Recall Great Depression

Reno-area residents recall Great Depression
By SUSAN SKORUPA

RENO, Nev.—Some Nevadans who lived through it called it the Great Depression, others just Hard Times.

People worldwide mark the beginning of the Depression of the 1930s with the U.S. stock market crash of Oct. 27, 1929.

By the time Franklin D. Roosevelt took office as president three years later, nearly one-third of America's non-farm work force was unemployed and the gross national product had fallen to half of its 1929 level. Unemployment nationwide reached 25 percent in the darkest days before economic recovery late in the decade; poorer neighborhoods were even harder hit.

Adults who were children during that era recall family sacrifices and what it was like to do without. Young as they were, the hard times mostly just seemed like the way things were. People helped each other, and a quarter was real money.

Vernon Eaton of Reno was born in June 1929, just months before the stock market crash.

"By the time I got under way, the Depression was under way," he said. "The older I got, the worse the Depression got."

Eaton never knew his mom; she was admitted to a state hospital in Raleigh, N.C., when he was a baby and died when he was 10. An aunt helped raise him and his brother, Lloyd, in the rural South. Meanwhile, Eaton's dad, Robert, traveled around for jobs trimming trees in Missouri or working the wheat harvest in Kansas. When Robert Eaton ended up in Denver in 1930, he sent money home to have his sons join him.

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Denver, "we lived in a little converted chicken house until 1934. A long wooden building," Vernon Eaton said.

"Dad worked for society people as a handyman. He averaged $4 a day, which was top money in the Depression," he said.

Margie Allen got married at age 17 in 1936 to a man who drove a truck and earned $25 a week. She and her mother and brother thought her new husband was a millionaire. Now there was money where before there had been almost none.

She grew up in San Francisco. Allen's father already had left the family.

"I never thought much about the Depression. That's the way we started life," said Allen.

Allen doesn't recall where the money came from that put food on the table, but the family never went hungry.

"I remember we did not have new shoes until the sole was flopping and came off," she said.

At the grocer's, Allen's mother would ask for 15-cents worth of soup vegetables and get an onion and some greens. A butcher would give them soup bones or sell them for a few pennies.

Allen remembers seeing Oklahoma residents coming into California fleeing the Dust Bowl. As little as Allen and her family had, the immigrants had even less.

"The stories they told were unbelievable, so we didn't give much thought to how we were," she said.

Eddie Scott was a grade-school-age kid living in rural Louisiana during the 1930s. He heard his elders talk about what life was like before the Depression when people bought things on credit and had new farm equipment.

Then all at once things changed. People didn't get up-to-the-minute news or economic forecasts to keep them informed.

"They were in the dark. Someone would say, 'You can't get in the bank.' When it fell, it fell," Scott said of the economy.

"Now when it really got down on the ground, you couldn't find nothing. No jobs, no food. You couldn't get things on credit no more," he said.

There were no refrigerators or freezers. Farmers learned to manage what they grew and ate. They kept hogs, chickens, ducks and geese for meat. They made lard from pork fat. Scott had an uncle who made and sold syrup, which replaced sugar. Another man in the community had a mill to grind corn.

Farm families had gardens, Scott said. And most people had some connection to someone who lived on a farm and grew food.

"There was a lot of bartering going on in those days. ... even paying the doctor with chickens," Scott said.

Jobs were few. For children and teenagers, the only way to make a few cents was to do farm work. By the early 1940s, Scott was making 50 cents a day doing field work. His older brother, who was married, earned 75 cents a day.

"We were delighted to get that," he said. "That went on a long time until I got up to a dollar a day. That's how we grew up and out of that Depression. We're talking about adults getting a dollar a day."

Donal Turner's mother was a waitress in Morgantown, W. Va. He was born there in 1921, his sister four years later. His father abandoned the family about then and his grandparents raised him on their 15-acre farm until he was about 9.

"I hardly knew what money looked like," he said. "It was a poverty-stricken area."

In 1929, Turner's mother, who owned a restaurant by then, took him on a vacation. He stayed with his mother and sister after that. One morning, his mother went to the bank to make a deposit and found a line of customers. A note on the door said the bank was closed due to lack of funds.

"By then I had a stepfather. He decided to sell and move west," Turner said. "We ran out of gas and money in Battle Mountain," Turner said.

The sheriff filled their car's tank with gas and gave the family enough money to get to Reno.

They were headed to California, but in Reno a police officer told them his stepfather could get a job washing dishes at the Riverside Hotel and a wrecker would buy the car. He helped them find a house to rent.

"The next day, Dad went to the Riverside and started washing dishes for $1 a day; he sold the car for $20 and rented a five-bedroom house for $15 a month," Turner said.

Turner and his sister attended school, his mother took in laundry. Turner mowed lawns and earned quarters running animals off the runway at the Reno airport.

His parents bought two lots in Sparks for $25 each, and Turner built a house there when he was 15.

"We moved in. Mom raised goats and sold the milk," he said. "The railroad was doing good then. In the late 1930s, Mom opened a restaurant across from the round house and a lot of people from the railroad ate there."

Norma Washington was born on a little family farm in Arkansas and was a little girl in the mid-1930s. Growing up, she said, "we must have been very poor, but it did not seem like it."

The family raised food and Washington's mother canned fruits and vegetables, and dried onions, peas and beans. They had hogs for meat and cows for milk and butter.

"I never remember being without food," she said.

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Are we in for another depression? Anyway I'm not joining this depression I'm not even joining the recession. Find out how on future post.