It was 75 years ago that the stock market crashed – really crashed! – and the era of the Great Depression began. It happened near the end of October, 1929, on one of our cloudy, dreary, chilly days with the light of the sun squeezed into about 10 hours. And even thinking of it now, I get a frisson of chill at the memory.

     Yes, I was there. I don’t remember the day of the “crash”, exactly. But, even as a child, I became rather quickly aware of the tragedy of it all. It was before radio came to our house and television then wasn’t even a vague dream. We depended upon newspapers with their screaming headlines and vivid word pictures describing despondent and desperate losers jumping out of skyscraper windows; the bad news was imprinted indelibly on almost everyone’s psyche.

     But, of course, the real impact came in our small Minnesota village as the Wall Street disaster hit us right in the pocket book. My father had been doing fairly well financially in the 1920’s. No excess to enjoy, though, and certainly we were far from wealth. But we lived comfortably. His business depended upon area farmers regularly coming in to our small town. They appreciated (and paid for) his livery barn services for their horses. We knew the Depression was upon us when the farmers wanted to charge rather than pay precious cash for these services. Most of his customers were father’s friends; how could he refuse them? The unpaid bills followed him to his death in a few years.

     As the lean years proceeded, our resources receded. Our family of seven kids needed food. My mother was heroically frugal and clever in making sure the vast harvest of garden vegetables were either canned or stored in a safe sand barrel in our basement. We didn’t really suffer, thanks to her. We even kept a cow in a nearby pasture or woodland. And mom wasn’t just thinking of our family, but of the whole community. She became a leader of the local Red Cross chapter that was about the only agency organized to help out. When foodstuffs and clothing were to be distributed, mother was in charge of this for our village and later for the county. We devoted our dining room (it was seldom used for dining because we always ate in the kitchen) to a storehouse for underwear, sox, shirts, pants, jackets, blankets, and flour, sugar, canned goods and even some fruit. How we lusted after the crates of grapefruit which we weren’t allowed to have on our table. Mom observed a strict criteria of those whose income made them eligible for relief and those who didn’t qualify or were on the border line.

     Father lost almost everything as an independent businessman in a farming community. So he was forced to take a modestly rewarded salaried job for the village as the manager of its “dispensary”, a euphemism for liquor store. I remember the preceding era of Minnesota’s gift to the nation: Prohibition. Only when F.D.R. came in as President in 1933 was the Volstead Act repealed. Booze could finally be bought. The community eased into the newly licensed liquor scene with a controlled location where my dad dispensed it.

     It’s difficult for young people today to understand or appreciate just what the Great Depression’s effect on the populace from those days was. Some months ago in a group discussion at our church, I was commenting on how the Depression affected my parents. One of my young friends questioned why this was so: “Weren’t there psychiatrists and anti-depressant medications then?” It seemed he hadn’t really been aware of that slice of 20th Century American history.

     But I was. I think of it every time I buy something I consider expensive. We could never do that back then – “Make do with what you have. It can be cleaned and mended.” Life was much simpler then, of course. It took World War II to usher in a new day of economic growth and luxury. I think of it when I put more food on my plate than I need or want; when I leave some uneaten food on my plate I always have a small tinge of Depression-induced guilt.

     Even though the economics of that era were indeed depressed, our spirits really were not. We could laugh, enjoy life, and share our grim tales of genuine poverty and we sought to find the humor in it all – and did. My oldest sister acted in a community theater comic play, “Depression Blues” and we loved laughing at ourselves. And even singing the Depression-era songs and seeing the movies lampooning it helped.

     I can’t recommend that anyone undergo the rigors of such an era, but I do know that it gave us then a sense of value-discrimination that has continued to influence us to this very day. If ever we needed the lesson that life could be lived fully with minimum money and wealth or even without financial security, it was taught it to us every day during that era, mostly of the 1930’s,

     So now when recalling that fabled and fatal “Crash” day, we elders can observe, commemorate, and maybe even celebrate, the poverty that shaped our lives and left us with a profound gratitude for each new day of grace and fulfillment in living -- wherever and whatever our true treasure may be.