Deltona woman recalls the Great Depression

‘Black Tuesday’ struck Oct. 29, 80 years ago

By Al Everson
BEACON STAFF WRITER

posted Oct 30, 2009 - 8:53:29am

Though she was only a child in Marion, Va., Alta Felty remembers well the start of the Great Depression.

It happened 80 years ago today, on Oct. 29, 1929. The day would become known as “Black Tuesday.”

“I was 7 years old, and Mama would take us uptown to get a cup of sherbet, orange sherbet. They cost a nickel, and we were walking home up the railroad track, and there was a newsboy saying, ‘Read all about it! Read all about it! Stock market crashes!’” Felty said. “I was only 7 years old, and we didn’t have any stock. I didn’t know what it meant.”

It was a different time, indeed.

“We didn’t even have a radio then. We didn’t have a car. We walked everywhere,” Felty said.

For the next dozen years, Felty, now 87 and living in Deltona, learned what the stock-market crash meant, as the nation and much of the world plunged into an economic abyss that scarred two generations of Americans.

(Read about the Depression in DeLand.)

Unemployment soared to 25 percent in the 1930s, while cash became ever more scarce.

“Things were priced according to income. A loaf of bread was 5 cents,” Felty said. “My mother sent me every day to the Piggly Wiggly to buy bacon. If you got 15 pieces, it cost 15 cents.”

Meals were generally simple.

“My mom would open a can of peas and a can of corn, and we would serve it over bread,” she said.

Much of the family’s food was canned. “Everybody grew their own garden.”

Some people kept livestock, even inside cities. Felty’s friends included young urban farmers.

“Most of the time, they had to milk a cow before they went to school, and they often did it by lanterns,” she said.

City governments then did not have the stringent zoning standards that nowadays forbid farm animals in neighborhoods.

Frozen food and freezers in homes were unknown, but many homes had refrigerators. Those were usually nonelectric iceboxes.

“The iceman would come by, and you could buy 25 or 50 pounds of ice,” Felty said.

Quick-energy or snack foods were available, but they were not the individually wrapped packages we see on store shelves today.

“I ate granola before Granola was cool, oatmeal mixed with raisins and black walnuts. Sometimes you might have a little brown sugar,” Felty said. “It was not the quick-cooking oatmeal.”

There were other novelties at the dinner table.

“Jell-O was a treat. Everybody loved it,” said Felty.

Clothing was similarly sufficient, but it required care. Much of Felty’s wardrobe was homemade.

“Mama made our dresses and our coats. Girls did not wear pants then,” she said. “Church was the center of our life. We had a good outfit that we wore to church. You wore it only to church, as if you were going to meet the most important person ever.”

When the Depression hit, Felty avoided losing her bank savings.

“I had just drawn my money out to buy a pair of roller skates. My skates cost $4, and I had $3 or $4 left,” she said.

The epidemic of bank failures and the losses of depositors’ monies was before the creation of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. While the Great Depression saw a massive expansion of the regulation of banking and investments and widespread public-works projects, the nation’s economic woes did not really end until the United States entered World War II in 1941.

Economic depression was just the way it was. Good times didn’t return until Felty and her peers were older.

“It wasn’t until after I was married,” Felty said. Her husband made $39 a month. She was a working woman, too. “I was working for the telephone company. I was an operator. I was paid $13.40 a week.”

Between the 1929 crash and World War II, the Depression was a time of hardships, “but everybody was in the same boat,” Felty said.

Close relationships within families helped ease the difficulties, and so did a newfangled thing called radio. Radio was coming into its own in the 1930s as a source of news and entertainment.

An uncle bought a radio and listened to high-power stations whose announcers pitched everything from patent medicine — often rich in alcohol — to items handy around the house. One such product was “a surefire bug killer.”

“Uncle Brent sent off for one, and it was a block of wood and a mallet, with instructions to put the bug on the block and hit it with the mallet,” Felty said.

For the first few years of the Depression, Felty and her family were a little better off than many, because her father, a disabled World War I veteran, received a pension.

“He got $100 a month,” she said.

The pension ended, however, when her father met an untimely death in an auto accident in 1932. Years would pass before Felty’s mother would receive a retroactive payment for becoming a widow with two young daughters to rear. Her mother moved the family back to Bristol, Tenn., as she went to work in a pharmaceutical firm.

“Mama bought a 1932 Chevrolet in 1937, when she was awarded back pay,” she said.

In high school in the late 1930s, Felty found part-time employment in a department store. The job was intertwined with her education, as she received academic credit toward graduation for working.

“I worked for 18 cents an hour,” she said.

Wages so low seem unthinkable today. For Felty’s generation, it was simply normal.

“By today’s standard, it was depressed, and you didn’t know anything else,” she said.

— al@beacononlinenews.com

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