I TOLD YOU SO

So here we go again. Another Depression is coming. Or so some people think. Well I’m ready. I’ve been expecting it. You see, childhood impressions are lasting. The impression I got as a child of the Big One was that hard times were normal I’ve never really believed in the prosperity that came after them. Unconsciously I knew there had to be a catch somewhere. It was all too good to be true. Eventually the roof would fall in.

With that cheerful outlook I went through the boom years with one ear always cocked for the sound of the dam breaking and the flood coming. I am now paddling as fast as I can to stay ahead of the surge.

What was the Depression like? I can only give a kid’s description. What it meant to kids was …really not much. Not because we were above it or immune to its effects, but because we took them for granted without thinking too much about how they came to be. We heard plenty of talk about people being “on relief” and we knew it wasn’t good, but we didn’t dig any deeper than that. Talk abut the WPA was always current, but most of us had only a vague idea of what it all meant. It was mostly just a set of letters you saw on a lot of signs at construction sites.

Since there seem to be a lot of militant teachers in the schools today, it wouldn’t be surprising to see some of them using the current problems of the economy as a excuse for indoctrination of their students against the evils of the capitalist system, but that didn’t happen in my school. The teachers didn’t look on us as a lot of little buds ready to burst into full bloom but as a set of unlicked cubs in need of firm handling just to learn our ABC’s, never mind any theories of economics, politics or anything above the schoolyard level. They didn’t worry about your self-esteem. They dealt with it by telling you things like “you have a head and so has a pin.”

My family was involved in one of the better-known episodes of the Crash in 1930. In December of that year the Bank of United States in New York failed and left 500,000 depositors with empty pockets. This was the first important bank in a big city to go under and the sensation was nation-wide. No history of the Depression fails to mention it. So we in the family had our little brush with fame but, as the man said about being tarred and feathered, if it wasn’t for the honor of the thing, we’d just as soon have gone without it.

Because we had our money in that bank. How it got there I don’t know. This was a Russian-Jewish bank established by immigrants, serving mostly their own community. Its origin was indicated by its name, which omits the article before the title, as Russian does. Whether intentionally or not, the name also was notable for the implication it carried that this was somehow a government bank. What could be safer than that? Is that what my father thought when he entrusted his money to it? I’ll never know.

I do know something good about it though. It took years and it involved a lot of small checks sent in the mail, but eventually the depositors had their losses made good. They got back everything they had put into it. We were included of course, but I’m unable to report that we got rich off this reimbursement. For that we would have had to have real money there in the first place and I fear that was not quite the case with us in those days.

In previous essays -- am I obsessed with the Hungry Thirties, I wonder? -- I’ve mentioned other aspects of those days which have faded from the memory of most people by now, but which remain with me more or less vividly. One of them was the army of the unemployed I saw one winter morning lined up on our neighborhood shopping street with long-handled shovels in their hands while they waited for the word to start cleaning up after the heavy snowfall of the night before. It wasn’t quite the same as a chain gang, but let’s say it did familiarize me with the concept so that I recognized it when I encountered it in road-gang movies later on. I actually saw one of them in 1952 when a Georgia man gave me a lift from Fort Gordon to Atlanta and we passed “a lot of fellows who didn’t pay their support” busy whacking weeds along the roadway in regular Paul Newman style.

I’ve also previously mentioned the prevalence in those days of brother-in-law jokes usually referring to the need of finding a job for one of them who’d moved in with the family while out of work. In the jokes it was always the wife’s brother, not the husband’s, who moved in and became a fixture, not only on the couch but also in the mind of the husband, who developed an obsession about moving him out. It was funny, but not, I suppose, to people who were actually having the experience. My own family was in this class, as I’ve just now recalled. My maternal uncle did stay with us a while but I only found out about it afterwards since I was too young to know about it when it happened. From what I learned later, it seems possible that some joke material could have come out of the situation.

From reading this you can see I didn’t suffer too much in the last depression. “Pure insensibility, sir” as a famous man once said. I didn’t know enough to be, ah, depressed. I had enough to eat, enough to wear, quarters for the movies, free rides to Rye Beach on my father’s railroad, the Boston and Westchester. My father didn’t own the railroad, he was a conductor on it. He said an old New York family, the Goelets, owned it or at least started it, to compete with the Vandebilts, who owned the New York Central. If they did, they’re shy about it because their Google entry doesn’t mention it. They’re now in the wine business and apparently still in real estate. The railroad? That’s in bankruptcy, or was, until all the assets were disposed of beginning in 1939. My father and his friends were among the assets, but they got jobs on the New York subways, which took over two miles of the line.

That was life in the Great Depression. Bankruptcy was something we all lived with. Having it around again is nostalgic all right, but, hell, you could say the same of polio if it came back. That kind of nostalgia we don’t need. I prefer to look back on the positive aspects of those days. What were they? That’s easy. We were kids. That says it all, doesn’t it?


























































I TOLD YOU SO

So here we go again. Another Depression is coming. Or so some people think. Well I’m ready. I’ve been expecting it. You see, childhood impressions are lasting. The impression I got as a child of the Big One was that hard times were normal I’ve never really believed in the prosperity that came after them. Unconsciously I knew there had to be a catch somewhere. It was all too good to be true. Eventually the roof would fall in.

With that cheerful outlook I went through the boom years with one ear always cocked for the sound of the dam breaking and the flood coming. I am now paddling as fast as I can to stay ahead of the surge.

What was the Depression like? I can only give a kid’s description. What it meant to kids was …really not much. Not because we were above it or immune to its effects, but because we took them for granted without thinking too much about how they came to be. We heard plenty of talk about people being “on relief” and we knew it wasn’t good, but we didn’t dig any deeper than that. Talk abut the WPA was always current, but most of us had only a vague idea of what it all meant. It was mostly just a set of letters you saw on a lot of signs at construction sites.

Since there seem to be a lot of militant teachers in the schools today, it wouldn’t be surprising to see some of them using the current problems of the economy as a excuse for indoctrination of their students against the evils of the capitalist system, but that didn’t happen in my school. The teachers didn’t look on us as a lot of little buds ready to burst into full bloom but as a set of unlicked cubs in need of firm handling just to learn our ABC’s, never mind any theories of economics, politics or anything above the schoolyard level. They didn’t worry about your self-esteem. They dealt with it by telling you things like “you have a head and so has a pin.”

My family was involved in one of the better-known episodes of the Crash in 1930. In December of that year the Bank of United States in New York failed and left 500,000 depositors with empty pockets. This was the first important bank in a big city to go under and the sensation was nation-wide. No history of the Depression fails to mention it. So we in the family had our little brush with fame but, as the man said about being tarred and feathered, if it wasn’t for the honor of the thing, we’d just as soon have gone without it.

Because we had our money in that bank. How it got there I don’t know. This was a Russian-Jewish bank established by immigrants, serving mostly their own community. Its origin was indicated by its name, which omits the article before the title, as Russian does. Whether intentionally or not, the name also was notable for the implication it carried that this was somehow a government bank. What could be safer than that? Is that what my father thought when he entrusted his money to it? I’ll never know.

I do know something good about it though. It took years and it involved a lot of small checks sent in the mail, but eventually the depositors had their losses made good. They got back everything they had put into it. We were included of course, but I’m unable to report that we got rich off this reimbursement. For that we would have had to have real money there in the first place and I fear that was not quite the case with us in those days.

In previous essays -- am I obsessed with the Hungry Thirties, I wonder? -- I’ve mentioned other aspects of those days which have faded from the memory of most people by now, but which remain with me more or less vividly. One of them was the army of the unemployed I saw one winter morning lined up on our neighborhood shopping street with long-handled shovels in their hands while they waited for the word to start cleaning up after the heavy snowfall of the night before. It wasn’t quite the same as a chain gang, but let’s say it did familiarize me with the concept so that I recognized it when I encountered it in road-gang movies later on. I actually saw one of them in 1952 when a Georgia man gave me a lift from Fort Gordon to Atlanta and we passed “a lot of fellows who didn’t pay their support” busy whacking weeds along the roadway in regular Paul Newman style.

I’ve also previously mentioned the prevalence in those days of brother-in-law jokes usually referring to the need of finding a job for one of them who’d moved in with the family while out of work. In the jokes it was always the wife’s brother, not the husband’s, who moved in and became a fixture, not only on the couch but also in the mind of the husband, who developed an obsession about moving him out. It was funny, but not, I suppose, to people who were actually having the experience. My own family was in this class, as I’ve just now recalled. My maternal uncle did stay with us a while but I only found out about it afterwards since I was too young to know about it when it happened. From what I learned later, it seems possible that some joke material could have come out of the situation.

From reading this you can see I didn’t suffer too much in the last depression. “Pure insensibility, sir” as a famous man once said. I didn’t know enough to be, ah, depressed. I had enough to eat, enough to wear, quarters for the movies, free rides to Rye Beach on my father’s railroad, the Boston and Westchester. My father didn’t own the railroad, he was a conductor on it. He said an old New York family, the Goelets, owned it or at least started it, to compete with the Vandebilts, who owned the New York Central. If they did, they’re shy about it because their Google entry doesn’t mention it. They’re now in the wine business and apparently still in real estate. The railroad? That’s in bankruptcy, or was, until all the assets were disposed of beginning in 1939. My father and his friends were among the assets, but they got jobs on the New York subways, which took over two miles of the line.

That was life in the Great Depression. Bankruptcy was something we all lived with. Having it around again is nostalgic all right, but, hell, you could say the same of polio if it came back. That kind of nostalgia we don’t need. I prefer to look back on the positive aspects of those days. What were they? That’s easy. We were kids. That says it all, doesn’t it?