Great Depression taught frugality and generosity (2024)

Media General News Service

Theirs is a generation marked by frugality. It was a time when a single man could live on $40 a month -- bread cost a nickel, a suit could be had for about $25 and a streetcar ride cost 7 cents.

It was a time before TVs, air conditioning, iPods and computers.

Generations later, the children of the Great Depression are living in a world vastly different from the one 80 years ago, when major stock market crashes five days apart in October signaled an end to the prosperous, roaring 1920s.

Even as they look back on the 1930s, a decade plagued by high unemployment and economic strife, it's not with the bitterness of a childhood lacking extravagances, but with the experience of living through historic events.

Laura Harrison, 92, of Richmond recalled selling straight pins she found on floors, 20 for 10 cents.

"We were frugal before that time, too. We lived a much simpler life as a whole country, I think," Harrison said.

They speak with disdain about people piling up mounds of debt. The Depression showed them how to make do with what you have.

"I never had any debt, never saved anything," said 97-year-old Chester Starkey. "Spent everything I made, but I always lived within my income."

. . .

Some companies closed, some maintained, while others received their starts during the Great Depression.

Before J. Harwood Cochrane became a trucking magnate, he started with just one tractor-trailer in 1933. He pawned whatever he could -- jacks, spare tires and wheels, rear tires, his watch -- to get gasoline on his return trips home.

He kept a jar of mayonnaise and a loaf of bread and could buy enough bologna for 10 to 15 cents to make two meals. That's the way he lived hauling freight to locations north and south of Richmond.

For a nine-month stretch in 1934, Cochrane drove a truck that had no brakes or fourth gear.

Starting a new business -- he founded Overnite Transportation in 1935 -- in the midst of the Depression didn't phase Cochrane, 96.

"I kind of felt like I didn't have anything to lose," he said recently.

Union Pacific Corp. bought Overnite Transportation in 1986 for $1.2 billion. From his residence at Westminster Canterbury Richmond, Cochrane said his intention was never to get rich.

"I longed for the day I could buy new tires; I longed for the day I could buy two [tires] at a time, four at a time."

Before Cochrane ventured out on his own, he put in nearly three years working for Virginia Dairy, where he once sold his vacation time to co-workers for a dollar for extra cash. Cochrane once went nine months, three weeks without a day off.

At age 16, after his father died, he dropped out of Goochland High School and entered the work force. There were tough times on the family farm in Goochland County long before the Depression hit. School lunches consisted of preserves -- peaches, apples, apple butter. At the end of the school day, Cochrane and his siblings raced home "to see if we could get something better; sometimes we got a hot sweet potato or something of that kind."

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The economic downturn didn't spare people based on race or religion.

Retired Army Col. Porcher Taylor Jr. grew up in a racially divided South. Just a youngster during the Great Depression, he remembers African-Americans still being lynched in his home state of Florida.

Even as people struggled, "they wouldn't see past color," said Taylor, 84, of Petersburg.

To his young eyes, that segregation is what stands out about growing up in the Depression. Bread lines were segregated by color, and relief from the Federal Emergency Relief Act was administered separately as well.

Taylor's family largely avoided the economic troubles felt by so many. His father ran a successful publishing company, printing the black newspaper the Florida Tattler, which had a circulation of 17,000 and sold for 2 cents in 1934.

Taylor served as an apprentice to his father at the company, appropriately named Taylor and Son.

"My family wasn't exactly what you would call poor," he recalls, "but not rich either, don't get me wrong."

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Neil November said he was one of the fortunate children of the Depression. His father, Israel, ran a clothing manufacturing plant in Richmond that was largely untouched by the economic recession of the 1930s.

Friedman-Marks Clothing Co. employed nearly 500 people in Richmond during the 1930s. When America entered World War II, the company manufactured pea jackets for the U.S. Navy. Eventually, the company produced 10,000 suits and 2,000 pairs of slacks a week.

"Dad was very happy that here we were, right in the middle of the Depression, and he didn't have to shut down," recalls November, 85. "Most of the plants and businesses in Richmond had shut down or at least altered their hours."

There were moments of joy even as the country was mired in tough economic times. November remembers one such day at his father's plant at Bowe and Marshall streets. It was the day Congress passed the Social Security Act in 1935. Standing on a box, Israel November shared the news with his workers, a day his son would recall 74 years later:

"He was a tremendous orator. He used to talk to the people of the plant. . . . 'Can you imagine now, the one thing all of us have always been worried about, the security in our old age? Now we have it. Isn't this wonderful? Now we have security in our old age.'

"Everyone cheered and clapped. I remember that vividly, even though I was a kid."

. . .

When the country settled into the Great Depression, those not directly hardest hit still were unable to fully escape its clutches.

"In most cases, if people did have work, they were afraid to lose it and you simply skimped and made do with what you had," said John T. Kneebone, associate professor of history at Virginia Commonwealth University.

The Depression also ushered in societal changes that extended beyond the financial sector. Agriculture was hit hard as tenant farmers and sharecroppers left the farms they worked in search of employment elsewhere, much like the Joad family in John Steinbeck's Depression-era novel "The Grapes of Wrath."

Paul A. Levengood, president and chief executive of the Virginia Historical Society, said the Depression's impact on society led to labor unrest, the migration of people to other parts of the country, and the emergence of the modern federal government. With the government jobs created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Northern Virginia was transformed from dairy farms to a thriving metropolitan area.

"I think the effects were so profound, it's almost not easy to categorize it as just a financial and economic crisis," Levengood said.

Mary Shumate was one of those who left her hometown of Wheeling, W.Va.

Her family struggled to make ends meet after her father lost all the money he invested in the stock market. At that time, Shumate was a teenager and remembers the family of five living on $20 a week for food.

When she graduated high school, she was offered a scholarship to Wittenberg College in Ohio. But she was unable to attend because her older brother was in medical school and the family couldn't afford to also send her to college; instead, she went to work for the telephone company.

In 1933, she left the phone company and joined her father in his photography studio, retouching photos, as she says, "trying to make people look 15 when they were 50."

She also took a 30-day class in photography at the Winona School of Photography in Indiana where she met Carlton Brown, who had his own studio in Waterville, Maine.

Brown had an opening for a receptionist/photo retoucher. After someone else turned down the job, Shumate asked if she could have it.

In 1936, with only $61 after selling her bicycle, she left her home in West Virginia for her new job in Maine.

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Chester Starkey was a typical college student -- going to classes and working in the dining hall.

But during the fall of 1932, things fell apart.

Starkey's father lost his job as a salesman, so Starkey had to drop out of the College of William and Mary and start looking for work.

As a young, single man, Starkey, now 97, recalls that he wasn't the ideal candidate for companies that were hiring.

"You go in and apply for a job. It was really an accomplishment if they gave you an application to fill out," he said. "Many times they'd say, 'We have married men we want to take on,' and they wouldn't take an application."

But after six months, a period he said was the only time that he was depressed during the Depression, he was hired as an assistant office clerk in 1933 at a natural-gas company in Richmond. His salary was $40 a month.

Except for the time he was in the service during World War II, Starkey worked for the same company until retiring in 1977.

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With money tight during the Depression, families became self-sufficient. They made their own clothes and grew what they ate.

Harrison grew up on a 13-acre farm on Hermitage Road near Laburnum Avenue in Richmond. Her father farmed the land as if they were living in the country.

"Everything we ate came off the farm," she said.

The possessions people had were precious, and families went to great lengths not to waste what they had.

November sums up lessons he learned from the Depression in two words -- frugality and generosity. He is a leader at raising funds for organizations and supports Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden, the Virginia Aviation Museum and the Barksdale Theatre, among others.

Cochrane is also a generous benefactor throughout the Richmond area, donating $36 million over the years to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

Helping others was a key to survival during the Depression.

"Being generous, if you had something, was not just a nice thing to do," Levengood said, "but really the difference between life or death for your neighbors or the community."