A close friend and I were discussing this on the phone yesterday. She and I have no particular memories of the Depression other than feeding men who came by our houses asking for something to eat. My mother always prepared something for them and then something to “take along”. However, my father was always employed and in his spare time built two houses which were paid for when they were finished. No loans for him. And in that regard he gave me sound advice about credit, the difference between “pay for” and “afford” and also “don’t ever live in a house on leasehold land”. All of these warnings have stuck in my brain for my lifetime and I have followed them. So far, so good. My husband lived in the midwest and his stories of the depression are much different from mine. He claims that California was not hit as hard. Who knows. Could be true.

Your dad was from Decatur, wasn’t he, Candice? The Swedish immigrants in Illinois were split between the townies and the farm people. The farm people, my grandparents, were better off because they had the land and they could grow their own food. Some sharks came to pay the land taxes and take away home-steaded farms in Illinois, just as they are doing now, but then the farmers all had guns, and would chase them away. Interesting that it worked. Now, of course, it wouldn’t. Your pop was doing what all the town Swedes were doing, i.e., thinking, thinking, thinking. And developing the talents that they had, whatever they were. He got lucky, of course, and was talented, of course. Many of the factory workers came from those ranks, because the Swedish and German immigrants were hardworking fools, as my granddad used to say. I can’t start on the Depression stories, because there were hundreds of them in my family. Many of which were how they fed other people. We had one family that lived on the farm, a family of idiots. Now that means something different, but in this case it was people with IQs of around 80. The neighboring people just took care of them. I think it’s good that you were okay. Many of my mother’s generation learned good lessons and weren’t fools because of it. Stick with that day job, Candice.

Candy, I appreciate your empathy for the downtrodden.