Lessons of the Great Depression

In the early hours before dawn, Thelma May Beets shuffled across the cold linoleum floor for a weekly inspection of the trunk next to her bed.

Her husband built the rust-colored tool chest when he came home from World War II. Now it is full of food: sugar, pasta, soup, oats, crackers, creamer.

Nearly blind, she reviewed her inventory by touch -- peanut butter jars with ridged lids, ground coffee inside a rusting can.

"If you like to eat, you better save some," said the 91-year-old widow, her fingers spotted with age and curled by arthritis.

Thelma has long kept some food in the chest, but as the latest recession has deepened, she's made a point of keeping it full. It's a compulsion she learned as a child of the Great Depression, the period of epic hardship that began with the stock market crash in 1929 and lasted for a decade.

Her memories of that time have come flooding back lately. Survivors of the Depression are approaching the end of their lives, and their tales flow freely -- of countless injuries and precious joys. They experienced humiliation and unexpected generosity, moments of fear and times of laughter.

"My age group, the older people, we came up the hard way," she said from her home in Sedalia, Ind., about 60 miles northwest of Indianapolis.

The children of those times learned things that they would remember for the rest of their lives. They discovered how to make endless pots of soup, how to use corncobs for fuel, how to make undergarments from bleached feed sacks. They learned the value of a wild imagination and honest neighbors.

They were good lessons.

It all began for Bertha Greenstein when she couldn't have a new pair of shoes.

Good shoes were everywhere in New York in the late 1920s -- T-straps, Mary Janes, slip-on boots, soft leather pumps. Nothing said style like shoes.

Her father, Jacob Greenstein, an immigrant from Romania, co-owned a tailoring shop in Lower Manhattan. He spent his days surrounded by bolts of fine cashmere. His nimble fingers smoothed the cloth across the shoulders of stylish stockbrokers and other businessmen.

Eight months after the crash, Jacob sold his share of the tailoring shop and bought a bakery on 110th Street, a block from Central Park. People lined up for dense loaves of rye and horn-shaped rolls covered in salt.

Every couple of weeks, as customers' debts grew, her father sent her to collect. She would crisscross the neighborhood, climb flights of stairs and politely ask for the lady of the house. Everyone recognized her as the baker's daughter.

She loved to walk. She found jobs along the way -- tutoring children, selling paper flowers, folding bolts of cloth in a fabric store.

There was a beauty to never standing still, even though it was hard on her shoes.

When holes in her soles grew to the size of quarters, she cut off a chunk of the tan cake boxes in her father's bakery and slipped them inside her shoes, over and over again.

It took time for the Depression to settle into the minds of children whose parents had jobs, a precious commodity at a time when the national unemployment rate would eventually hit 25 percent.

Arthur Lewie's father, Dr. Lemuel Lewie Sr., was the only black dentist on Main Street in Columbia, S.C., and Arthur began to notice that things were different when patients stopped paying cash. "They'd bring hams, chickens, things like that, for us," he said.

Arthur was 10 at the time, the eldest of three. Unlike many of their neighbors, the Lewies owned their wood-frame home with a wraparound porch so wide that the kids would race their tricycles on it.

His mother heard the news of banks collapsing and suggested to her husband that they pull their money out of the local black-owned bank. "My father left all his money in the bank and, of course, he lost it all," Arthur said.

Sections of their lawn were replaced with rows of tomato plants, cabbage and collard greens. Pits were dug into the ground to store potato slips and vegetable seeds.

Each vegetable picked and engine repaired impressed on the boy the importance of self-reliance. "I knew the value of being able to make things, and do things yourself," said Arthur, 89.

Arthur's wife, Reva Goodwin, remembers strangers showing up on her family's back doorstep in northwest Baltimore, asking for something to eat. The cast-iron pot on the stove's back burner was never empty, and nothing in the kitchen was wasted.

Reva's father complained that her mother was giving away food, but she shrugged it off.

"In the neighborhood, everyone looked out for each other," said Reva, 79. "We had to mind everybody in the neighborhood. ... People have forgotten that."

Even with the help of family and friends, there were sacrifices, many of them beyond the understanding of children.

Richard was 7. His father, a fisherman, had drowned when he was 10 months old. His mother, Temperance Anne, had struggled to raise him and his sister, Margaret.

Anne's brothers agreed to take care of them. Earlier in the Depression, she had helped them. "I have to work, and I'm sorry," Richard remembered his mother telling him.

His uncle reminded him that he was "the extra kid in the family," said Richard, who resented the chores he had to do that his four younger cousins didn't have to do.

Across town, Margaret was included in most family activities, but she, too, knew she was a burden.

Both uncles were carpenters who were struggling to find work in Boston. They rose early each morning and headed to a nearby union office, waiting for jobs that came sporadically.

Then Anne met Andrew Hillier, 12 years her senior. He was a good man with a steady job, and they wed in 1937. Anne told her children years later that she remarried to bring them home.

Long after the Depression, Richard's uncle reached out and they slowly developed a friendship. Richard, after raising his own family and facing his own worries, came to understand his uncle's words.

"A lot of his abrasiveness was this constant on edge of 'How am I going to provide for this family?'" said Richard, 82. "He gave me a roof to live under and enabled my mother to work."

That was worth forgiveness, he figured.

After years of the Depression, the hardships gradually began to ease as federal spending boomed, factory jobs grew and prices slowly rose.

She was an avid reader, sneaking away from the battered metal washtub to curl up on her feather bed with a stack of movie magazines about faraway Hollywood. At dusk, when the wagonloads of hay had been harvested, she sat next to the family's oil lamp with murder mysteries and dreamed of solving crimes.

But as the Depression wore on, she set aside the books and magazines from the school library once the sun set. Coal oil was too expensive to waste.

Judy was the youngest of seven and the only girl. Her father had passed away. Her mother and two brothers were running the farm.

In 1936, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Rural Electrification Act, which promised to install electrical distribution systems to rural areas. It was one of many government efforts to pump cash and technology into the country.

It took two more years for electricians to arrive at Judy's family farm. That first night, after the workmen left, she raced to her bedroom. There it was: a light fixture, with a single bulb. She tugged on its metal chain and a warm light bathed the room.

World War II was coming, and the country's impending burst of production would eventually catapult the United States out of its economic malaise.