How We Got Through the Great Depression

During the 1930s our Dad was gone much of the time looking for a day's work here and there leaving Mother alone with first, Louise, then me (Dwight), then Liz, and a bit later in the decade, Judy.  We lived in a two-room uninsulated home that would probably be called a shack today.  Here are the resources Mother had to get us through that troubled decade:

1. Maybe three or four pans and a cast iron skillet.
2. Two coal stoves, one for heating the bedroom, one for cooking and heating the kitchen.
3. An enamel dishpan, which sprouted a hole midway through the decade.
4. Two kerosene lamps.
5. A can of kerosene.
6. A stash of coal and green cottonwood for burning in the stoves.
7. A cellar full of canned peas, beans, tomatoes, corn, peaches, pears, apricots, strawberry jam, plus some potatoes, carrots, cabbage, and a few apples.
8. Mustard for mustard plasters.
9. A water bucket for carrying water into the house from the outside pump.
10. A scrub board.
11. A galvanized metal bathtub for laundry and baths.
12. A big garden and an apple orchard in the summer.
13. Two beds, one of which my two sisters slept on, and the other, a cot, which I slept on, and a sort of couch that Mother slept on in the other room.
14. A rolling pin and bread pans.
15. Irons Mother heated on the stove for ironing clothes.
16. Surely I have left something out.

What we did not have:

1. A car.
2. A telephone.
3. Electricity--until 1939.
4. Inside plumbing and bath rooms.
5. Washing machine.
6. Many toys.
7. Many clothes.
8. Store bought groceries of any kind except for a few staples.

But what we did have that got us through the Great Depression:

1. Love in great abundance.
2. Warmth.
3. Great imaginations for inventing things do do.
4. Mother's indomitable will, perseverance, mustard plasters, and lonely days and nights.
5. Dad's sacrifice in looking for a day's work anywhere and everywhere and showing up some Saturday nights with the Denver Post with its "funny papers" and making a kite for us that flew and pulling us around in our red wagon and playing his harmonica for us and giving us hugs.  And then he was gone again.

That is how we learned to get by on our own throughout our lives, to tough out the bad times, and to stay close to one another.  So we really came out ahead, didn't we?