My Mama Done Told Me: What I know second hand about The Great Depression

I'm no economist, but I am married to one, so I know that a recession is nasty, brutish, and short, while a depression is nasty, brutish, and long. And that The Great Depression was nasty, brutish, and long - really long.

And it was bad. Really bad.

During The Depression, there were some years when the nation saw double digit negative growth rates. That means Gross Domestic Product decreased by 10% or more.

I guess it could happen - maybe as a one shot deal - but I really don't see it happening again as it did during the thirties, because - for all our stupidity with respect to borrowing, lending, and squandering - we're richer and more powerful than we were then; we have safeguards that have been put in place to keep the economy and the country from falling arse over tea kettle into another Great Depression.

Yes, there've been lay offs. People have lost jobs. More of them probably will. But is there anyone who seriously believes that we're going to have 25% unemployment without seeing Keynesian action that will make the WPA and the CCC look like nothing.

Twenty-five percent unemployment was bad. Really bad.

I know this second hand because my parents lived through The Great Depression, my mother from the age of 10 to 20, my father from the age of 17 to 27.

Twenty-five percent unemployment never translated into cold and hungry for my mother's family. But it did mean that sometimes the folks who shopped at her father's butcher shop/grocery store couldn't always pay their bills. And the people who rented an flat in the family's small apartment building couldn't always pay their rent. And my grandfather wasn't going to let someone else's kids go hungry, or put some family out in the street. So, for my mother's family, this translated into making do and doing without.

My mother remembered putting cardboard into the soles of shoes to postpone a trip to the cobbler.

She remembered getting a violin case as her only gift one Christmas. (She already had the violin.)

She remembered the unemployed men coming to the door and getting some kind of a handout from my grandfather.

She remembered girls in her high school class at Alvernia whose parents could no longer make the tuition payments, or pay for the uniforms and books. The fees can't have been much, but if you're not working, twenty bucks meant a lot. (Especially in those days, when twenty bucks was TWENTY BUCKS.)

My mother got her first job in 1939, just as The Great Depression was winding down. She was laid off on Christmas Eve because her boss needed to give the job to his niece.

For my father, twenty-five percent unemployment translated into spending his late teens and early twenties shifting from one dead-end, crummy job to the other, and taking night school college courses to better himself. (Why my father didn't go to college-college remains a mystery to me. Yes, his father was long dead and the family wasn't exactly awash in cash, but 40 years after his high school graduation, several of his teachers showed up at his wake and told us that they remembered him quite well as the best student they'd ever had. I asked my Aunt Margaret why these teachers hadn't encouraged my father to go to college, and her completely non-bitter, nonchalant, matter-of-fact answer was, "Oh, they were Yankees. They never would have encouraged an Irish Catholic boy." Which doesn't explain why my grandmother - who was not only an Irish Catholic, but a school teacher who'd gone to Normal School (teachers college) for a 2-year degree when that meant something - didn't encourage him. Ah, well. That tale's dead and buried.)

My father and his best friend Spike had a regular comedy routine they'd worked up over the years to talk about their Depression era jobs.

My favorite was the time they went to the training seminar for vacuum cleaner salesmen, during which the high point was a demo of the vacuum cleaner sucking red liquid up and down a giant thermometer that was tacked to the wall. They all had to take turns to prove for themselves that the vacuum cleaner had powerful suction. My father and Spike decided then and there that the life of a vacuum cleaner salesman was not for them, but when they bolted from the room, they found that they were locked in.

Spike also had a job going door to door giving out baked bean samples, and would have us all howling as he'd recount how he crept up the front walks and rang the bell, only to hear the house go dead. Radio off. No talking. "No one home."

"Free baked beans," he'd yell through the mail slot, but who was going to trust that this wasn't the nasty ploy of a bill collector?

Fortunately for my father and Spike, neither was supporting a family. Both had a roof over their heads, and food on the table.

But how humiliating and dreadful it must have been for these young men full of energy and intelligence to languish through their early twenties. Both of them found steady work, 1940-ish, in plants that were producing industrial materials used for defense products for the coming war. Both spent their working lives with these companies, my father with a 4 year Navy hiatus during World War II.

Like my mother, my father remembered the drifting men coming by his mother's house for  a handout. The cardboard in the shoes. The shiny pant-seat of his "good suit."

Like most of those who survived The Great Depression, my parents were financially cautious.

The only thing you borrowed money for was your house.  Maybe a car.

If you couldn't pay cash, you didn't buy it.

We didn't have a lot of stuff.

So be it.

Neither did anyone else we knew.

My parents knew one couple who borrowed money to take a vacation. They were beside themselves.

"How could you enjoy a vacation that wasn't paid for?" they'd shake their heads.

Thus our vacations (depending on the cash situation and whether it was our turn to visit Chicago, or Chicago's turn to visit us) consisted of:

• A car trip to Chicago to visit my mother's family.
• A week or two at the Cape, renting a small cottage in Bass River from my parents friends Mae and Nemo.
• "Day trips" - i.e., one trip to Nantasket Beach and one to somewhere else, over the course of the two week period when Thompson Wire was shut down.

So, what I know second hand about The Great Depression is that my parents (because of their ages and family circumstances) absolutely escaped the worst of it. They didn't live in shanty towns or hobo jungles; sit on the side wall surrounded by their possessions post-eviction; or queue up at soup kitchens. (Now that I think of it, I bet my father did that on occasion.) I also know that it was truly terrible for some people, and no trip to the beach for most people. That they did without stuff - and in doing so, figured out that you could do without stuff, and that acquiring stuff you don't need and can't afford is really not the road to happiness.

This time around, I really don't think we as a nation have to worry about Tom Joading it out to California to live in a Tent City, or selling apples and pencils on street corners, or sustaining anything close to 25 percent unemployment.

Which is not to say we don't have to worry.

But while we may be in for some hard times, my guess is it's going to be more along the lines of "The Great Kick in the Arse," or "The Great Slap Up and Down the Side of Our Head," than it is "The Great Depression."

Maybe it'll mean putting off the large flat screen TV purchase. Or retirement, even.

Maybe it'll mean not having a 4,000 square foot dream house with a 1,000 square foot great room.

Maybe it'll mean fewer meals out. A vacation to nowhere.  (Not even a day trip to Nantasket Beach.)

But I can't see anything of the scale of The Great Depression happening here just yet, and I find it more than a bit disconcerting to hear the word tossed out by politicians who have no more clue than I do - and maybe even less of a clue - about what The Great Depression actually entailed.

Of course, I may live to eat these words. Metaphorically speaking, that is. At least during The Great Depression, they'd have been written on paper that I could have burned to keep warm.