Chapter !V MEMORIES OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION
There's a reason behind giving you an insight into the family history before getting to the story of how we survived The Great Depression, and that is to show that many people were well prepared for it because they had been taught from an early age how to work, and work meant survival. In other words, they were prepared for such upheavals. Uncle Harry, whom I have mentioned, as a well trained technician as a lens grinder in the optical trade, also had other abilities and seemed to always be employed throughout those years. In fact, right in the middle of it, in 1935, he took his savings, borrowed other money from friends and family, and opened his own business in Hew Haven, Connecticut, an optical shop where you could take your prescription for glasses and he'd grind the lenses, sell you the fames as well, and fit them to your face. He employed from three to five people, sponsored a weekly radio show, giving his nieces and nephew a chance to act, and was quite successful and lived in a nice home in an upper-class neighborhood. His business continued on until his death, and, in fact, after he died my father, who had also obtained his Optician's license, continued the business until his retirement.

This is a good example of why I say that opportunity was not dead because of the Depression, it was simply not available to everyone because they either didn't have skills to sell or if they had them, they didn't know how to market them. Uncle Harry obviously did. This may sound simplistic to some, but I saw it time and time again in those years, and young as I was I recognized it. As an example, one neighbor, an Italian named Steve Cerra, opened a barber shop half a block away on the main street. He spoke English with a strong Italian accent, but he built up a stead clientele and continued there during the thirties, saving his money, and one day had enough to buy a nice home in another town on the south Jersey shore, where he opened another shop and continued to earn and save. He never had trouble feeding his family and he saved enough money to send both his son and daughter through college. It was an immigrant's dream, America, the land of opportunity and open to all.

Another neighbor had an ice cream parlor and it was successful all through the Depression. In fact, at one point when our finances were in a precarious position, mother went to work for him and she became his most valued employee because of her pleasantness with his lunchtime customers.

Small businesses were the backbone of the country in those days. A butcher shop usually had two or three employees. The local hat shop had one or two. The garages employed three or four mechanics. Many men opened filling stations and each also had a garage and mechanics. The local farmers displayed their fruits and vegetables in the back of small trucks and drove up and down the streets, delivering freshly picked items right to your door. There were vegetable stores, with displays of fruit on stands out front. Dress shops had two or three employees. There was seldom a vacancy in the stores, as someone always wanted to go into business for themselves, a typewriter repair shop, a shoe-maker, an Italian grocery, a German grocery, a baker (German in our area), and all of them usually had their children behind the counter, learning how to handle the business and treat customers.

Many men, with lots of free time on their hands, tinkered and came up with inventions, then sold them out of their garages. Others took jobs they might not have considered before the Depression, but that often opened new vistas to them, opportunity was there if you sought it out. This was free enterprise. After all, this was America.

We read about the coal miners who were out of work, the farmers in the Dust Bowl who lost their land, the auto workers in Detroit who were laid off, the people living in tenaments in New York who were evicted because they could not pay the rent, it was all there in both story and photo in the newspapers and magazines, so we knew what was going on. The coal miners? They had it rough, but I never did think that God created a man and said that he could only work in a mine. Or that he should not travel a hundred miles or two to find a new type of employment. The farmers in the dust bowl suffered enormous privations and thousands of them migrated in pitiful condition to the west coast, to California. Along the way some people would not even give them a glass of water for their children. They suffered, but many built new foundations in their adopted state. Walter Knott, who would build Knott's Berry Farm, was one of them, but he came up with a new berry, the Boysenberry, and from there came the beginnings of his fortune. (Read the story of Knott's Beery Farm; it is as exciting to me today as the first time I read it.)

MEMORIES OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION - Chap. I

My childhood was lived through the twelve or so years of the Great Depression, so I have some memories to share with you, as well as some lessons learned during those years, lessons that might be a guide to those of you, who, today, find yourselves loaded with problems (such as debts), and therefore, facing the future and seeing only bleakness ahead.

Life is not bleak. Life is wonderful. The future is what you, personally, create for yourself, even though you may experience changes and rough spots. Sure it may be a struggle, but, so what? Your ancestors struggled to make it through life, to raise your great-grandparents, then came your grandparents, and then your parents, and so you're here today. Face it with the same fortitude and determination that they did and you'll come through it all right, because what most of them went through in those days is barely imaginable as you sit in the comfort and safety of your home today. You've a lot more advantages than we had then.

I was born on December 8, 1924, so in 1929 at the time of the crash I was only 5 years old, and I was 16 in 1941 when I first went to sea, taking a job during summer vacation before my Senior Year in High School, Then, again at 18, during WWII I sailed as a Merchant Seaman. Let me tell you some stories about those years in between so that you can see what we went through and how we survived none the worse for the wear. Let me start by saying that I don't believe that we're entitled to anything in this life, that we all start out as equals when we drop from the womb. If some find that their parents are rich at that point, there is no guarantee that life will be any rosier for them than it can be for the children of poverty-stricken parents.


The picture above is of my new brother and me in March, 1926. Now tell me, how can you start out more ordinary than that? Please excuse the bloomers, as they were called, but they were used to keep the diapers from leaking.

This picture, of course, was taken a few years before the crash, said to have dramatically begun on October 29, 1929.

FAMILY BACKGROUND
My folks were just ordinary people. Mom had been a bank clerk, her first and only job until she married at age 24. She worked for the New Haven Bank and Trust. She was one of twelve children, ten who survived, eight girls and two boys.

Dad as a boy of 14 had begun working in the music department of a local department store, then he was a traveling salesman, a career he began around age 16, and later he was entrepreneurial minded and had his own business. He was around 17 when he opened up the Texas territory for Victor Talking Machine, selling the early phonographs invented by Thomas A. Edison and the records to go with them.


Mom and Dad lived next door to one another on Quinnipiac Avenue, New Haven, Ct., when Dad, age 23, returned home from Ohio and proposed to mother on Christmas eve in 1923. They had dated for some months at that time, but her father did not approve of it. So, the engagement caused a cataclysmic upheaval in Mother's family, for her father had ideas of his own whom she should marry. He simply tossed all her clothes in a trunk, put it on the porch, pulled down all the shades and locked the door. She was disowned. So, they were married two days later, as mother suddenly found herself without a home to return to, on December 26, 1923. When I was born the following December, 1924, (please note, a full year later) in Cleveland, Ohio, I was the first grandchild in either family. Dad was then head of the Music Department in a large Department Store and they lived in a rental apartment.

Mother, who was the eldest in the family, had been a main support to them as she had been a bank teller from age 16 or 17

Dad had a sister and a brother, both younger than he. None of the children in either family had a college education, nor did their parents. Including the parents, there were five in Dad's family and twelve in Mother's, all ordinary folks, who in a few years would be facing the rigors and challenges of the Great Depression. They faced it, bucked it, and lived through it, at times eating a lot of soup and stew, but they all managed to survive and live decent lives, while marrying and raising families as well. The Government was not the biggest factor in their lives then, as it seems to want to be doing now, so these are my observations of that period in our history.

My brother, by the way, was the first in either family to earn a University Degree in Accounting, that from Syracuse University in Syracuse, New York, after his service in the Army during WWII. My sister followed by borrowing some of my savings and attending school to earn a Certificate as a Dental Hygenist, and followed that profession for a full fifty years before retiring. She repaid me promptly from her first earnings, every dime. I was still going to sea and saving my money.