Thursday, October 02, 2008
Tough times of '30s recalled
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Shanna Flowers is The Roanoke Times' metro columnist.
Shanna Flowers
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In these days of increasing financial uncertainty, it's worth noting that many Southwest Virginians went through even worse times. In the early 1930s, they and the rest of the country were trying to survive the Great Depression.
Imagine if you can the day word got around that developer John Senter had submitted the low bid to build the new William Fleming High School. The next morning, the builder awoke in his Maiden Lane home in Raleigh Court and looked outside.
"Literally ... 150 and 200 men were standing on the lot adjacent to his home, in total silence, just hoping for a job," Senter's great-nephew Sam Lionberger recalled Wednesday afternoon, sharing the story his great-uncle had told him years earlier.
"He said he'll never ever forget that scene."
Over the past 75 years, lots of things have changed. Senter's company is now Lionberger Construction. The school he built in the county is now Roanoke's Breckinridge Middle School.
But echoes of the collapsing economy that plunged the nation into despair for a nearly a decade are being heard again. That's sending shivers through some folks who remember it.
"I'd hate to see that come back again," said Al Holland, 91, of Roanoke. Born in 1916, he was a teen when the stock market crashed in 1929, triggering the Depression. "If it's any way we can get a stop on this ... " Holland said of the free-falling economy, his voice trailing off.
As politicians in Washington scramble to stop an economic calamity, Holland was one of four elderly Southwest Virginians who took time this week to recount memories of an era that marked their lives.
One told accounts of her father's customers paying him not with cash but with food and other crops. Another recounted a nomadic life as his father crisscrossed the country looking for work, and yet another remembers standing in a Roanoke milk line.
Lionberger was born in 1940 after the Depression. But when his father graduated with a civil engineering degree in 1932, no jobs were available. He landed a job with the Civilian Conservation Corps, one of President Roosevelt's economic recovery programs.
"Fortunately, I don't think we're anywhere near that," Lionberger said, comparing the current economic situation with the Depression. "There are more safeguards now. But people who went through that period, they have a common tendency to be very frugal."
Emily Stuart of Blacksburg was a young girl in Douglas, Ga., in the early '30s. To this day, the retired YMCA director, now 88, watches her budget closely.
In 1930, Stuart was 10 when the Depression tightened its grip on the nation. She recalls childhood Christmas gifts that consisted each year of a book, a doll and fruit.
"I just remember the devastation of it all," she said.
Stuart remembers the days when people knocked on her family's back door, asking for something -- anything -- to eat. Her mother always managed to find something.
Her father owned a hardware store, so he was a mainstay for farmers who needed seeds and other supplies. Often, they couldn't afford to pay him. Many couldn't pay with money. They didn't have it.
"They brought in food. They'd bring in ham. ... He would let them buy on credit."
In 1933, Stuart's brother was accepted into Duke University. But her father didn't have money to send him. Stuart said right before her brother was supposed to leave, one of her father's customers came to the house.
"I've been owing you," the man told Stuart's father, and gave him a bale of cotton. That helped cover her brother's tuition for that fall; he graduated from Duke four years later.
Stuart's husband, Bob, 90, moved from La Crosse, Wis., to North Carolina then back to Madison, Wis., while his father pursued different textile mill jobs. The family landed in Lafayette, Ga., where Bob Stuart graduated from high school.
"Every year in high school, I was making new friends," said the retired Virginia Tech professor. "The family was preoccupied with survival."
By Depression standards, Holland's family fared relatively well. His father, a blacksmith for Norfolk and Western Railway, never lost his job. His stay-at-home mother occasionally took in laundry. His parents' garden was "their stopgap."
But Holland was not immune to the Depression. He remembers the Red Cross flour giveaway and the lines for milk.
Now 84, Bob Hale remembers standing in the milk line once. He was a preschooler, about 5 or 6. His mother was a schoolteacher, and his father was in a wheelchair. He had three siblings.
"Mama really had to take care of all of us. In the summer, she'd go up to Connecticut and do day work."
Like others around them, the Hales made do and everybody chipped in. Young Bob would do odd jobs. Often, his pay was pop bottles. He'd redeem them for 2 cents. His mother would go to the market at closing time. A vendor might be a few potatoes short of "a peck," so he would give them to her.
Many meals didn't include meat, and his mother did a lot of canning, Hale said.
"You were poor, but you really didn't know," said Hale, a retired musician. "This is the way it was. So you didn't think about it."
Holland sees some distinct similarities in today's crisis and the one of his young years.
"People were taking money out of their account," he said of the Depression-era run on banks. "It's almost running simultaneous with right now."
He chuckled. "I called this morning to check on my money. They still have some in there for me."
