The Great Depression

(as told by Elizabeth Perkins Buchheit)

I remember that during The Great Depression, there wasn’t a lot of paper so you’d use the paper over and over again so you never wasted a square inch. There was always somebody that was out of work or didn’t have a place so we always had somebody living with us.

We lived pretty close to the railroad track. A lot of people didn’t have cars and used to walk past our house to the train. That’s how they did it until fairly recently. People had nothing. They would take the train to Arlington Race Track in Chicago and bet the house. The trains had white flags on the engines. They would run one after another up there to take thousands of people up to the race track. On the way back, there’d be plenty of people walking who’d lost everything. They had only bought a one-way fare.

I can remember being down in Chicago with my mother and seeing lines of people without any work, wanting to get a job. A lot of people went to the movies in order to take their mind off their troubles. They had a lot of troubles because they didn’t know whether they were going to get the money for the mortgage. Movies cost ten cents.

A lot of my friends’ parents lost their houses because they couldn’t pay the mortgage. One family in our neighborhood, the Beards, lost the house. They were very nice and had three kids.

VERNON WORK MYERS: In those days you just paid the interest on the mortgage so it was either renewed or it wasn’t. It wasn’t like these mortgages now which President Roosevelt reformed in the New Deal. If you couldn’t come up with your payment, they’d take the whole house.

ELIZABETH PERKINS BUCHHEIT: That happened to a lot of the houses on the backside of our block.

It was a very serious time. Ruth Dinse’s father’s printing business went bankrupt. He finally got a job as a night watchman. Ruth’s mother was a wonderful musician and lost her piano. My friend Jean Keeler’s father jumped out the window and was killed. Her mother was left with three girls.

My dad’s safety deposit box was confiscated and locked up. My mother was very mad. My dad was the director of the bank, after all. Nothing was sacred. There were runs on all the banks. Prior to the Depression, in 1893, when the country was also in financial trouble, Grandfather Buchheit sent a flier around that said he pledged his fortune, all of his money, to anybody who lost any money in his bank, The Bank of Watertown . I have a picture of it. The banks didn’t have guarantees by the FDIC. If the bank went under, you lost your money.

Things were really tough during The Great Depression. You can see why young people joined the Communist Party. You just can’t believe how hard up people were. There was no money. I don’t care if you worked as the finest surgeon down in Chicago. There was no money. It was a strange situation.

(as told by Vernon Work Myers)

The conventional wisdom was that we’re going to be stuck in this forever. In 1932 there was a man in my hometown who went down to the tracks as a freight train coming through. He just stood on the track with his back to train and let it hit him. That was a very uncommon event but it shows how desperate people were.

ELIZABETH PERKINS BUCHHEIT: You never get over it.

Ellwood City was only saved because the Mellons took over the bank. The Mellons were crooks but at least the bank didn’t fail. In those days, if people owned bank stock, they were liable for the amount of stock they owned. They had to produce that much dough.

ELIZABETH PERKINS BUCHHEIT: William Malone was the crook in our town. He owned one of the banks. They finally got him on failure to pay income taxes. My dad knew what he was up to.