Personal Narrative: Life During The Great Depression

Life during the Great Depression

Most of the population today, mainly the younger generations, do not know exactly how good they have it or how much worse the quality of life can be. Personally, I’ve been fortunate enough in my life to not have experienced too many hardships. It was a real eye-opener for me after my interview with Mary Fowler, Great Depression survivor. She has been a close friend to my grandmother for as long as I can remember, but I have never heard her real story.

I made usual trek home this past weekend. With Morgantown being about 3 hours away from home, I unfortunately have to ride a charter bus. It’s basically a greyhound with an extensive amount of decals on the side that blows it name completely out of proportion

to make it seem like it is better than a normal bus service. The only positive thing about it is being able to see my family every two weeks. The ride was a pain, as it always is. Carsickness followed by an astronomically annoying headache was typically on the itinerary for the trip. Then on top of that, the bus makes its last stop in Charleston, WV which is still about an hour away from home. I make it home about 10:15 P.M.
I got in contact with Mary the following day to reassure that she was still available for me to drop in and interview her. As expected, the meeting was still on. It was a relief that she lived right next door to my grandmother, because otherwise I might have had a hard time getting there do to being without a vehicle at the moment.
I walked into the house and the odor of years and years of constant cigarette smoke engulfed me. I did not want to offend her by making a point about it, so I kept my affliction to myself. I should have expected it though, seeing as the woman had smoked unfiltered cigarettes for the past 65 years of her life. It was astonishing to me that she didn’t have anything medically wrong with her. Other than the usual aging affects such as arthritis, bad eyesight, and weak bones she was basically fit as a fiddle. She was a small woman too. Only weighing probably 100 pounds and standing 4’6”, but that did not stop her from carrying on her day to day life. I could tell she had been seasoned by the hardships of the depression and was tough.
The first thing she asked me when I got there was “Are you hungry? Can I make you anything to eat?” You could tell she had a very motherly instinct and longed to use it on someone, but I had to decline her nice gesture because I wanted to seem professional for the interview. Even though she’d had been good friends with my grandmother for years, I strangely had only met her a few amount of times. I don’t even remember when or why I met her, but just that I did.
I started by asking her mainly just background knowledge to get a good foundation for how her life was in that time. “I was born in the little town of Torrey, Utah, which is now a gate-way to Capital Reef National Park. I was born on October the 5th, 1920. We lived on a ranch way out of town. There was no running water, there was no indoor plumbing, and we just all had to work.” (Fowler)
She told me that her family was fortunate enough own a farm at the time the market crashed, which greatly helped with feeding everyone. For the most part, whatever they ate came from their own land or they raised their own meat. I think people today couldn’t imagine having to rely 100% on the land for survival. We’re all too used to others doing for us with places like super farms or restaurants.
Mary’s family mainly had its struggles with keeping clothes on their bodies. At least clothes that could be wore to school and were not tattered to pieces from working. Mary recalled that if she was lucky, she would get a new pair of shoes maybe once a year. Her family was still very poor, and if it was not for the farm that they lived on then life would have been much worse for them. She says, “I think it was truly the only reason we pulled through it.”
As more time passed, Mary and her family became more acclimated to the way life was after the market crash. Their local church had a “movie night” about once a week, so that gave them something to get their minds off of things for a short while. They were silent movies of course, but she still thought to this day that they were pretty funny.
Mary wasn't old enough at the time to work outside of the house.

So her, her mom, and her sisters usually took care of all the planting, weeding, harvesting the garden, and harvesting the fruit. There was absolutely no electric washing machines, henceforth several hours of scrubbing on a washboard wasn’t uncommon either.

“I remember as a child, no more then 10 years old, seemed like my job was to, lots of big brothers and a father and irrigating, and what-not, their socks were so dirty that it seemed like every Saturday my job was to scrub these dirty socks on the wash board. I use to hate Saturdays.” (Fowler)

She recalled one time in her youth of a sudden drop in price for cattle, and it was after the great depression had already began. The government ended up buying some of the cattle that year. Her dad had an old white dairy cow that the whole family was just in love with. Sadly, the old cow grew elderly and they could now longer afford to feed her. It was quite unsettling what she told me the government would do to a lot of the heads of cattle that the bought.

“Literally, they dug a big pit, and they dropped the cattle up there and shot them. Covered them over and didn't save the meat for nobody or anything. They just shot the cattle in this big trench and covered them over and let them stay

there.”(Fowler)
For my closing question, I asked Mary what she of today’s generation and how they would have fared during the depression. At her older age she can see a lot of the old remedies and things that they did, for instance, like making their soap. “The young kids today would have no idea how to handle things,” she said. She advised me to learn to do a few of these things. She also added on that she was so happy that I took the time to talk to her about this. She thought it was a very good idea to have young kids interview older people because they can sort of get an insight of what our life was like.
Before leaving, I thanked Mary for opening up her home to me and sharing some of the knowledge that she had to offer