My grandparents were very small children when the Great Depression occurred. They did not remember much of the Depression, but they do remember the emotions/feelings during that time period. One set of grandparents lived in Kentucky. The other set lived in Missouri. My grandmother in Kentucky simply remembered the fear surrounding the Depression - when will things get better, why are my parents so worried, etc. She very much remembers her mother (my great-grandmother) not ever trusting banks. So every penny that was earned was hidden in the mattress or in the unmentionables drawer. 

None of my great-grandparents had put money into the stock market because there wasn't any extra money to do so. There was a level of suspiciousness and mistrust about other people handling their money. When it came to food, since my great-grandfather from Kentucky was a druggist (now called a pharmacist), he was given extra items for his job specifically. However, my Kentucky family very much got creative with foods like making a birthday cake with applesauce than sugar. 

I am interested in this time period because I love stories regarding the American spirit. How did Americans make it through this time period? 

Both sets of my grandparents were young newlyweds during the Depression. Neither they nor any close family had money in the stock market...or extra money in general. They came from families that farmed, built, or traded for most of what they needed, and families and neighbors all relied on one another to make ends meet. One set of grandparents were sharecroppers for a farm out towards Dekalb County. They had to scrimp, save, and recycle everything to survive. 

My other set of grandparents owned a few rocky acres and a little three room house up in "the holler."  All times were hard times, they said, but they made do with what they had. I do remember my grandfather talking about how, at  one point, food was so scarce that they had to eat whatever they could find. Grandma learned how to cook groundhog then. 

Like Amy, I'm interested in the spirit of the people: their will to survive, love, and live even when it must have sometimes felt like things couldn't get any worse. I'm looking forward to reading more about that spirit of survival and human ingenuity.

My grandmother lived well below the poverty line most of her life. I remember her being very frugal with all of her food and other resources. Always saving things "in case she needed it someday." She never wasted anything. I attributed that to the time she was coming of age during the Depression years.

I am interested to read about experiences during the Depression for rural areas like ours, but especially in the midwest regions that Mr. Egan focuses on. I do find personal memoirs and primary sources of special interest in how intimate you can come to know the people groups or individuals being studied.

Both sides of my family come from a farming background.  They all had that mindset of waste not, want not.  I can remember family gatherings- leftovers would almost always be put in old ‘Cool Whip’ bowls.  Families passed them from one to another, but nothing was ever trashed.  This is a hard concept for my generation because we so often want to de-clutter and trash anything that is not a necessity.  I know we could really learn a lot from remembering that everything may not always be an Amazon click away.

One of my great grandfathers served in WWII.  He died from cancer long before I was born.  My father loves to talk about him and share the items that were handed down to him through the family, especially those associated with his military career. 

Because of the depression and war, I truly believe that the women in my family showed a mountain toughness that many associate with that Appalachian upbringing.  Growing up, the past hardships were not much discussed, probably because hard experiences can be difficult to share.  However, the impact it had on both sides of the family was evident.  When my mother was born, her family was still using an outhouse. Four children shared one bedroom.  My maternal mamaw passed away when I was in high school.  My maternal papaw when I was starting my career as a teacher.  They never had indoor air conditioning.  What they didn’t have in monetary value was always made up for in love and faith.

I think what interests me most about this time in history is the perseverance of those who lived through it, how it impacted them, and how the American spirit was evident in their lives.  I hope the books will focus on specific stories of individuals who endured and survived the time.  I also want to learn more about the daily fight for survival and making ends meet from different perspectives. 

My grandparents were both born at the tail end of the Depression and, although they haven’t passed down any stories from their experiences, I can see the effect that it had on their upbringing, especially my grandmother. My grandmother has always held on to anything that she might consider useful at some point. Even though financially they are in a situation where they would be able to afford to purchase something new should the need arise, you can tell that she would prefer to hold on to an item rather than to potentially waste what could be utilized in the future. In addition to saving items that might be of use, food is never wasted and leftovers are always eaten (oftentimes out of the butter tubs turned into food storage). This belief in “hold on to what you have because you never know when you might need it” is something that growing up on the heels of the Great Depression most certainly was instilled in her by family and passed down as she grew up. It is also interesting to me that my grandmother, who grew up in Tennessee, and my grandfather, who grew up in New York, seem to have different experiences passed down from their families. My grandmother grew up a preacher’s kid with eight other siblings while my grandfather grew up a butcher’s kid with two other siblings. As much as my grandmother loves to save what she can, my grandfather has always been somewhat the opposite and would prefer to not worry about storing items in case the need arises because he feels that it does not arise often enough to justify storing things. I know that living in a dirt-floor house in the South was much different than growing up in an apartment in New York City and their differences are fascinating to view, especially in comparison with events like the Great Depression.

I am looking forward to learning more about lived experiences throughout the Great Depression in all parts of the country and seeing what differences there might have been. I’m expecting there to be more in common than differences, but I’d like to see if the region a person lived in had major impacts on experiences during the Depression. I’m excited to read both books, but especially about the food of the Great Depression; I feel like today there are so many different cuisines that vary region to region so I feel like that would have an impact during the Great Depression as well.

Unfortunately, I do not have any stories about the Great Depression from either side of my family. My mom is from the Philippines and migrated to the United States in 1991 with my dad, who was in the Air Force, when Mount Pinatubo erupted. While her parents were born in the 1917 and 1925, they did not share stories about what it was like during the Great Depression other than what was going on during American occupation of the Philippines.

As for my dad's side, I do know that his paternal grandfather was a dairy farmer in Upstate New York and had eight children. His maternal grandparents emigrated from Canada but I do not know what their occupations were.

I am interested in learning more about how the average American lived through such a difficult period of history and how they went about their day-to-day lives.

Strangely enough I have never heard any stories about my family during the Great Depression. I say strangely enough because I tend to be an archiver of my family history, or at least my family of husband, sons, and myself. It has been a long time since I dug into any genealogy of my family, but I do know we can trace our history back to Italy, Canada, and America.

Unfortunately, both sets of my grandparents have been deceased for a long time. My dad was from rural Maine a member of a hardworking but lower class family. My mom came from a wealthy family in Cincinnati, Ohio. They met, married, and raised their family in South Florida so I can count the time I have seen my grandparents on one hand. I could ask my parents because I definitely think it's worthy of a conversation. 

What piques my interest is stories of survival through the hardships of this period of history.

- Shannon M.

My grandparents were born in the late 1920s and early 1930s in Chicago. My maternal grandmother is still with me (she turned 91 in May!), and she has expressed that her family had a tough time during the Depression. Her father died a few months before she was born, leaving her mother alone and pregnant with her (the first child). They moved in with family to help make ends meet, but things were still very tight and it was hard for her mom to find steady work. The family had to come together to help each other out. This continued throughout my grandma's childhood. For example, my grandma took on a lot of responsibility caring for her younger siblings throughout her life, and even stopped attending high school to start working.

Now, I see my grandma do things that don't always make sense to me, like saving and reusing tin foil and saran wrap. Instead of making a fresh pot of coffee each morning, she saves a pot and reheats it until she drinks it all. Sometimes, this makes me think that I behave in a wasteful way. Especially in the face of pressing environmental concerns, I have come to admire my grandma's thriftiness because I think her patterns of consumption are less inherently wasteful than the patterns I was raised with. On the other hand, I recognize that her habits around waste were also formed during a period of intense stress and want. I am grateful that growing up I was able to prioritize my education instead of caring for multiple younger siblings or needing a job to contribute directly to family finances.

I am especially interested in learning more about culinary history during the Great Depression. In my AP Seminar class, we do a unit on American food and our essential question is "to what extent is there an authentically American cuisine?" I am hoping to select passages or chapters for them to read to deepen our discussion around this central question. For my honors US history students, I am more excited about reading The Worst Hard Time. I find that many of my students come into class with background knowledge about the Dust Bowl, so I am excited to learn more to hopefully deepen their initial understandings about this event.

I asked my family group chat, and they offered several stories from the Depression. Most of what they had to say involved food. Almost everyone kept chickens and hogs so there would be enough to eat. My great grandpa (who passed away when I was very young) once told my dad that the family would collect wild walnuts when they were in season, then trade them in at a local store for things they couldn't make on their own like coffee, sugar, and flour. The most humorous story was from my great aunt. She said there was no money for women in the community to buy panty hose, so many churches started having separate services for men and women so the women's legs wouldn't be seen. 

What most interests me about this period is how Americans eating habits changed. Did different types of food gain or lose popularity during this time? Are any of those trends still holding today?

My parents were very young during the depression. My mom’s family always said they were so poor they didn’t really notice a difference.  I always thought that was their way a covering up how bad it really was.  My grandmother would make something from every scrap she came across.  I remember watermelon jelly.  She made quilts using feed sacks.  On my dad’s side they had it a little better.  They had their own business before it and with hard work and a lot of luck they were able to keep it going.  My grandmother’s mother had scratched out a living for her four children by herself.  She had arranged for my grandmother to go to college. That would have been apx. 1930.  It was always a scandal that my grandmother chose to marry my grandfather instead!  I know those years made a lasting impression on my grandmother because she always kept extra canned good “so her family would always be able to eat.”  When she passed away there were so many cans of food in her closet that the lids had rusted!