My Great Pagy: The Story Of The Great Depression

My great-grandmother was born in the year 1918 so that is going to makes her 98 in two weeks. She was so ecstatic when I called to talk to her and ask her about the past. We talked for almost two hours! When I told her the topic she exclaimed, “Oh my goodness! I’m so old sweetheart, there is so much to remember”! And she is right, she had so much to tell me and so much happened during her time. The first thing she wanted to talk about was the Great Depression. She remembered was 11 or 12 when the depression hit. She remembers the change in the way the government was run and how instead of using money for many years, they used rations. They used rations during war and the depression for everything. “We always used rations. And people now don’t understand not being able to just buy things like they do now. There were things you just could go buy. If the government said you couldn’t buy something, you didn’t”, she told me. She remembers specifically that one ration was one pound of sugar a month. There were 20 million people in America out of work which was a lot for that time and this time. During the Depression people couldn’t buy clothes because people could no longer sell them. There was no one making them. Textile and clothing business went out of business. People only had one or two clothes and the poor …show more content…
She said that jobs started appearing again and people got jobs building plains and tanks for the government everybody. Airplanes, she told me, first became popular things during her grade school. She said that kids would run outside and look up at the sky when they heard them passing. The first time she saw one with her own eyes was while she was having lunch at home between the school hours. “We walked to and from grade school because there were no school busses during that time”. They were home for lunch and they heard one passing, so they ran outside too look and see how such a thing stayed up in the