The two of them sat at the little kitchen table and watched the stock market tremble on a tiny television set. Six hundred points the Dow-Jones dropped, and then 700, and still it kept going. The brilliant Wall Street analysts on the television began to invoke a phrase: the great depression. It sent a chill across the room.
The two of them sat there and said nothing for several moments. They are both past 80 now, and they remember those years. It won’t happen again, they said. But it sounded more like a prayer than a declaration.
They are brother and sister, Baltimoreans since the late 1940s, but they lived those depression years in The Bronx. The father died young, and the mother found them an apartment for $32 a month, big enough that she could sleep in the living room while the kids shared the bedroom.
“We lived on relief,” the woman said. “My mother would send me out with food coupons to buy groceries. I was a little girl.”
“Why did she send you?”
“She was too ashamed to go herself. The coupons made it felt like begging.”
Her brother remembered a grocery store in the middle of the block, and the mother issuing strict instructions when she sent him out:
“Get a half of a quarter-pound of cream cheese.”
“A half of a quarter-pound?”
“Those were the instructions, a half of a quarter-pound. If the check hadn’t come yet, the grocer would put a mark in his little black book: 6 cents, next to the family name. When the check came, I could go back and get some Malomar cookies as a treat. It was heaven just to smell them.”
After all these years, they still remembered the taste and the smell of things, but mainly the price. Six cents for a half of a quarter-pound. These are the kinds of things people of a certain age are recalling now around their little kitchen tables.
We aren’t there yet, but we’re beginning to worry about comparisons. Last week Janet Yellen became the first member of the Federal Reserve’s interest rate-setting committee to utter the word “recession,” which has the sound of an overture to something darker.
It won’t happen again, assures Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve. But he says this as the lines of the unemployed go up and the retail sales numbers go down.
Retail sales in September were the worst in three years, with electronics, cars, clothing, and furniture hit hardest. Who’s buying furniture when nobody’s buying new homes for furniture? Who’s buying cars when the banks aren’t lending money?
But all of this is still a long way from buying a half of a quarter-pound of cream cheese, and the anguish of that long-ago era.
“A southern woman of my acquaintance remembered the guilt of the great depression,” Studs Terkel once wrote. “People saying, ‘If we hadn’t bought that radio.’ ‘If we hadn’t bought that old second-hand car.’ She was horrified by the preachers who’d tell the people
they suffered because of their sins.
“The people believed it. They believed God was punishing them. Their thought their children were starving because of their sins.”
We aren’t there yet, but we’re starting to think about it. Those who survived the great depression lived long enough to plunge into World War II.
“That’s what finally took us out of the depression,” the woman says. “The war.”
“But look at all the lives that were lost.”
“Yes,” her brother agrees. “But the depression was worse. It killed something inside of people. It killed their spirit.”
Twenty years ago, Baltimoreans went to the Mechanic Theater to see Arthur Miller’s “The American Clock,” his harsh remembrance of the depression.
“This can’t go on forever,” a character says. “The country can’t just die.”
He’s told, “We’re just waiting for our dreams to come back from wherever they’ve gone to hide.”
We aren’t there yet. But there are prices we’ll have to pay for the excesses of Washington, and Wall Street, and our own habits. We imagined we could spend without limits, stretching our credit cards beyond reason. We imagined lending institutions had rules, and followed them. We imagined somebody in government was watching to make sure we would never have to think about another depression.
This is no depression. Nobody’s buying a half of a quarter-pound of anything. But you sit around a little kitchen table, and the old-timers’ memories kick in. They’re thinking about it.
