survive future shock - making ends meet in the great depression - our survival story

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Thomas and Annie Moon both grew up in austere Depression-era homes, he in Alabama, she in New York.

AT a time when life in America is beginning to resemble a roller-coaster ride on the way down and everyone is trying to findways 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.

Memories from the Great Depression seem more relevant today than ever. The New York Times is starting a series of video

conversations about that painful past and the uncertain future.

Thomas Moon holds a picture taken shortly after he and his wife, Annie, were married 65 years ago.



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 kerosenelamps. 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 intwo or three months.



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.

ANNIE PEZZILLO MOON, 87

Huntsville, Ala.

Annie Pezzillo Moon, Mr. Moon’s wife, who has been a homemaker for more than 65 years, grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, one of 12 children — nine of whom survived — of Italian immigrants. Her father was a self-employed truck driver,

she says, delivering fruits and vegetables in an operation controlled by the Mafia. (“If you didn’t pay off the Mafia, they shot

you,” she says. “I guess my father paid.”) As a 13-year-old during the Depression, she sometimes sold shopping bags in the

street. A few years later, she dropped out of high school to make 50 cents an hour working at Woolworth’s. She met her

husband when she was 21 and he was a sailor on leave in New York.

Our house wasn’t nice. All we had was three bedrooms and a kitchen. We never had a living room, we never had pictures on

the walls. My sister slept at the foot of the bed, and I slept at the head of the bed.

I went to the Madonna House on Cherry Street, where the nuns were; my father didn’t know this, but we needed food. The

nuns gave me a ticket where I would get stale bread and stale cake.

For Christmas we got fruit — maybe a case would break and my father gave us a piece of it. We never, ever got a present.

At the Madonna House, they would put us on a bus and take us uptown to what we called the Rich Lady’s House. I don’t think

it was a house, maybe it was a club house. They would have toys on tables, and you could take a toy from every table. And

at the end, they would give us a coupon and there was an Endicott Johnson factory and we would get a new pair of shoes.

My sister wanted to go roller skating one Christmas Eve. I wasn’t doing nothing. I said, Oh, heck, I’ll go. My sister met these

two sailors and brought my husband over to me. He didn’t pick me up, I’ll make that clear. That was Dec. 24. We got married

March 11.

Gladys Cole recalls how her mother, Yvonne (pictured with her at their boarding house), recycled everything.

Memories from the Great Depression seem more relevant today than ever. The New York Times is starting a series of video

conversations about that painful past and the uncertain future.

Anna Nicholas’s father, E. Earl Moore (pictured with her and her brother, Thomas, at left), kept his job at a steel company, so



where his father, a onetime North Dakota farmer, worked in real estate. In 1933, when Mr. Nelson was 11, the real estate

market had collapsed and his father bartered property in San Bernardino for an old house and some land in Salem, Ore.,

where he eventually started a chicken farm.

We spent the Christmas of 1933 in this modest house there. Dad drove the 1930 Chevrolet out in the foothills toward the

Cascade range, found a tree, put it on top of the car, found some mistletoe and picked some sprigs of that and some holly

and then some white berries. They popped corn and then you got a needle and thread, and that combination of fruit and

popcorn basically was our decoration.

The next summer, we all went out every day helping restore this derelict house. We did things like lift the house up and put a

basement underneath.

You got the neighbors to help you. There was a team of Belgian horses nearby; they helped pull the barn closer to the house.

Farmers in those days knew how to do all kinds of things. You didn’t need much cash — you did everything on a swap.

My dad got the idea of having Rhode Island Red chickens, and they built a big coop for 200 or 300 chickens. He put in a trap

nest system, with a board in front. If it laid an egg, I’d mark a plus on the board; if not, a minus, and after a while the poor

ones were sold or eaten.

The male chickens we wouldn’t keep, we’d sell them. I’d have to go and get one and chop its head off and pluck it. No big

deal.

GLADYS COLE, 74

Nokomis, Fla.

Gladys Cole, a retired teacher and insurance investigator in Nokomis, Fla., was born in the middle of the Depression and grew

up in Hartford. Her father was a mechanical engineer at a dairy there; her mother ran the boarding house where they lived.

That meant keeping the tenants in linens and trying to make the house attractive when buying new things was not a good

option.

My mother never threw anything away. If a sheet got worn, she would cut it up and put it together with another sheet for the

people who lived in the rooms — they didn’t care, they weren’t fussy about linens the way people are today. She mended

towels, and when they frayed around the edges, she cut them up to make washcloths.

The sheets that got old and were worn out in the middle, they cut strips from the sides, narrow strips, and tied the ends

together and put it on the loom and wove blankets. If they wanted color, they added narrow strips of fabric from old dresses.

You didn’t go to the store and buy clothing; you went to the 5-and-10-cent store, where you could buy fabric very

inexpensively. You darned socks — you had a special little wooden ball you put inside the sock; you had cotton yarn. You

could actually weave it so it didn’t show. You can’t do that today because the socks are synthetic; it doesn’t hold. My mother

would make picture frames out of papier-mâché, and she cut pictures from the Sears catalog and then would make the

frames to go around the pictures.

They recycled everything, I tell you, everything.

ANNA JANE NICHOLAS, 87

Oakmont, Pa.

Anna Jane Nicholas, a retired arts and antiques appraiser in Oakmont, Pa., was luckier than many: While by her estimate, the

families of 40 percent of her schoolmates could not afford to buy them shoes, her own father, who worked for United States

Steel in Gary, Ind., kept his job through the Depression. Still, her family was always very careful with money, and her mothermade the family’s clothing and curtains herself, and even re-covered the dining room chairs. She would also line a wooden

b th b k h ith b l d l di i it f i t hi f k



Anna Nicholas’s father, E. Earl Moore (pictured with her and her brother, Thomas, at left), kept his job at a steel company, so

her family was better off than many. Her mother often left food on the porch for migrants searching for work.

My mother would put food out there if she had an extra helping, then she would pull the blinds in the kitchen, because she

didn’t want my brother and I to be watching. We discovered later there was a mark in the alley that indicated there was

something on the back porch.

My mother was a big-hearted woman. If she had a dessert, she always put a dessert out there. Sometimes they’d leave littlenotes: ‘Thank you, Ma’am.’

One woman came along — I was surprised, it was usually men — she said, ‘Your gingerbread was lovely.’ She had some sort

of piece of paper, it looked like a piece of a bag, just a few words, she said, ‘I always liked to bake gingerbread and your

gingerbread was lovely.’

PETER G. HOLDEN, 92

New York

Peter Holden worked for the New York City parks department for 35 years and still lives in Manhattan. He grew up in Raleigh,

N.C., where his mother took a job as a cleaning woman for North Carolina State University when he was 7, after the death of

his father, a brick mason. Mr. Holden’s home had electricity, but no water; water had to be drawn from a neighbor’s well or

hauled from a stream several houses away.



Peter G. Holden, 92, remembers "a great feeling of cooperation" among neighbors when he was young.

We lived high up on a hill above the southwestern campus, and we just worked together and shared. There was a great

feeling of cooperation and help, even among the poor whites and the poor blacks. My grandfather had a farm and most any

time he would come in, he would bring enough for two or three days — corn or tomatoes, whatever the season was — and we

would share.

We ate beans maybe four times a week, boiled in salt pork. On Saturday or Sunday somehow or other we would have a nice

meal. My mother would bring back a steak, that might have been 25 cents a pound. She was paid $8 or $9 a week, but at

that time you could have more than a whole week’s groceries with that and have a little money left over.

She got laid off from the N.C. State job and there was just no jobs around Raleigh, so she went to Stamford — she had a

sister living up there — and took my younger sister with her. I finished high school in 1934.

My mother always told us you can be anything you want, don’t come here telling me you can’t be this and they won’t let me

be that.

That first year, I didn’t think I would be able to go to college, but my mother sent $10 from Stamford. She said, ‘Boy, you

take this to St. Augustine’s and see if they don’t take this as a down payment, and if they don’t take it, you send my money

back to me or I’ll come back to Raleigh and beat you all over.’

So I went out and tried to discourage St. Augustine’s, but they took me. I graduated college in 1938.

Like my mother said, if you really want to do something you can.

survive future shock - making ends meet in the great depression - our survival story

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