ARTICLE: MAKING ENDS MEET DURING THE LAST GREAT DEPRESSION

Making Ends Meet in the Great Depression By JOYCE WADLER


AT a time when life in America is beginning to resemble a roller-coaster ride on the way down and everyone is trying to find ways to save money, it may be instructive — both in terms of offering helpful hints and putting things in perspective — to look at how people ran their households during the Great Depression.



Back then there was little money for food, let alone new curtains, but people found ways to cope. Backyard gardens were cultivated not because of a sudden itch to eat locally grown produce, but out of necessity; homeowners did their own repairs and found ingenious ways to make their homes functional and attractive.



Below, some who lived through the Depression share their memories.



THOMAS MOON, 87



Huntsville, Ala.



Thomas Moon, a retired electrical engineer, grew up in New Hope, Ala., 20 miles from Huntsville. One of six children of a sharecropper, he began working in the fields just as the Depression hit, when he was 7 or 8, earning 50 cents a day. At 17, he joined the Navy, where he served in World War II.



The house I grew up in, all we had was a fireplace for heat and a wood stove in the kitchen to cook with, and two kerosene lamps. The living room had the fireplace — we had two full-size beds in that room.



In the winter the chickens would come up under the house and sit in the basement, so if we wanted a chicken we’d raise a plank up and reach down and get the chicken. (It was warm in the wintertime. The base of that chimney would be nice and warm; I don’t blame them for going down there.)



There was nothing thrown away. We’d make soup out of the feet that was delicious. The gizzard, oh, man, that was choice meat, everybody loved the gizzard. We used to make featherbeds out of chicken feathers and geese, but we’d pick the goose without killing him: all you do is pick him up, yank the feathers off when he was still alive. He don’t mind it. It grows back in two or three months.



In the summer, I took a washtub and put it on a little scaffold out near the chicken house and put burlap sacks around it to make it private. You’d fill that tub full of water in the morning, the sun would heat the water. I found a valve somewhere and I had a valve in the bottom of the tub, and that’s where we got the warm water. It held about 20 gallons. We might take one shower a week.



When you got hungry, you could take a walk out in the mountains. There was always something to eat — all kinds of berries — and in the winter you got pecans, hickory nuts, walnuts. We used to eat bullfrog; that’s a delicacy. And we used to eat squirrels and rabbits.



And possums. Ever eat a possum? Don’t try it. I’ll never forget the first possum I ate.



My grandfather and his son invited me to have a possum dinner. You know how a possum looks at you with his teeth open?



When they opened the oven door, the possum’s mouth was wide open. I took one bite out of that possum, that was the end of my possum career.

rest at link:  http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/02/garden/02depression.html?_r=3&hpw=&pagewanted=print