Lessons from the Great Depression

On weekends, their friends still living in the city would take the New Jersey Central to Plainfield and dance and drink until they fell asleep on or under the tables. And the next day, they'd do it again.

Watching security slip away

My mother was an only child, and I suspect my grandfather, a proud man who never fulfilled his ambitions of leaping from draftsman to engineer because he didn't have enough formal education, poured all his hopes for the future into her. Imagine then how terrible the Depression was for him. He lost his job. He faced the risk of losing his home. And what of his dream of sending his daughter to college so she could get the education denied to him?

When I look at photos of my grandfather in the 1930s and 1940s, I can see signs of security slipping away. From before the Depression, there's the photo of my grandfather standing proudly in front of his new Model A. In another, he seems to strut as he poses in hat and top coat with his black terrier in front of the house. He seems a prosperous but hard man.

• Talk back: What lessons do you see in the Great Depression?

The man in the photos from the 1940s is, to me, strikingly older. He has put on weight. His skin seems to sag a bit. The strut is gone. He seems a little battered, a little less likely to take on the world by himself.

Sticking with a plan

If he looks like a tired warrior back from the battles, that's quite possibly because he was. By the 1940s, he'd fought and won. The house was safe -- my mother would raise my brother and me in that house. He'd gone back to work at Exxon and then spent years drafting plans for planes and engines at Curtiss-Wright. And his daughter had gone to college and graduated.

Frankly, I know I can't begin to fathom the struggle that represented and the stubbornness of this man. He managed to put my mother, who graduated from high school in 1937, through college while the Depression still lingered. At a time when so few women went to college, it would have been easy for him to give up. But he didn't.

My grandfather died of a heart attack a few years before I was born. My grandmother and mother almost never talked of him. I have a sense that he wasn't easy to live with, and I'm not sure I would have liked him. But I do admire him. I'm in awe of his ability to stick to his plan during times so unsettling. Somehow he kept his faith that the future would deliver its part of the bargain and reward his hard work.

Getting past the pain

My mother, who grew up in that house, believed in that bargain, too. So did my dad, who went to work for Franklin Roosevelt's Civilian Conservation Corps when he couldn't find a job after he dropped out of school. I still remember the weekend car rides we took so he could show me the fish hatchery he'd built during those years. My dad's idea of a good time during a week off was -- annoyingly -- teaching his son how to lay concrete.

Every car my parents ever owned was bought with cash. My dad, the spendthrift of the couple, held their only credit card, a revolving charge card from Sears, where he indulged his wild love for fast lawn mowers.

They saved enough to put two kids through college and to pay for their own modest but, I think, comfortable retirement.

In all those years, my parents never talked about the time that shaped their lives. I can understand why they didn't. It had been painful, but my dad at least would sometimes tell me stories that must have been more painful. More important, I'd guess, it was over, so why mention it? They'd come through the dark of the Depression into the sunlight of the postwar boom.

Missing key conversations

I wish that they had talked. I know from my experience with my own son that sometimes what's most helpful to a child is hearing about a parent's failures and fears. It's how we know that problems can be licked and monsters defeated even though they're very scary and we're very afraid.

I'd like to have known this history directly from people who lived it. I think I'd have a better appreciation for how precious economic security is. I'd better understand that fear about the future can be justified and perfectly normal. And I'd know how these people faced up to their fears and kept faith in their vision of a better future in times much more uncertain than our own.

But they left enough material that I get some sense of that time and their lives. For that -- and for much, much else -- I'm grateful.

Continued: Developments in a past column

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