Readers share their Great Depression stories

The News Tribune asked readers who grew up in Western Washington during the Depression to share those times, good and bad. Here, in their words, are their stories.

DICK MARTIN, 91,
retired logger/electrician who lives in Tacoma:

I grew up in McKenna back when it was a company town. My dad worked in the woods for the McKenna Lumber Co. He lost his job a month after the crash. He would not go on welfare. It was a stain if he did.

So he did a lot of gardening. We had a garden that was almost an acre. One year, in 1933, it produced a lot of pole beans and Mom canned them. That winter the only thing we had to eat were those string beans. We ate them, three meals a day. To this day I’ll eat them – but not many. All those beans didn’t hurt us, but it hurt our feelings. That was the first time I ever thought I was poor.

When I was 13, I decided I would look for a job where I could have room and board. I worked at a dairy farm at Harts Lake all summer. One of my jobs was to turn the manual separator to get the cream out of the milk.

During high school, in the summer, my brother and I went to Tacoma and rode a boxcar down to Portland with the bums to look for work. Those bums never bothered us one bit. They would just bother us for cigarettes. They’d showed us how to jump out of the boxcar before the train cops could catch us. But there wasn’t any work. They weren’t interested in hiring kids for nothing.

Us kids would take a paper sack full of carrots and go to Hollywood-on-the-Tidfeflats and talk to the bums. They would throw the carrots in their stew pots and we would have lunch. Very seldom would there be any meat. I don’t know where they got those pots.

Hollywood was a bunch of shacks built out of anything they could get hold of. Each one of them owned their spot. They would lay a blanket down and sleep. I call them bums, but they were men out searching for work. Most of them had families in the Midwest. They told us stories and entertained us quite a bit.

WINONA SALMON, 91
a retired ship welder, taxi driver and waitress who lives in Tacoma:

My family’s income primarily came from the 16 small rental houses my dad had built in our own neighborhood in Centralia. He was quite a carpenter. This was the poorer side of town, but they worked hard to keep the houses in good repair.

When I was 10, my dad was accidentally struck in the head by a hammer dropped by another carpenter above him. He passed away one year later. It was the height of the Depression and now my mother was a widow with four young children.

One day, the banker came to the house along with two other men to talk to my mother about giving up the rental houses. The conversation had been going civil enough, but then he said, “It’s hard enough for a man, but for a mere woman to think she can manage ...” And that’s as far as he got because my mother shot out of her chair and yelled that she would manage and ordered him out of the house. I was stunned, because my mother was a quiet, reserved lady and I had never heard her raise her voice. The banker never returned, and my mother did manage to hang on to the houses, but it was by no means easy.

It seemed as if everyone was out of work. It was hard enough for people to get enough food, let alone pay rent. One month, my mother took in only $5 in rent for all 16 houses. Sometimes people paid in other ways. One renter, a lawyer who no longer had any work, gave her a bookcase as payment when he moved on. I still have the bookcase.

I remember trying to recall what an orange or banana tasted like because I hadn’t tasted them for years. We only had meat on the table once or twice a week. One day our mother killed two chickens for meat. We considered the chickens our pets because we couldn’t afford to keep a cat or dog. We were heartbroken and refused to eat the chicken, so it was the one time my mother ate the whole meal herself.

My mother had to make some tough decisions. A very popular boy from a more affluent neighborhood asked me to the prom and I was so excited. But a formal gown was required – even in the Depression. We couldn’t afford a new dress. I had to tell the boy no. He seemed very disappointed, but I was too ashamed to tell him why.

JOE BETZ, 82,
a retired college math teacher who lives in Fircrest:

I was born on Sept. 29, 1929, just before the crash.

We had two incomes, neither of which was very big. My mother ran the candy section at Frederick & Nelson in Seattle. She worked 13-hour days. Frederick loaned her the money to build a house in 1930 because my parents couldn’t get a loan from the bank to save their lives. They built it in Seahurst (Burien) for $1,400 using paving bricks that were torn up from when the street cars were retired.

My dad was making $100 a month teaching German at Highline High School. Later, in 1942, they threw all the German language books on the football field and burned them.

When the banks went under in 1933, my dad couldn’t cash his check. The check was only good if the state had money. The grocer up the hill said he’d take the check for $85. But Dad said no and we just bummed it out until the state got the money. He didn’t like that grocer after that.

I didn’t know the Depression in terms of being depressing. We had our own garden and grew lots of vegetables and we had chickens and rabbits. We canned vegetables and fruit and we lived off of that. We were able to survive that way.

I didn’t have many toys. I did have Lincoln Logs – one set. And Chinese checkers. My Dad wanted to get horseshoes for me, but my mother said we couldn’t afford it. I never had a bicycle.

For one Christmas, in 1935, I got a wool shirt and that was it. I was a little disappointed, but I didn’t know any better. Nobody was crying. We just put our nose to the grindstone and worked.

RAY MILLIE, 83,
a retired firefighter who lives in Greenwater:

I grew up in Tacoma’s North End. I was one of the luckier ones. My dad had a steady job with the Tacoma Fire Department. He made $126 a month. Our mortgage payment was $30.

I remember people coming down the alley looking through our garbage cans, looking for food. Kids at Sherman School couldn’t afford to have their shoes resoled. They had newspapers or cardboard stuffed in them.

We were lucky. We had a car. Gas was 10 or 12 cents a gallon. Some people couldn’t afford that, so the cars would just sit idle in the garage.

Along Ruston Way there were three or four lumber mills. When we drove by, there would be crowds of men looking for jobs. It was a rough go.

I knew families who were evicted from their homes. And the homes were boarded up and just sat there. Nobody could afford to buy them. Kids would just disappear from school.

For fun we’d go down to Point Defiance Park. Owen Beach was put in by the WPA in 1937. We would rent a rowboat for 50 cents and go out and fish.

It finally ended with World War II. Then there was a manpower shortage. I worked in the Todd shipyard in the fire department during high school in the summer of 1945. I made $1.05 an hour. I made $18 on my paper route. I mowed lawns for 50 cents. I thought I could retire!

JIM BROWN, 88,
a retired public works supervisor who lives in Tumwater:

I remember my father, who at the time (1929-30) owned four or five homes, telling my mother that he would likely lose everything. But he hung on to one house with an extra lot in Tumwater. We moved out of a really nice house and into an old house. I don’t remember if it didn’t have lights or we couldn’t afford lights. We used camping lanterns. We had a big garden.

I remember my father telling my mother, “It’s been 18 months and I haven’t had any work except for one day.”

If we were poor, I didn’t know it because everyone was in the same boat. Several of the mothers got together and they would bring vegetables to Tumwater School and they would make soup. Every kid could get a cup of soup. I remember two sisters came to school barefooted.

My dad was in construction and he had a friend in Lacey on a big dairy farm. They made a deal to build a barn. He would give my dad milk or a chicken. Whenever he got a milk check, he would give my father $5.

R.C. SKIP MCCONKEY, 80,
a businessman who lives in Tumwater:

We were living in Tumwater on a farm. We raised a whole hillside of pigs. One day, federal government men came and demanded a dollar for every pig. My mom came up from the barn and ran them off with a broom.

The hobos came by and sat on our porch. Our grandma came out and gave them food. Some of them ended up staying in our bunkhouse and working. We went up to Tacoma once a month to buy bread and clothing at the Goodwill for them.

There was a big hobo camp up Percival Creek. It was just like a little settlement. The hobos would ride the trains. They would get the salmon out of the creek. Everybody had a pot. I would sit with them and they would give me a tin cup of something to eat.

There was a fellow building a huge ark right at the Fourth Avenue bridge. It had chickens and sheep. The city condemned and burned it.

There were 80 to 100 float houses at Little Hollywood (on Capitol Lake). The whole thing was a mass ramble of houses. They burned that too. I saw the flames. On the shore there was a whole row of houses on stilts. Later, in 1950, we moved some on to our property. The houses are still here.

JEAN MANSFIELD, 90,
the owner of a furniture repair business who lives in Lakewood:

When my dad came to Tacoma right after World War I, he got the flu (during the worldwide Spanish influenza pandemic). A black family on the Hilltop took him in and hid him. They were supposed to turn (flu victims) in because it was so contagious. They fed him and nursed him back to health. For years after, my dad and I would go visit them and bring them Christmas presents.

I grew up at North Third and K, across from Christ Episcopal Church in Tacoma. My mother was at home. My dad worked full time for the bus company that took tourists to Mount Rainier. During the Depression he worked half time. He wasn’t popular in the neighborhood because he had a job and a lot of other people didn’t have jobs. I guess it was jealousy.

Mothers used to come to Lowell Elementary and they would make lunch and serve it. My (future) husband used to wear his grandmother’s shoes to Lowell. He was two years younger and I didn’t like him then. I married him after he came back from the service.

I wasn’t short of anything. We didn’t sit and wail about it. You just changed your habits and did something else. My folks weren’t frugal. They just kept track of their money.

For entertainment, we’d walk down to the Stadium Bowl for games against Lincoln or whoever. My parents would ride the streetcar to Oakland to cut a Christmas tree and bring it back.

DOREEN LIGRANO, 89,
a retired clerical worker who lives in Eatonville:

We moved to Roy from Hood Canal in April 1930 when I was 7. My father heard about a widow who needed someone to run a garage and sell gas.

The funny little house we rented was two bedrooms. It was $5 a month. We couldn’t pay it. The landlord lowered it to $4 and we still couldn’t pay it. But he let us live there until we could. There was a lot of give and take then.

Everything was centered around the school and town: games, plays, Sunday school parties. It wasn’t a bad time for me. Growing up was wonderful. I didn’t know I was poor.

We always had food, pot roast, pie, cookies. I don’t know how my parents did it because they never had any money. One year, during the depth of the Depression, a farmer from Rochester came through selling a crate of strawberries for 50 cents. We gorged on those.

We had a cow even though we were in town. One of my jobs was to drive it through town to pasture. We were able to have milk and make homemade ice cream.

To make money, we picked hops and trained them. We picked berries. I got a job at the grocery store. My dad left the garage to start logging again. But that didn’t work out so he joined the WPA. He worked on roads.

The train went right through town. Boxcars used to be full of men. Mama fed quite a few people. Maybe they would chop wood. Sometimes they would come in the house and that would be kind of scary.

Compiled by Craig Sailor, staff writer