I missed the Great Depression. This is because I was clever and rough to have been born in 1945.
Let me tell you about the Great Depression. It lasted from the early 1930s to the early 1940s. The unemployment rate was about 25 percent. This was before women worked, so nearly all of these jobless lived in one-job families. There was no unemployment insurance. People lived outside, in tens or maybe even caves. Rich people who had bet everything on the stock market jumped out of top-story windows on Wall Street. Bankers were shot when they tried to foreclose on mortgages. My father said he feared a civil war.
He had come to what became our hometown in the late 1920s in order to become a short-order cook and gradually gain seniority on the railroad. My mother was a telephone operator and was one of the relatively few women who had gainful employment. President Roosevelt became popular because he had creative patchworks in order to relieve suffering, but only the nation’s going onto a war footing, with huge industrial output and deficit spending, got the United States out of the Great Depression.
The beginning of the end of this great economic calamity occurred on the day the Japanese raided and bombed Pearl Harbor.
My parents were like many others in the United States then. They put off having kids until they could afford them. So it was only near the very end of the war, when victory was all but assured, that I was conceived. My father by this time was making good money on the railroad. This was thought to be an essential occupation during wartime, so he was never drafted. If he had been, I might never have been born at all.
By the time I came along, the United States was the most victorious and least damaged nation on earth. It alone produced over a third of the world’s industrial and service output. My small town Texas parents weren’t rich. But by the standards of the Depression they thought they were.
Now I have no memories of either the Second World War or the Great Depression. Yet I grew up in the shadow of both. As a small kid my buddies and I would go all over town hunting for secret Nazi agents. We found them, too. It’s just that we didn’t have the proof. We also found evidence that the Creature from the Black Lagoon had been in town. Again, though, no one listened to us.
As for the Great Depression, it was still around, too. I would go to the drug store from time to time, as a kid, and order a cherry coke, which was mixed right there behind the marble counter by someone called a soda jerk. There is Paradise and there are Cherry Cokes. They run neck in neck for sheer pleasure.
At the start of every month my father would walk downtown and pay bills. We had charge accounts at various stores. Once he came back home furious with me. I had ordered three cherry cokes that month. This cost us seventy-five cents. Did he think we were made of money?
Meanwhile, the stores were carrying something called LayAway, by which consumers could put down an initial payment and pay a little bit every month until the item was fully paid for and could be owned. My parents thought this was virtuous. Their view was that they could do without a new set of pots and pans until they had them off. This may have been penny wise and pound foolish, as there were small “carrying charges” affixed to this arrangement. But it made them feel better. They were children of the Depression.
But as the 1940s yielded to the 1960s my parents could deny their wealth no longer. I believe the tipping point was when my father bought my mother a new Samsonite luggage set for Christmas. He bought it at once. It was purchased with cash in one fell swoop. Only a few years earlier this would have been forbidden decadence. Now it was a smoky blue luxury. Of course, my parents still didn’t think they could afford a real vacation, so it’s not clear what the luggage would be used for.
Maybe they could look at it every now and then and dream about a trip. The anticipation of one is better than the real journey anyhow.
Finally, in the late fifties all Hell broke loose. My parents had been watching the Lawrence Welk Show on Saturday nights, and Walk had been sponsored by Dodge automobiles. The company had just come out with a new model, which it called “swept-winged.” It was an extremely long car by today’s standards. Getting from the front bumper to the tailpipe was a hike. And at the end it had an upward wing shape that suggested it could fly.
It also had a push button gear shift, and included a speedometer that was not marked by a needle but by red liquid filling up in ten mile per hour segments. Going sixty meant you saw six brilliant scarlet puddles on your dashboard.
My father gave in. He bought it new. It was his first new car. All others had been used. There had been the ancient Chevy sedan, the pug-nosed Chrysler touring car, and the melancholy gray Chevy with unreliable standard shift and slippery clutch. No more. The swept-winged Dodge was brand new. It was ours. My mother came to hate it, as it was hard to get into our small garage. She came to call it “a black hunk of tin.” There are limits to the happiness of prosperity.
My parents no longer thought of themselves as poor. The Great Depression had faded at last.
Well, almost. When I was thirteen I knocked out the window of the local Presbyterian church with a baseball. Once more, my father asked if I thought we were made of money.
He also said that at least it wasn’t a stained-glass window. Replacing that would have broken us. Did I not realize that the Great Depression could come back at any time?
Tom McBride is author of BENT DEAD IN BELOIT: A MYSTERY.