After years of reading, it finally dawned on me there is an untapped source of Depression Era reading that is readily available to all of us.

Most soldiers, sailors, marines, airmen were children growing up in the depression. Invariably almost all of them tell something of their youth and growing up in Depression Era America.  I was reading about a marine who grew up in West Virginia and decided to escape the Depression by joining the Marine Corps before the war.  He had money in his pocket and during training, more food than he ever had in his life.

OK, so where is this vast resource?

Read WW II memoirs of American airmen, sailors, soldiers and marines.  You have to cull them; something which I never thought of until I started reading a book about a marine in Guadacanal.  Funny but I can't really say the same about first hand German accounts of WW II and some of those guys had to see Weimar hyper-inflation.

I was hoping for something a weeeee bit more specific.

You gotta cite sources man!

Lol my Dad enlisted on his 17th Bday, Feb of '43.
Said it was the first time he could eat all he wanted!

Miller's Earned in Blood.  Miller grew up in West Virginia.  Had shoes only in winter.  Subsistence farmer family.  Joins USMC to escape Depression.

Morehead - In My Sights.  WW II fighter pilot. Brief account of his family during the '30s.

Andrew Doty's Backwards Into Battle.  B-29 tail gunner.  Grew up lower middle class and girlfriend was upper middle class (her family cut sandwiches diagonally).  He gives a few insights into growing up during the Depression.

James Davis' In Hostile Skies.

BTW, while not first hand, I do recall some information on Jackie Cochran in Amelia Earhardt's Daughters about the WASP pilots.  There's also some info in Secret Rescue about the plane carrying nurses that crashed in German held Albania.

You guys are a tough audience.

Shifty's War: The Authorized Biography of Sergeant Darrel Shifty Powers.  It has a bit on growing up in the Depression.

Guys, as I've said in my original post, there is an untapped resource for reading on the depression.

I have a signed copy of this. I got it from the family of a B-29 pilot that passed away.

He knew Doty from the war.



 

Ya gotta bring your A game to Arfcom.

 
 

My grandfather left home in 1934 or '36 and joined the Army.  Right off the bat he gained 20#.  He lived in the country and had been out working on a logging crew since he was 14 or 15.  His mom had made him quit school in 8th grade and put him right to work behind a plow in the farm.  He wasn't small or weak there just wasn't enough food for a family of four and his mom always rationed food.  Even into the 50s and 60s the men of the family got one serving and if you were still hungry you got a piece of bread, women only got one serving and if you were still hungry- tough s--t was her policy.  (Obviously Great-grandma ran the roost and was a parsimonious old bird, I think grandpa literally ran away to the Army to get away from her.)

Unfortunately most of his stories have been lost because he died in '71.  I gleaned everything I could from my other grandparents

Luckily these snippets survive in a lot of WWII era books, it's fascinating.

Presently I'm reading Droughts and Dreams.  It's a collection of first hand accounts from the Great Depression.  Beck is a co-author and I don't particularly care for that phony, but the stories are well worth the time.  Get it via inter-library loan.

My Father grew up during the Depression. He was born in 1924. He tells some stories like the OP is eluding to.

When he was 17yo, he lied about his age to join the Army Air Corps. He waited until dinner that night to tell his Ma and Pa. When he broke the news, his Mother went ballistic and yelled at him for nearly a half hour about how he was too young to fight a war and then said; "tomorrow, I am going down to that recruiting station and telling them you lied about your age". My Dad said his Father just paused from eating for a moment and calmly but firmly said to his Wife; "No, you're not" and that was the end of that discussion

When he arrived for Basic Training at Ft.Dix it was ~3am so the recruits were just sent to their bunks without any introduction to Army life. Three hours later, they were mustered and taken to the chow hall since many of them had not eaten for more than 24 hours. My Father said that when he saw the trays of food, he had never seen so much food in one place at one time. It was also the first time he had ever been told to put "more" on his plate (he would need it later that day).

He had a couple guys in his group (for lack of the official term) who didn't know how to read or write. His whole group was told that nobody would graduate Basic until these two men knew how to read. So, in between PT and learning how to be a Soldier,  they taught these two enough to pass the literacy test.

While attending Aerial Gunnery School School in Laredo, TX he was also taught E&E tactics which included defensive handgun. Although, my father had grown up around rifles and shotguns (he was hunting ducks solo at 10yo to put dinner on the table) he had never fired a handgun. They learned using double-action revolvers. Their instructor was, as my Father still describes him, an Old West Gunslinger in his 80s who had been part lawman and part outlaw at different chapters in his life! Tex (as they knew him) taught them some unorthodox "dirty tricks" not covered in the U.S. Army Manual.

After his first combat mission as a Tailgunner on a B24 based in North Africa he felt a need to learn how to drive before he died. He spent the next day driving a jeep up and down the runway until he figured out how to shift gears. He said he didn't know why it was so important to him except that he didn't want to die not knowing how to drive a car.

He is 92yo now, still alive and kicking. He once told me that those who lived through the war had an obligation to live life to the fullest for those who didn't.

Makarov- that is awesome!  Thanks for sharing that.  I really enjoy stories like this.

Sounds startlingly like my grandfather, also alive and kicking at 91. Grew up dirt friggin poor, but got by on very little over the course of the rest of his life. I was always amazed at his resourcefulness - Example:he used mcdonald's styrofoam pancake trays and old mosaic tiles as planters to start his seeds in the winter. He taught me everything I know about gardening and growing food.

Markarov. What tricks did Tex teach him?  

Still culling my books to see what else may be found.  BTW, tugboat radioman Mason hated PT boats.  He felt they were skippered by rich brats who wee reckless and privileged.  They almost sunk the salvage tug he was on.

Uncle Pete was in a unit and the sergeant had to teach them how to use toilet paper.  Uncle Pete was highly educated as he had a high school diploma.   His division kept messing up on maneuvers until the Army figured out they were doing it deliberately to stay out of the war. They got sent Island hopping

WE HAD EVERYTHING BUT MONEY

DROUGHTS AND DREAMS

WORST HARD TIME

FOXFIRE SERIES

DOWN AND OUT IN THE GREAT DEPRESSION

My dad was born in 34 and grew up in WV.  He went in the USAF in 1953.  He said he put on 20 lbs. in basic training up at Samson AFB, NY (that base was closed a long time ago).

He had four siblings.  They lived in a house with his dad's parents living with them.

They had 3 gardens.  One inside the fence, one on the hill across the creek from the house and one in a flat spot up on the mountain behind the house.

In the fall they dug a big trench in the garden (the one inside the fence) and cut the corn down to line the bottom of the trench.  Then they put in apples, potatoes, cabbage and onions and covered it with more corn stalks before covering that up with dirt.  He said that kept the buried vegetable good well into January and early February.  They'd just go up and dig up a portion of the trench when the cellar ran low.  There were baskets of apples and potatoes in the cellar, too.

They picked wild strawberries, rasberries and black berries to can (jelly, jam).  They picked apples (some trees inside the fence and many outside the fence) and made apple butter and preserves.  There were no deer in the area back then, they'd been killed off.  There was no deer season around home till 1959 when the deer herds had built back up enough to allow hunting.  Even when I was growing up in the early 70's hunting season was 2 weeks, you could kill one buck.  If you bow hunted you could kill a buck or a doe during bow season.

They had a cow and chickens.  They tried having a hog but grandma said they couldn't feed it so they didn't do that again.  The cow was milked in the morning and turned loose to roam the woods.  My dad would come home from school and find the cow (other folks in the area paid him to hunt theirs down, too, and bring them home) and milked again in the evening before being put in the barn for the night.  The barn is still there.  It's used to store garden tools and junk these days (small barn, was big enough for 2 cows).  The chicken coop is still there, too.  Had some old bicycles and sleds in it the last time I was in it 10 or 15 years ago.

Dad would take a pick and shovel and the wheel barrow (summer time) or a sled (winter time) and walk up to the old strip mines above the house.  He'd dig coal out of the high exposed seam and wheel barrow it back down the mountain to sell.  In the winter time he put the coal in burlap sacks and piled them on the sled to bring down off the mountain.

Grandma said she had to be careful in the winter time when scrubbing the floors as the water would freeze in the corners if she put too much down and didn't get it mopped up quickly enough.  There was a double fireplace in the front of the house with one fireplace in the living room and the other one in the front bedroom.  The second bedroom had a spot for a small wood stove and used the same chimney as the cook stove in the kitchen.  The back bedroom was built on later and had no heat.  Grandpa's can of piss under the bed would freeze some nights in that bedroom.

They had an old circular saw on a rolling cart that they would wheel out of the feed house and hook up to the little walk behind tractor used to plow up the gardens.  Take the belt off the tractor and flip it around to run the saw blade.  It was good for cutting up "slabs" from the sawmill.  I used to use that thing when I was a kid.  It gives me the creeps to look at it now.  No guard of any kind.  If you slipped and fell on the blade it would kill you quick and messy, or cut off a limb if you fell to the side of it.  I sure wouldn't want my kids using it, but back then we didn't even think anything of it.

Dad said possum was good eating and raccoon was greasy.  Groundhogs were eaten when they could dig one out of a hole.  If you heard dogs barking up on the ridge you'd grab a shovel and mattock and some rope and walk up there to see if they had a ground hog holed up.  If they did you'd take the rope and tie the dog(s) to a tree and start digging.  You dig down to the ground hog and kill it.  I killed one with a small wooden club one day.  I almost lost a dog, too.  I didn't know a dog had that much blood in him.  Dumb ass got down in the hole with the ground hog just as we got there and that ground hog cut his face/lips up pretty bad.  I just knew he was going to die before I got him home, but he didn't.  I was about 15, I think.

My grandparents never had a car.  They walked to the nearest town to shop for groceries.  If they had to go to the next largest town for something they rode a small train that went around picking people up and taking them back and forth to town.

They had all the fresh water they needed though.  Built a water box up the holler from the house and piped the water down to the house.  It got muddy when it rained hard.  Cold, man that water is cold.  In the summer time when you fill a metal bucket up moisture condenses on the sides of the bucket till the water warms up some.

Grandma baked cornbread to feed the dogs if there weren't enough "bad" leftovers to feed them.  If it was edible the family ate it.  All the garden scraps went into a pot on the stove.  Cabbage leaves, bad sections of corn cut off the cobs, bones, gristles, apple peels/cores, anything the family didn't eat.  If there was not enough of that the dogs got cornbread.  The cats got oatmeal.  I remember thinking how funny it was to see cats crowding up to a big pan of oatmeal and chowing down.

They took care of their tools.  You couldn't afford to go buy a new one, so you took care of what you had.  I remember my dad sitting on the steps at the back of the house checking the teeth on his grandpa's old felling saw (these days not many know the difference between a felling saw and a crosscut saw) and sharpening them with a file, or increasing the set with a punch and hammer and then using old motor oil to wipe it down before hanging up in the wood shed.  I bought dad a cross cut saw at a flea market in the late 70's to go along with the felling saw, so he'd have both.  We cut a lot of firewood on the old sawhorse with that felling saw when we were kids.  Me on one side and my younger brother on the other side.  Pick the limb/small truck up, place it on the saw horse and start cutting.  Dad or grandpa would split the wood.  Smaller limbs were cut with a buck saw which I could use by myself.

I remember the cats (grandma's and other folk's, too) swarming around the back steps when dad and his brother would clean the fish after a fishing trip.  That was about the only time dad had any use for a cat.  They'd clean up the guts, skins, fins and heads and carry off what they didn't eat right then.

How many people here have chased chickens around after their heads were cut off.  When grandma got older the chickens would sometimes get away from her after she chopped the heads off and they'd run around spouting blood and we'd chase them around the wood pile/creek bed till we caught them or they bled out and collapsed.

Did you now dogs will eat apples?  Especially sweet apples.  You had to get over on the hill side under the early transparent apple trees early in the morning to get some apples.  If the dogs got over there first they'd devour those soft sweet apples.

You know what's funny.  I had it easy compared to my dad and mom.  Good times.  Gone now.  It's not the same country anymore.

Oh, one more little story.  A couple years ago, the summer my dad died, I went up the back steps of grandma's house onto the back porch.  Grandma's old freezer was sitting in the corner.  The door was rusted out (like and old car) along the bottom.  I wondered why they hadn't hauled it off the porch to the dump.  I walked over and grabbed the latch and opened it up and the light came on and I saw the shelves were full of frozen food.  I went down to mom's house and asked her how old that freezer was.  She said grandma bought it in 1958 or 59.  They don't make stuff like that anymore.  Fifty five years old and still running like a top.

Great stuff M1A4ME.  

BTW, another good book on living through the depression is Benjamin Roth's The Great Depression:  A Diary.  Arfcom brought it to my attention and it's a fascinating look at life during hard times.

ETA:  Remember guys, while things can get bad, it's also means opportunity to become rich if you are positioned to take advantage of it.  More importantly, it is an opportunity to adjust the system to something better than what those who are causing the crash want.  Remember Iceland and what they did.

Awesome stories gentlemen .

I almost hate to post this here.
You will probably spend a huge amount of time reading these magazines.

Popular Science:
https://books.google.com/books/serial/ISSN:01617370?rview=1&source=gbs_navlinks_s&hl=en

Popular Mechanics:
https://books.google.com/books?id=BtEDAAAAMBAJ&as_pt=MAGAZINES&source=gbs_other_issues

Boys life: (yeah, full of news about the time)
https://books.google.com/books?id=fyhCgdsZKboC&lr=&rview=1&source=gbs_all_issues_r&cad=1

M1a, great stories. I used to love sittin around my grandmothers house listensing to the old stories. thanks for sharing!

Awesome.  I love looking up old magazines from my birth year to see all the "new & exciting" things they advertised.  For $650 you could get a new fangled thing called a microwave, can cook a potato in 5 mins!

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My grandfather and great grandfather about 1940 or maybe a bit earlier.. They made their money cooking whiskey and killing Cougars. They were North Carolina  transplants to Washington.

My grandpa used to talk about how when they killed a cat his dad would disappear to town and get his drunk on for a few days before coming home.  He said he bought the hounds through the mail just like in where the red fern grows. They lost a dog once and a while. My grandpa said running dogs was fun but a lot of work.  He told us a story about how the tax men came and broke up his dad's still once.

They were care takers for a summer camp type place. They lived in a canvas tent and a root cellar in the summer and lived in the big log cabin lodge in the winter.  My great grandmother (actually a step great grandmother) cooked on a wood stove until she died in the 80's electric wasn't the same.  Grandpa said they are anything and everything that lived in the woods. Porcupine, beaver, deer, elk, bear, raccoon, they even ate the cats they killed but he said it was his least favorite.

Ironic that these days many of the 80+ year olds are crazy picky. If we had another big depression era, people would adapt. Also, talk about it like army guys talk about deployment. Then, think less of any generation that wasn't also -forced- to do the same.

I've noticed people of all ages changing at the same time. So there are 12 yr old phone zombies, and 50 yr old phone zombies. Picky eaters, lazies, etc. All ages.

But yes, we've lost a lot of the skill sets, tips, and tricks that they used in the 20's-30's depression. They'd emerge again though, if/when it repeats.

Here is another one by a Korean War vet. James Butcher was born in 1933 and joined the Army at age 17 in 1950. He fought as an infantryman in the first Battle of Pork Chop Hill as well as others.

He grew up poor in West Virginia. Dad was killed in a mine accident and then his mom died when he was 12 or 13. He and his sister kept the family together and out of an orphanage. They lived on their wits, his hunting skills, and deception (to keep DSS out of their hair). The first part of the book deals with this and the latter half about his war experiences.

Butcher went to college on the GI Bill at Guilford College (my alma mater) and then to earn his PhD in psychology. He became a well-known researcher at the University of Minnesota. He's responsible for a number of the personality tests and directed their clinical psychology program. Not bad for a dirt poor orphan from WVa.

Korea: Traces of a Forgotten War
James Butcher.

It just dawned on me that post WW II books by Germans have some relevance too.  Their nazi money was no good.  Jubilee was declared for most debts and that help fuel the Germany economic miracle.

The book, A Higher Call, covers the encounter between a shot up B-17 and a Me-109.  The Me-109 pilot saw the deplorable state of the barely flying B-17 and decided not to shoot it down.  The book discusses the lives of the individual pilots and their post war reunion decades later.  Its relevance to this thread is the Luftwaffe pilot went through some pretty hard times after WW II.  He was hated by the Germans because he failed to defend them from terror fliegers (terror flyers as the Nazi propaganda called the Allied bombers) and it was very difficult for him to find employment.   Another book would be Hans von Luck's Panzer Commander.  After his release from a Russian gulag, von Luck works in some very menial positions (bell boy or something like that).

Thanks for sharing these stories guy's, my Grandfather who was also from West Virginia, and from a dirt poor farming family. He used to tell me the best stories, I could sit and listen to the same one 100 times, he died Sept 23rd 2001, my best friend/father my real father who was his son didn't care to have a kid so he and my Grandma raised me. He joined the army at 16 by lying about his age, I still have his dd214 that has the wrong birth date. It's kind of funny how many of these stories are the same. He used to tell me about sitting on the dirt floor in their house everyone huddled around the wood stove, the best seat in the house was for a smaller kid who could get in behind that wood stove and sit for hours to actually stay warm.
 I often wonder if we actually could get as tough, and as skilled as those old folks did. They grew up with those skills, we for the most part would all be learning them from nothing. Not to mention the tools then seemed to be made much better, and lasted for generations if taken care of. I was always amazed at how my Papa could make anything work from nothing, when I remodeled his house after he passed away, I had to laugh at all the horrible wiring he did with scraps of wire here and there, and pieces of 2x4 made into one whole one by scabbing parts together. That old house is as strong as they come though, and it now keeps my wife and I warm. He ended up moving to Washington State after being stationed at Ft Lewis, and stayed raising 5 children, lost one son to a car accident in the 60s. It's kind of sad to think that we are now considering selling the house to move to another state because it has become so liberal here, not to mention that town is now only 3 miles away. We live close to Lacey, and I remember as a boy people wouldn't come out to visit because it was to far out lol. The roads were still dirt, and that was only in the 70s, I hate to think of selling my family home, but before he died he told me to sell and get the hell out of here while I still could. I have drug my feet for 15 years.
 We are now looking at Montana as a place to relocate to. Please keep the stories coming, they all bring back some great memories.

Gunning For the Enemy by Wallace McIntosh. McIntosh was a bastard child raised by his grandparents in Scotland.  Their hidden savings was a 50 pence note that they hid in the mantle piece clock.  They were frequently at the mercy of their laird who, if dissatisfied with their work, could eject them from the land and their house. McIntosh joins the RAF so as to get three meals a day and have a little money.  

During WW II he is a gunner and shoots down eight Jerrys.

This is really good..




Also interesting reading is the siege of sarajevo went on longer..

Don Stratton's Those Gallant Men about the sailors at Pearl Harbor.  Stratton is a Pearl Harbor survivor from the Arizona.  He grew up during the Great Depression and joined the Navy to escape it.

My dad was born in 1920. During the Depression, he and the 5 other kids in the house would be sent out with a bucket to walk the railroad tracks and pick up the coal that fell out of the rail cars to heat the house with during the winter. He always used to say that a loaf of break only cost a quarter back then. Problem was finding a quarter. Clothes were almost always hand-me-downs or homemade. There were numerous methods of using meats for multiple meals, particularly chicken. Canning was commonplace and a necessity. He also described the situation that virtually everybody was in - multiple families sharing a single house, one breadwinner with a job supporting multiple families, bartering. He grew up in Pennsylvania coal country and his dad was a coal miner. Cars? A luxury most could not afford.

People were more.....resilient back then than the majority of folks are now. They've become so dependent on technology and unnecessary items that they can't imagine not having them.