Great Depression Stories

Jay Spencer

I was born in New Mexico and remember my father hunting wild turkey and deer to supplement our meals. A few times I went out with him and with a shotgun, fired into a flock of blackbirds so that my mother could make blackbird pie! I started working as a teenager. The wages were a dollar a day and that was good money then. My father farmed mostly but during the winters he would work on construction projects. I would often join him when he left home to find these construction jobs. We had to work wherever there was work. For six months I drove a road scraper that was drawn by a team of horses. That was during winter and the workers had to live in tents. I remember how cold it was at night in that tent. The money was much more than what we would earn on the farm. We lived in the quarters but the meals and accommodation was deducted from our pay.

By the time I got married, I was earning a silver dollar per day. Once I was showing my wife, Emma, the silver dollar as we were standing on the porch. I accidentally dropped the dollar and it rolled down through a crack. We simply could not afford to lose that dollar, so we pulled up that porch to find it. I remember the Great Depression days and how poor everything was. There was one telephone in town. A handful of folk owned cars, but everybody else had to use wagons, horses, buggies or just simply walk.

Florence Reitnauer

During the Depression years, my husband and I had three children to care for. Like many struggling families, we had to turn to relatives for help. We moved into my parent’s attic and lived there for four years. Because my father was laid off, all of us pooled our money, including the few dollars of public assistance that my husband and I received each week. We ate mainly vegetables, grown in gardens on undeveloped land that the city allowed families to use. I became a very creative cook, especially making tuna a la king on toast.

During the year I would put away a bit of money so that I could buy Christmas presents for my husband and children. Evening entertainment consisted of card games, sitting and talking on the porch, or watching baseball games at the local playground. On highlight was playing with a small pinball machine that had been donated in a Christmas toy drive.