Despair is suffering without meaning. –Viktor Frankl
Dad was born in 1916, just starting high school when the Great Depression struck. That summer, he had raised a crop of tobacco to pay for clothes and school expenses, and when the market crashed that October, the sale of his summer's production brought one dollar. In today's dollars, that's about $15 for a summer's work at a hot, dirty job. He said that starting school with no money would have been a lot worse if everyone else weren't in the same shape.
After that, I don't think Dad ever worried too much about what he wore.
Dad's father was a bit of a gentleman farmer at the beginning of the Depression. He raised some tobacco with the help of sharecroppers on the farm, and he oversaw the work on some larger plantations in the area. His wife was quite proud of being from town and being descended from good people, including Betsy Ross. When the Depression hit, Grandpa lost the farm to the bank and started drinking, and grandma moved into a separate bedroom.
My father would never buy anything on credit. Ever.
During World War II, Dad learned to work on airplanes and, after the war, joined an airline starting up with surplus DC3 planes. Soon after, he met my mom and married, moving back to near where he grew up. They built their own home, a log cabin made of trees cut on his brother's farm. No electricity, no running water, no phone.
They paid for everything with cash.
Dad had little time to get to know his in-laws before marrying Mom—they got married six weeks after they met. Dad was 32 and Mom was 19. She grew up in the hills of North Carolina during the Depression, which may explain why she was willing to put up with, even embrace, Dad's ways.
They remained married 33 years until Dad died.
Dad was impressed with his father-in-law. Mom's dad may have been a hillbilly, but he loved to read, had traveled outside the hills when younger, and embraced a self-sufficiency that contrasted with Dad's own upbringing. Mom's family was poor in an income/cash sense, but they raised a big garden, grew an orchard, milked a cow, raised pigs, canned and preserved food, and never went hungry.
Dad and Mom always had a large garden, raised livestock, dug their own well for water, and kept multiple freezers and a block outbuilding stocked with food.
I grew up never knowing what it felt like to be hungry. And despite the economic turmoil of the pandemic, there are many more sources of aid in place now, largely because of programs dating to the 1930s—put in place by my Dad's generation. During the Great Depression, we learned a lot about how to better take care of each other.
My parents and neighbors always found time to help each other.
I think those relationships are key to overcoming despair. As Robert Waldinger says in one of my favorite TED talks, "Loneliness kills." People with relationships they believe they can depend upon live longer, even healthier, lives.
