Email
Print
Gwendolyn L. Derr's Great Depression story
ADVERTISEMENT
Published: November 29, 2008
HICKORY - Gwendolyn L. Derr is a child of the Great Depression. She was born in 1932, three years after the 1929 stock market crash that signaled the beginning of the worst economic collapse in U.S. history.
A year after she came into the world, more than 15 million Americans were unemployed. The effects would linger throughout the 1930s, as Derr grew up on what was then 13th Street in Hickory.
There were six children in her family. Her parents could never afford to buy more than one pair of shoes at a time, Derr said. When she wore holes in her saddle oxfords walking through the mud streets to school and church, she had to line them with cardboard until it was her turn for new shoes.
Often on those walks, when Derr was accompanied by friends and siblings because her mother had to work as a maid every day of the week, the children kept an eye out for stray wood or pieces of coal.
They picked them up and took them home, knowing it meant a little extra heat.
Derr can't remember ever going hungry, but there were breakfasts of greens and cornbread or whatever food was left from supper the night before. Sometimes her mother would challenge Derr and her cousins to find a four-leaf clover. The first one to do so got a cookie. One cookie. And it was a thrill to get it, Derr said.
Her father always had a garden. He told his family he planted too much so that when hungry people would take his vegetables, as was bound to happen then, they would leave enough for him.
In her community, Derr said people were expected to help. When anyone died in a neighbor's family or there was another occasion that required a trip out of town, everyone gave a piece or two of clothing so their friend or neighbor could, Derr said, "look right while they were there."
"When you got back, you'd have to spend all day taking everybody's clothes back," she said. "And usually the suitcase, too."
Derr doesn't worry about the difficult times she's hearing about in the news. But she wonders if young people can weather a tough economy as well as her. She lived with her niece in Columbia, S.C., when Hurricane Hugo came through and power was out for days.
Derr said she found a block of ice and cracked it in half to save the food in the refrigerator and freezer. She uncoiled a clothes hanger and roasted hot dogs in the fireplace.
At her house in Hickory now, she keeps a wire rack she salvaged from an old refrigerator, thinking it would make a good grill if she ever had to dig a hole in the ground and cook over a fire.
"I'm a survivor," she said. "I've got a rub board for washing clothes right now and I've got the cast iron pot to boil them in," she said.
Email
Print
ADVERTISEMENT
Advertisement
