Henry Hager, 82
Columbia, MO
My mother, Henryetta, was a high school English teacher. The neighborhood we lived in in Huntington, West Virginia — so we're talking the dual whammy of Appalachia and the Depression — was lower middle class, I guess you'd say. Mother at least had a salary for nine months of the year. And that was good. We didn't have any money at all, but she scraped by. She always said one of the great things about the Depression was how the people came together. So many people have criticized George W. Bush for saying [in response to] the crisis of the 9/11 attack, "Just go out and shop, folks." Back during the Depression everybody felt that they were in this together, except of course the very wealthy. The man that owned our house bought the house — not from us because we were renters — but he bought the house and went around buying a lot of cheap houses in town and kept fattening his purse. He made a fortune off the Depression.
What I've been amazed by is how well my mother handled it. She had three kids, she was a single mom — the anxiety she must have had because we were living right on the edge, but with people on the same block who were over the edge. Lost their jobs, cases of alcoholism. My experience in a way was maybe typical in the sense that as a kid it was a lot of fun. I lived in a neighborhood that was very crowded with kids. There were something like 30 kids on our block. You could walk outside and there was always someone to play with.
I was accustomed to hard times. I went to Yale on the G.I. Bill, and boy, that didn't cover it. But I knew how to handle it somehow. That's what goes with the territory. Nobody in my era splurged. No one traveled. I only remember one kid who actually traveled to California, and I thought he was the luckiest kid alive.
Hopefully we've learned enough from the first Depression that we are emboldened to take strong steps to cure this one. Do I think [this one] is going to be bad? Yeah, I think it's going to be bad. The Depression is really hardest on those who can least afford it — the people who are not in great health, the people who are not educated, the people who are not gifted or blessed with good fortune. I have been saying to a number of people that I think it's not fair. [Laughs.] I was born into a Depression and it looks like I'm going to go out on one. That's more than one person should have to put up with.