Childhood Memories and the Great Depression

By MURRAY MONTGOMERY 
Staff Writer

According to the Federal Reserve History website, the longest and deepest downturn in the history of the United States and the modern industrial economy lasted more than a decade, beginning in 1929 and ending during World War II in 1941.

Along with a group of folks who have since become known as “The Greatest Generation,” my parents lived during those terrible economic times. Many Americans found themselves having to struggle just to put food on the table and it took a world war to bring the country back to a gainful situation.

Memories of her childhood, the Great Depression, and World War II seemed to consistently linger in my mother’s mind as she got older. I think that is fairly common with senior citizens; I find myself doing the same thing these days. Jessie Montgomery (Momma) passed away in 2017 at the age of 92; she outlived her husband and two of her four adult children.

When she was 83 and just a few years shy of having to enter a nursing home, Momma decided to write about her memories of the Great Depression. After she passed, we came across a four-page letter containing recollections of the depression and her childhood; sadly, some of those memories were not good.

Momma began her letter by writing, “My greatest remembrance of the depression was how kind and considerate everyone treated each other.” She went on to say that people living on farms and those with jobs got along better than most. Following that, however, she recalled that some jobs were not all that great.

“My brother-in-law made five dollars a week and after I was old enough to work as a car hop for an ice cream store, I made six dollars every other week,” she said.

 Evidently Momma was not able to attend high school as she lamented in the letter, “Because of a slight heart problem, the doctor said that I could not work and go to school. I stayed with my job so I could buy school lunches for my two little sisters and give some money to my mother.”

At this point in the letter, Momma decided that she had gotten ahead of herself and wrote,“ I was born the sixth child of my parents in June 1925. We lived one-half block off 38th Street and N. Lamar Blvd. in Austin, Texas. ”She recalled that Lamar Blvd. was a two-lane dirt road back then. I left this part in for a little historical record; have those of you familiar with the area been on Lamar Blvd. lately?

It seems that Momma’s letter was kind of hit and miss as the memories came back to her. She evidently wanted the reader to know about the family “I had three older sisters and two older brothers. Later, two more little sisters came along making us eight children for Mama and Daddy.”

So, what began as a recollection of the Great Depression rapidly faded as Momma’s childhood memories continued to flow into her mind. “Daddy never had a steady job until I was two years old. He went to work in the oil field near Dale, Texas. He took care of the wells with those old wooden derricks.”

When she was four, Momma and some other kids were playing in the pump house of one of those oil wells. They climbed up on one of the drive belts and were playing there when the machine was turned on. She was thrown into some iron pipes and nearly died. “I had lots of injuries to my head and still have deep scars from skull fractures,” she said.

Momma poured her heart out in this document, “Life near Dale was not all that great,” she recalled.
“But some good things happened there. I started school and I thought that was pretty good. I had a Big Chief tablet and a #2 pencil.”

They rented an old house and there were 10 of them living in it. “Mama and Daddy had a room and there was a sleeping parlor for seven kids. The two brothers had a bed and that left five sisters to share two double beds, the baby sister slept with Mama and Daddy. We were all pretty little so we weren’t all that crowded,” said Momma.

One of the sad times she recalled was that her older brother left home when he was 16 because the daddy was very mean to him. “He would whip him so hard that my other brother would try to help but he was only 12,” she wrote. “He went to work in the oil fields and never came back except for a visit years later.”

When Momma was 10, the house that they rented was sold and they had to move back to Austin. In the letter she concluded, “That’s when the real trouble as to the depression started. When we were on the oil lease Daddy had an income, but now no more.”

Later in life, after my parents moved to Brazoria County, Momma worked as a Red Cross agent. Later, she took classes at Brazosport College and became a successful licensed insurance and real estate broker. She managed an insurance office in Lake Jackson.

My mother is an example of those folks from “The Greatest Generation” who went through some extremely hard times but never gave up. In my opinion, it is these kinds of individuals that have made America an inspiration to freedom-loving people around the world.