The Great Depression Era

The Great Depression of the last century occurred the year of my birth. I was born at home because there was no money for the hospital. I was born into a poor family and we were subsidized by relatives. My father's job was to deliver ice to homes that only had an icebox, which meant no refrigeration. I remember him using large tongs to hoist a 50 pound block of ice onto a leather shoulder saddle and take it from the truck into the house where he deposited it in the icebox. He injured his back and was now out of work.

My mother did not work and kept a clean house, clean clothes, clean children and cooked very simple meals. We were taught cleanliness, table manners, respect for adults, and to never lie, cheat or steal. The only violence in our home was my father's temper. He did not beat us. Instead, he used his tongue to lash us and it was psychological abuse. It was verbal abuse.

This country emerged from the Great Depression with the event of WWII. Women were freed up to work in factories and many of them never went back to being a stay-at-home mom. My mother was one of these women. I fulfilled a childhood dream of traveling the world by joining the Foreign Service of the U.S. State Department in 1952. I trained in Washington D.C. to be a code clerk. I was sent to work at the embassy in Paris and later to Tokyo. I observed and learned much from this experience. I was a naive young woman fresh out of segregated, bigoted Texas. It was a major turning point in my life and I call it my uncommon education.

It was an eye-opener when my training supervisor told my group that she was in the code room when a message came in stating that the U.S. had broken the Japanese code. It revealed that the Japanese were going to bomb Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. She placed the decoded message in the proper outbox and this was ten days before Pearl Harbor was bombed. She had no idea where her decoded message went to or who read it. This is when I began becoming aware of what was happening in the world.

Like us, many of you had a loved one that lived during the Great Depression. Many of us have heard stories from our parents or grandparents of the horrific times of the depression; stories that told us how hard it was to find a job, put food on the table, and to provide shelter for the family. Learning how to live without things was a battle all by itself. Hearing the stories made me grateful to be born in a different era. However, each era has it's own battles to fight that will change the direction of the economy and maybe the world.

Many people feel that we are in a depression. Unemployment rising, business closing its doors, and poverty ...