Stressed? All you need is a little Studs Terkel

Put things in perspective with a quick read of the Great Depression, told by those who lived it

A few years ago I purchased a copy of Hard Times by Studs Terkel for my dad. This book captures short oral histories from people who lived through the Great Depression. My dad was born in 1935 and he went through hard times, no doubt.

There’s nothing like hearing history directly from the source.

I don’t know much about my dad’s childhood. He told me stories about being made fun of at school for wearing hand-me-down girls shoes because he couldn’t afford new shoes. He told me the family would get lucky sometimes and buy a goat to slaughter so they’d have meat. I know his parents were heavy drinkers and he left home at age 16 because his home life was terrible. I wonder how many incredible stories about his early days died with him.

The stories in Hard Times help me imagine what it must have been like for my dad when he was a kid. Or for my grandma, an orphan who survived the Depression with the help of free soup lines made available to the community from the Heinz company. These stories are a reminder that hard times can fall on anyone, any time. What have you learned about your parents and grandparents experiences during the Great Depression?

Here are quotes from three interesting stories that I urge you to read in entirety. If you have a short attention span, chill out— none of them are more than 4 pages long.

“He done more to bring me into the fight for civil rights than anybody… From that day on, I was determined that I was gonna fight for freedom until I was able to get some of it myself. I was just stumblin’ here and there. But I been very successful in stumblin’ ever since that day. It was in 1928.”

— E.D. Nixon, of the NAACP and one of many leaders of the Montgomery Bus Boycott on meeting A. Philip Randolph

“… we’d ask the guy that was ladling out the soup into the buckets — everybody had to bring their own buckets to get the soup — he’d dip the greasy, watery stuff off the top. So we’d ask him to please dip down to get some meat and potatoes from the bottom of the kettle. But he wouldn’t do it. So we learned to cuss. We’d say: “Dip down, goddamnit.”

— Peggy Terry, identified as an advocate for poor southern whites, on the soup line

“The hard times brought farmers’ families closer together. My wife was working for the county Farm Bureau. We had lessons on home economics, how to make underwear out of gunny sacks, out of flour sacks. It was cooperative labor. So some good things came out of this. Sympathy towards one another was manifest.”

— Oscar Heline, farmer from the northwestern part of Iowa near the South Dakota border