression. |
The 1929 stock market crash, Wall Street suicides, bread lines, Hoovervilles, hobos and crippling unemployment symbolize the Great Depression.
But for several area residents who lived through that time, the hardships were more commonplace--and far more personal.
Here are some of their stories.
A RESCUED SHOE
Little Lois Barbour took off her shoes and tossed them toward the porch one warm day in 1930 or '31.
One shoe landed safely. The other went down a deep, dry well next to the house.
Lois hated telling her parents she'd lost half of her only pair of shoes. She knew there was no money to replace them.
She cried as her daddy made a ladder from little trees he'd cut. When he climbed down into the hole, it felt like the end of the world.
But he came back up with that black leather Mary Jane shoe.
That Great Depression memory is a defining one for Lois Barbour Rose, now 85 and a Spotsylvania County resident.
Her parents, Lester and Sudie Barbour, had a farm in central North Carolina. They owned a car, and though they weren't wealthy, they had a little money in the bank.
Then the bank failed, and the money was gone.
For the next several years, Rose recalled recently, the family lived virtually without cash.
Everything they ate was grown or raised on the farm--vegetables, fruit, milk, eggs and sometimes pork or beef.
"We had plenty of food, even if it wasn't always what we wanted to eat. Mother always managed to put something on the table," Rose said.
They couldn't buy a license plate for the car, so her father kept it in the garage.
Young Lois and her two brothers wore resized clothing and hand-me-downs passed among a galaxy of cousins.
Lester Barbour bartered grain for sugar and farm tools.
Every morning, Sudie Barbour would bake a pan of sweet potatoes in a wood-burning stove. She shared them with hungry travelers walking along the north-south highway beside the farmhouse.
"It wasn't a day that we didn't have somebody come by and beg for food," Rose said.
Her parents set an example for the children through charity. "I heard both of them say we were lucky. We had enough to eat, and we could share."
The family's cash crunch lasted well into the '30s, easing when her father found paid work as a carpenter in the wintertime. After Frank-lin D. Roosevelt became president, her older brother got into the Civilian Conservation Corps and sent money home.
"Even as a child I could see that things were getting better," Rose said.
The current struggles worry her, especially news of people getting laid off. She hopes never to see the country endure hardship on the scale of the Great Depression.
"I lived through it," she said. "I remember."
'A BLEAK WINTER'
Waldo Beck was just 6 when his father's baking business failed.
The elder Beck had contracted to buy flour at a low price. Then the bottom fell out of the market, and he lost his bakeries in the Southwest Virginia city of Bristol and nearby Kingsport, Tenn.
"It was going to be a bleak Christmas, and a bleak winter," recalled Beck, now 85 and a Fredericksburg resident.
He remembers his father asking him a serious question, man to man.
Would Waldo lend him the $50 in his savings account--accumulated from a lifetime of small presents from relatives--so the family could celebrate Christmas?
The loan meant a cheerful holiday for Waldo and his two younger siblings. That year, he recalled, he got an electric train. He still has it.
The family lived for a time with Beck's father's parents in Winchester.
Then two Fredericksburg bankers offered the elder Beck a share in a commercial bakery on William Street. They'd had to foreclose on it, and they needed someone to run it.
The family moved to Fredericksburg and lived on Prince Edward Street. Waldo went to fourth grade at Lafayette School on Caroline Street, now the Central Rappahannock Regional Library headquarters.
Fredericksburg's manufacturing industry--particularly the Sylvania cellophane plant--insulated the city from the worst of the Depression. CCC building projects, including several at the area's new national military park, helped as well.
"I don't remember things being difficult in Fredericksburg," he said.
Still, Beck says some lessons of the Depression stuck with him.
"Living through that period in my life has made me very conscious of wastefulness," he said.
"People my age live more frugally."
APPLES ON THE CORNER
Eileen Rensing grew up in the Flatbush area of Brooklyn, and her family got news-papers.
The headlines were grim, telling of the crash of 1929 and of the suicides, lost wealth and lost jobs that followed.
She was 8 that year, and she remembers taking the train into town to shop with her mother.
On street corners, she saw men dressed in good suits--selling apples or pencils for a nickel.
Her father had a secure job, working as a postal inspector, so her immediate family got through the Depression comfortably.
Not all her friends were so lucky.
"I knew children in school, in my classes, used to line up to get free loaves of bread to take home," she recalled.
Rensing is 87 now, and a resident of Spotsylvania County.
She remembers her father supporting Roosevelt for president in 1932, because he symbolized hope and change. She sees parallels now, as Americans look to President-elect Barack Obama to turn the economy around.
She, too, is hopeful--not so much that one man can do it on his own, but that elected officials can learn from history and act to keep the nation from sliding again into a depression.
"I don't think it's going to be as bad" as in the 1930s, she said. "But you're not going to snap your fingers and have it clear up tomorrow."
Laura Moyer: 540/374-5417
Email: lmoyer@freelancestar.com
