Grandma Dances Her Way through The Great Depression

“Wilma didn’t like it that we lost all of our money but it didn’t phase me one bit.  I still had as much fun after and it didn’t matter either way.  It started with the farms- they were losing.  It wasn’t as if the Crash came all of the sudden and everybody lost their money at the same time, it started with the farmers, and I would say that was 1923 it started.  Then we lost one farm and then a year later we lost the other farm, and we didn’t loose the house in town we rented out, we didn’t loose that till 1928.  We lost our ‘nice house’ before we lost the other one and had to move back into the older one in ’28.  Then we had to move to a rental house and we rented all the time that I was in high school.”

“We lost the money by the time I was through jr. high.  Everything was gone.  I don’t know that it affected my mother that much.  And of course it did.  My dad was not as affected…of course a sad time but they did not dwell on it.

My dad was a retiring person but not shy.   My dad was gone quite a bit.  He had an oil well in Oklahoma and land up in Canada and he’d go to see how they were doing, every so often, and when our new place was built and moved in.  Then they put the lawn in.  Our mother had a hard time putting our play and all of our friends away from the yard so it would grow- he was gone and she was afraid we’d trample….oh it was fun!!!!”

“I remember when my dad first told my mom that we had lost the farms and he sold the Canadian lands.  In the worst, ’35, and the Crash came, I can remember when my mother heard about the first farm that we lost- they didn’t go at the same time but one and then another- anyway, she cried, and that was all, that was all I heard about it. I guess she didn’t say too much on account of us kids, and kids don’t notice things like that so much.”

“Irene Foster, Elsa Anderson, Barbara Sanger, we all ‘played together.  I rode my bicycle a lot.  There wasn’t any dating, they guarded us. I graduated from high school in 1930.  I had a lot of friends.  You got a job unless you got married right away.  I didn’t get married; I dated long after I graduated.  Wilma and ‘Nita got married right away.  I was having too much fun!

I really loved to dance and I did a lot of that.  We always went to this radio station- big ballroom- they always had a big band there and then we roller-skated a lot- there was a big roller-skating rink and in the winter we ice-skated.  We gathered and had a lot of fun.  After I learned to dance I sure dated then.”

“I wasn’t ready to get married; I don’t know but neither one of them [Juanita or Wilma] stayed married.  I was just not ready.  My best friend was from Burley Idaho and she was a Mormon and I went with her to Church sometimes but nobody-I don’t know of any missionaries-I never heard of one till I moved to South Pasadena, even in Vale- nobody came to teach me anything.  I just had to pick it up as I went a long.

When your grandpa and I got married I knew he was a Christian, that’s all I cared, I knew we believed in the same thing, but there are so many things that are different.”

“There weren’t that many jobs, the Depression was on and I wanted to go to college and we just did not have the money.  And since the girls were married, I had to work because my dad- he drove a taxi and he sold shoes, he did everything and gosh it was so hard, it was terrible.  It did not effect me much because here I was working and dancing my way through life.

When I graduated I knew I had to get a job and the telephone company hired me right away.  It was fun and I loved it, I really loved it- I could type and I played in the orchestra.”