The thing is I have no pithy anecdotes about the Depression. Growing up in Hollywood, it had little reality for me. When I was little, I thought people were talking about a time in the ’30s when people were … well, just really DOWN. And then there were the really depressed who jumped out of windows. But my father was in vaudeville then, the tail end of it at least, and just trying to break into supper clubs. I don’t mean ROB supper clubs — just get started performing in them. He was scratching to get by. As I got older, but not much, my frame of reference for the Depression came from photos, news clips, films. Images of people in soup lines merged with photos of those caught in the Dorothea Lange photos of families in the Dust Bowl. It was a metaphor for utter misery, total destitution and almost impossible to connect with fully for one from a place of such plenty.

I was a child during the Great Depression in Phoenix, AZ, which, like every place, was hard hit by the Depression. Even though I was very young I was aware of it because the radio news shows broadcast stories about little else except, later, the brewing war in Europe. My father was the head of a bank and worried about a potential bank failure. He succeeded in selling the bank and retained his job so we were not personally affected.

I remember vividly the unemployed men coming from the road in back of our house, through our gate and asking for work. My mother paid them for yard work if she had it; and in any case, she gave them a sandwich and a dollar bill. What a difference from today. There was no fear of these unemployed strangers and much sympathy everywhere for them. Except for a few hate mongers and their followers, we were a united country worried about the people who were suffering and willing to pay the price to put them to work on Federal projects and alleviate their hardship in any way we could.

 

My mother’s mother, who had been the girl in the arrow shirt ad, a medallion I believe, was a mother of two when the Depression struck. My grandfather, a dashing, if short, gentleman, was in the kind of business that involved a great many meetings abroad and many handshakes.
My mother was very beautiful. At nine years old she had to support her family because, in the Depression, the handshakes didn’t work anymore. She went on stage, modeled and was the little girl on the "Amos ‘n’ Andy" radio show.

Exhausted by ten years of career, she married my father at 19 and vowed never to work again.

My father’s father, who, family legend has it, was a half breed — a rare mix of Jew and Cherokee or Cree — played the piano for silent movies, and by the time the Depression came had his little cigar store at 1600 Broadway. My father’s mother was a mother of two when the depression struck.

My father went to work at 15, becoming a press photographer in New York. I still have his badges. He moved out to L.A., shot stars and studio heads, became a cameraman during the war and then a producer.

When I was a baby, something that happened to them was worse than the Depression: the House un-American Activities Committee investigations, which divided Hollywood. My parents were never communists, but the level of hatred and mistrust in their company town made them decide to get the hell out of the States. They moved to Paris with my mother’s parents.

When times got tough again — because they always do – my mother gave a big sigh and played Charles Boyer’s secretary in a Four Star Playhouse shot in Paris.

Then times got good. Then they got bad again. Then they got almost good. Then they got absurdly good for certain people — and never quite good enough for the rest.

All I have ever seen is cycles, good and bad, each one perceived as an unchangeable reality while it was happening.

The Great Depression! I remember being relatively rich before 1929. (My family owned two houses in Fort Worth, TX, and my father earned a great salary buying cotton for the Japan Cotton Co.)

So the great crash took almost everybody down. I remember my father traveling incessantly, working “on commission.” I remember my mother standing in horror when the Baptist Church delivered two boxes of groceries as charity to those who had been the deliverers in the past.

I remember being unable to join a grade-school club because the initiation fee was 25 cents. And I remember my 16-year-old brother, James, working his heart out in an ice cream shop and bringing his salary home to my mother in nickels and dimes.

Even children were inspired by the way F.D.R. worked to create the W.P.A. and other social services, efforts that created the Tennessee Valley Authority and shored up new kinds of jobs in the U.S. It took World War II for America to fully recover from the Depression. But by then we were the Arsenal of Democracy and ready to be the greatest industrialized nation and lead the world.

I feel the Depression pulled the country together. People sacrificed, skimped, made do and maybe that’s not such a bad thing for a nation overfed, over-entertained, overpaid and moving along very low on "sacrifice."

Perhaps the low blow of Wall Street will bring the nation to its moral senses. Maybe we’ll begin to concentrate on education, science and health and less on jazzy cars, celebrity worship and massive entitlement and willful selfishness.

Click here on this text to read my New York Post column.

I’m from a black family; from the time we hit the shores of the United States there was a "depression." What I got from it was the Great Depression was the great equalizer. Nobody had anything tangible so what was tangible — respect, caring, etc. —  these things were shared.

We never had any money when I was young in Ohio, but nobody was jumping out of windows or selling apples in our town. We always thought life was about making do and working hard for very little. My parents told me a little about the Depression, about how my mother’s family moved into my grandfather’s small hotel for a short time, about how my father who kept his job through it all selling furniture and mattresses could pay his bills. They didn’t explain the Depression as an unusual and desperate heartbreaking experience, a story with a moral to pass on. Nothing they told me impressed me as a different life than what I was living.

I was lucky as a child to live in a pretty little town surrounded by a large fairytale forest. My father created a garden around our little house by transplanting wild flowers from the forest and people drove long distances to see his masterpiece. So I didn’t see life as a very small house with a very small bathroom; I saw it as living in a famous wildflower garden. My parents worked hard but everybody’s parents worked hard in my slice of Ohio – I didn’t feel poorer than anyone else, I didn’t know anybody who had a big house with two bathrooms. As I grew up the Depression appeared to me in books and theater and movies – distanced.

However, when I was older I learned that my parents had ben deeply frightened by the Depression and the impact it had on people’s lives and relationships – and its threat to us. They just saw no point in upsetting their child and unwittingly they may have contributed to my courage or craziness in financial dealings.

I am very concerned about today’s financial world, but not so much in its possible threat to my children, or our friends and me. It is the precipice overlooking how little we know that has been revealed that is my Depression.

My parents both lived through the Depression. While I wasn’t born until the late ’50s, that legacy was alive and well in our house in Auburn, ME. As a child I thought "The Depression" was located in our basement. It was certainly dark and "depressing" down there and my parents kept enough canned goods in that dank place to permit months of chowing down on creamed corn and green beans. I confess to thinking that not eating might be a better option, although those thoughts were fueled by a full belly. It was the "just in case" food supply, also fueled by a vibrant "duck and cover" arms race. 

My parents, I realize, talked about the Depression a lot. My father’s father owned a tiny corner grocery store, "McFadden’s Market," in those days and my father was proud that his father, Charlie McFadden, was well-known for "trading" with his neighbors. Shoes for food. Sweaters for food. Milk for meat. That kind of thing. He also extended credit — lots and lots of credit — to his neighbors who needed to feed their families. Needless to say, grandfather was never paid back for most of what he lent and ultimately lost the store. I wonder if that is part of the reason my father refused to borrow money. His philosophy was, "If I can’t afford to pay cash, I can’t afford to buy it." He never owned a credit card until the 1980s when a car-rental company refused to rent him a car without one. I don’t think he ever used it but that once.