Paul Speagle was 14 when he read stories in the newspaper about New York businessmen who were jumping out of buildings. Not long afterward, the banks closed. Some of them, he remembers, didn't open back up.
Speagle, now 93, considered his family better off than many in those days. He had several shirts and two pairs of shoes, he said. His father was a pastor in Concord, where they lived. His mother was a teacher. Both kept their jobs throughout the Great Depression.
He was allowed to spend the $1.50 a week he got from delivering the Greensboro newspaper on a picture show once a week, although he figures once in a while he did buy his own 98-cent shirt from JC Penney.
In Charlotte, where the family sometimes shopped, men appeared on the street selling pencils or apples for a nickel, a dime or whatever you could spare, Speagle said. Lots of people gave money, but didn't take their wares.
At home, people would knock on the door and ask for a sandwich or something to stop their stomachs from grumbling. Other times, the less fortunate would ask for odd jobs, carpentry or electrical work, to earn a meal. Speagle remembers his family having trees removed by men who were working for food.
In 1931, the summer before he started college at Lenoir-Rhyne, he got a job cleaning looms at Cannon Mills. It was the dirtiest job you could imagine, Speagle said, but he felt guilty taking it. He knew there were grown people with families who needed the money, too.
The next three summers he spent in school so he could earn his double major in math and science in three years. That was one way to save money.
Even though he considered himself fortunate, Speagle said growing up in the Depression made him the man he was to become.
"I learned to always think before I'd buy something, 'Do I really need it?'" he said. "It taught me to realize a nickel is a nickel and it's worth something."
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