Fran Suddath, 84
Jackson, Miss.
My daddy's company went broke, they went bust on everything. His job was taken away, so we moved in with my grandmother in another town. I was young, maybe six years old, so for me, my life went on and I went to school. My daddy tried to find work, but he was an accountant and it was a very difficult time for accountants back then. He lost his job in 1930, and was out of work for 5 or 6 years. He would get up and go downtown every day to see if there was anything available. There usually wasn't.
When I was in senior high school, I had one wool skirt in the wintertime and two blouses that went with it. I would wear one blouse and wash the other one out in the sink so I could wear it the next day. One girl in our high school, she just had the most wonderful clothes. Everything she had was marvelous. But her daddy owned the newspaper, they had money. The rest of us, we went on with our activities — our dating and dancing —everybody was in the same fix. It was hard.
My mother never went to work. At that time, the only jobs available for women in the workforce were as cooks or janitors or something like that and my mamma wasn't going to do something like that. It wasn't a good era for women to be working. She never worked.
We had no savings. We went though that real fast in the beginning. My daddy took any job he could find, even manual labor, he would take it. The thing about it was that my mother and daddy were so wonderful, they never talked about money or the lack of it in front of my sister and me. They did all that privately. It wasn't until after I was grown and married that I realized how horrible it must have been. But they never let on about it. We just knew that we couldn't have things, and that was it.