While rummaging through a box of papers in the bottom of a closet today, I ran across an interview I did for tenth grade History class in 1973 with my Grandparents about the Great Depression. We were allowed to either turn in a tape of the interview or transcribe it, so since the tape revealed that I was woefully unprepared, I chose to drag our 20 pound manual typewriter out of the closet and put it on paper. I was an average student with a short attention span, but on the back of this paper the teacher wrote a note saying, in part: "This is the best written interview that has been turned in" and he goes on to apply part of it to my grade and gave me the rest as extra credit. I don't know if I saved it because it may have been the only "A" I made that year, or if it was because of the actual content of the interview, but I know that I am happy to have it as the memories of my Grandparents, who have been gone for over 25 years now, fade away and I catch a glimpse of them as people with vastly different lives than the ones they led by the time I came along.
My Grandfather, known as C.H., was probably born in Pittsburgh around 1905. I wish I could say that I knew for sure. To me, he was the guy who drove a Cadillac, who smoked too much, who could talk for hours to my Dad about their business...aluminum siding and storm doors....who would challenge the grandkids to a rubber band (gumband as we say in Pittsburgh) war, who watched Bonanza on Sunday nights and always had one of us wrap aluminum foil around the rabbit ears and hold them until the tv picture was just right....and pretty much stay that way for the entire show. Rumor has it that at one time, he was quite the lady's man.
My Grandma, Ida, was the woman who prayed for his soul. She was probably born in Pittsburgh a few years after Grandpa was. She attended Mass every morning, gave us Rosary Beads and religious trinkets, sang songs accompanied by some silly dances, took me out of school every few months for a mental health day of going downtown for breakfast and shopping, and burnt the pot roast every Sunday to the point of flames. I know that she quit school when she was 14 because her mother died and she had younger siblings to care for, and I hear that when she did get out for a night on the town, she was quite the dancer.
I'm going to retype the interview word for word, spelling mistakes and all, so please remember that I was 16 and more than slightly unprepared with pertinent questions. I called them "Grandma" and "Grandpa" for the paper...how I wish I could change that now. At one point I mention "Mt. Lebanon". That is an upper middle class suburb of Pittsburgh where I lived, and I think my Grandma didn't want to badmouth the town or the people there. Oh and in another place, Grandpa mentions "loafing", which is Pittsburghese for "hanging out"...not baking bread lol I hope you like it and find it to be a glimpse of what life was like for an average couple in one of the darkest periods of our country, and maybe even garner a little bit of hope for a recovery back to life as we knew it.
DEPRESSION INTERVIEW WITH MY GRANDPARENTS
Me: The best way to do this is by you telling me about the Depression in your own words, so go ahead.
Grandpa: O.K. Prior to the Market Crash, the country had prospered. Everybody seemed to be making money and they had no idea what was ahead of them. Then the Market Crash came, and almost immediately after the Crash, the effects of the Crash was felt all over the country.
Me: Did that affect you personally, the Crash?
Grandpa: Yes, it affected everybody.
Me: I mean, had you invested in it? The Stock Market, that is.
Grandpa: NO. No. But things went downhill to the extent that people were losing their jobs. This country is classified as industries, such as the banking industry, railroad industry, lumber industry; all the different types of work were banded into industries, and these industries declined to the point where they were almost bankrupt. Banks all over the country were closing one after the other. Businesses, small and large, were closing one after the other. As a result of these closings, and these various business depressions, people lost work. And the first thing you know, the whole country seemed to be out of work.
Our President at the time, President Hoover, never did want to admit that the country was in a depression. He'd get on the air, on the radio, and he'd broadcast stories about: The country is not seeing a depression; that he promised everybody a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage. And it just didn't work out that way. So along came Roosevelt. Roosevelt was elected over Hoover. And the third day, or the day after Roosevelt was elected, he closed every bank in the country for a three day moratorium. And in that three day period they had plans that they would re-unite the country. And things start to shape up. Mr. Roosevelt come out with the NRA and the WPA and the CCC for the young fellas, and so on and so forth, and you could see his efforts...people coming back. However, the country was still in a deep depression, and he brought back beer...Prohibition was repealed. And he brought that back.
Me: Why do you think he did that?
Grandpa: Because, see, Prohibition was very unpopular in the country.
Me: Were the Kennedy's bootleggers or something back then?
Grandma: You couldn't call them bootleggers...
Grandpa: The Kennedy's were, the father, was more or less a financial manipulator, and he did gain considerable wealth.
But from all these little things that Roosevelt did, the country did begin to spring back. But what really started the country back is when war was declared in Europe. The the American factories started to get busy, and it just brought the country right back.
But the Depression was the worst thing that ever hit the American people in the course of their lifetime. There was never one like it and there's never been one like it since.
Me: Going back to Hoover...did you like him at all?
Grandpa: No! Not at all! Hoover was an administrator before he was a president, and he was always an administrator in food, like supplying the allies with food and rationing the American people to do it, see. He helped, he seemed to help other countries but he never seemed to help us...that was my interpretation of Mr. Hoover. And I had a personal dislike for him.
Me: So when he ran against Roosevelt, you voted for Roosevelt?
Grandpa: Oh defintely! Definitely. I changed from a Republican registration at that time to a Democrat, and I've been a Democrat since.
Me: Do you remember Roosevelt's Fireside Chats?
Grandpa: Yes.
Me: What were they like?
Grandpa: Oh, he was an excellent salesman. Yeah, he was very convincing, and people supported him, I'm sure they supported him 100%, even those that didn't like him. Had to go along with his programs because they were becoming effective.
Me: Did you realize that there were people worse off than you, like the farmers?
Grandpa: Those that were affected by the Depression were all hard off; they were all hard off. One case was equal to the other...when there's no work, no earning power, then you're bad off. Some people went on Relief, some people couldn't get on Relief.
Me: Why not?
Grandpa: Well, as in our case. My father was a city fireman, and he was buying his home. We made application for Relief and were rejected because of his working. They told me to go to him for support; that they had enough to do to support those that had no means of support.
Grandma: Tell her what people would do downtown to get money.
Grandpa: All the street corners in town were occupied by apple sellers. They'd set up a couple crates on the sidewalk and put some apples up and sell apples. They were doing anything and everything to a means of gaining a few nickels.
Grandma: If you had a family doctor, he'd come. But he'd hope that you would at least help to pay for his gas because he couldn't last too much longer, or come if you didn't do something to help him along.
Me: Did people beg? That's kind of tactless...
Grandma: We used to have people come from like up in Charleroi and Canonsburg, come to our place and ask for help, just ask for a can of food or something like that. And one man even knelt down and prayed one day that you'd give him something for his six children, that he couldn't get help. Coal miners couldn't get help at all...they were starving. People were eating anything. I took pears that we used to throw away every year, I took pears and brought them in the house and peeled them. Half of them were full of worms and all I did was put sugar on them to hold them for a day. Once in a while somebody'd give you some sugar, and maybe'd give you some flour, but you didn't have all the ingredients to make anything.
Me: What did you think of Roosevelt? Did you iike him?
Grandma: Well sure. Roosevelt was a good man, as far as uniting the country again. The country wasn't united. The country was starving, let's face it. And he did help that. He helped the first two times anyways. After that, I don't know.
Me: After the Stock Market Crash, did people just know right away that there was a depression?
Grandma: Oh no. People that had money just knew that that was it. People that were in business, that their money was in the bank knew that after they sold this they were done for; there was no more to be had. And people that were renting houses, that owned homes and were renting them to people knew that there was no more rent going to come unless the person had a job. Uncle Paul was a Bell Telephone man and he was taken from seven days a week to two days a week in order to give every man at the Bell a little bit to eat.
There used to be, the men in our neighborhood used to play with darts all evening, throwing darts on the street; they had nothing to do. And that was their game. Quoits and horseshoes...they played those games; they had nothing to do, day or night, but walk the streets around the neighborhood.
Me: What were you saying before about people in Mt. Lebanon?
Grandma: Oh no. Don't say that.
Me: It's O.K. Go on.
Grandma: There was people that were stealing from the poles. They were stealing the electricity right from the poles. They would be able to get out on to the poles and bring the juice into their homes. They had no lights in their homes! Their furnaces wouldn't operate, and they'd just go out to the pole and steal the juice right from the Electric Company! And people would, if a landlord put them out of a house, so they'd pack up and borrow somebody's truck and move to another house that was empty. Landlords didn't know whether they had tenants in the house or not! And we lived in the better neighborhood, so I don't know about the Hill District, how it was. And I know that the building we're in, the labor on that building was 25 cents an hour, was what the laborers got. Down 1618 West Warrington Avenue.
I had one baby that was born when Roosevelt came in. He was born in 1934, Bob, and the neighborhood people bought presents for the baby that never bought before. Some of the women were working, and the Red Cross, not the Red Cross, the Board of Trade, gave me little trinkets, little night gowns and things like that, and the lady next door to us used to buy supplies from a baker shop out in Dormont, and Saturday nights she'd bring them in and sell them for the same price that she bought them...for almost nothing. We'd buy a pie for about 20 cents, bread for a dime. What else did we buy? We'd buy all that from the lady. Everybody helped everybody...otherwise people wouldn't have lived. And people didn't kill. People didn't go out and...there wasn't as many robberies as there is today.
Me: There were a lot of suicides though?
Grandma: I don't know. I know there was some, but I don't know how many.
Grandpa: That was the day of the Market Crash. They were jumping out of windows, off bridges.
Grandma: That was just a heresay to us...the Market Crash. We had no money in it.
Me: Do you know what Hoovervilles and Hoover blankets were? Things like that?
Grandpa: Hooverville is the shanties that people were living in...shanties sprung up on the sides of Mount Washington; cardboard boxes and what have you, and people lived in them. I think they called that Hooverville. And Hoover blankets must've been just newspapers.
Me: Did it ever get to where they would turn off your electricity or any utilities?
Grandpa: No. Before that hit us we moved from where I was to move in with Ida's family, and I don't recall ever having the light or phone or any of those other utilities cut off.
Me: You had a phone? Did you have a car?
Grandpa: Not in the beginning. No.
Me: Where did you live anyways?
Grandpa: In what is known as West Liberty, South Hills.
Me: What was life like for you and your family then?
Grandpa: To give you some idea of what the Depression was like for us: After I had lost my job and things became impossible to keep up where we were living, we moved from our home into my wife's home, Grandma's. And we had two rooms in the basement. Now, this home was a frame house, and the basement rooms had flooring on them. But the other half of the basement was not floored, was a mud floor. So, at night, when we would, we had a kitchen and a living room during the day. That living room was transformed into a bedroom at night by one of these open-up beds. And at night we could hear rats, and much to our astonishment one morning, we got up and a rat had eaten completely through the door. We could just see a little round hole where he had eaten completely through in one night! And naturally we started setting traps and we were scared. And we caught several, but we always had that fear.
Now, cooking was done upstairs. We ate with the family, and things were prepared to make the most of everything. As an example, one meal it would be saurkraut and potatoes, see. Another meal would be beans, see. Anything that made a lot of something that was still nourishing, that's what was made.
Now, nobody in Grandma's family was working, and I wasn't working. That made a complete house of men out of work. And it was useless to go out and look for a job because everybody was doing the same thing, and jobs were impossible. Instead of getting jobs, more people were being laid off. Every day you'd hear of more people that were working before that are now loafing. So it was useless to go out and look for a job. And the thing that we did then to pass our time was play cards, or in the evenings we play horseshoes and quoits on the street, an unpaved street, and we just had to pass our time that way.
Now, Ida's family, fortunately, were on Relief. They were able to get on it. And as far as my own family was concerned, we were unable to get on because of my dad working as a city fireman. Now he, of course, had his own problems, and he couldn't help me. And that made me shift for myself. For quite a while, I ate off of Grandma's family's Relief allowances, and then I start to sell different things to bring in any kind of money at all. Among them was shoe polish, deviled crabs, ink, and almost anything; a drink, a competitive drink to Lemon Blend, was called Lemon Freeze. I sold that, and then from that I got into sweepers, and just the time that I got into sweepers, Roosevelt was elected and closed every bank in the country to make my job more difficult; trying to sell sweepers, nobody had money. But fortunately during that period, I sold sweepers. How? I don't know, but I did. And each week I sold enough to stay another week. Well, those weeks went into months, and those months went into years. I was a sweeper man for about fifteen years once I got started on it.
Me: How did you shake off the effects of the Depression? How did the Depression end for you?
Grandpa: Whenever you start making enough money to exist, you begin to shake off. That's the only answer I got to that. If you're making money, you can shake it. If you're not making money, you become more deeply depressed. and that's the whole story of the Depression. But everywhere you looked, everywhere you looked, it was the same thing. People out of work. People living off the Allegheny County Emergency Relief Fund. And they weren't rebellious, they should have been; they weren't. There were marches organized to march on to Washington, protesting and tings like that, but nothing violent, everything was done peacefully.
The Depression is something hard to explain. You almost have to, well it's almost like a war...you have to be in it to know what it's like. But every family was affected differently. There were some families that never knew there was a Depression; government workers, city workers, state workers. They had a job and they never knew there was a Depression. They worked all through it. But there were other families that felt the effect of the Depression just the same as our own family did. And it's just something that is hard to put into words. You had to live it to know it. And unfortunately, having gone through it, I, like everybody else, have forgot what the Depression was like. And if it hit again we would be hit the same way as were the last time because we didn't prepare ourselves for anything different. It's just something that's hard to explain, it's hard to tell you. I hope you never have to live under that condition.
UPDATE: Thank you for the interest in my diary! I would have gotten up earlier if I would have known :) I wish I could ask my commenters more questions about the experiences that they've heard of from their own family members but I have to get to work. As it stands now, I'm a few minutes late but it's been worth it to spend a little extra time here! I can't wait to get home and hope to read more stories. Thanks again. And thank you Mr. Emery, for this assignment all those years ago.
Long live our Grandparents in our hearts for pulling their families and this country through that terrible time. May we draw on some of their strength for ourselves and for others.