The GREAT DEPRESSION CAME QUICKLY!

STANLEY COLBERT
From Monday's Globe and Mail
December 29, 2008 at 12:00 AM EST
As I remember it, the Great Depression came quickly.

My father suddenly stopped wearing suits and going to an office. We moved from a house to an apartment. After a while, he left the house wearing a brown uniform with a leather clip-on bowtie. He had connected with a job as a service station attendant at an Esso station. He pumped gas and wiped windshields. That didn't last very long. A few blocks away, the Socony station put up a sign saying, "Six gallons for a dollar!" The owner of my father's station countered with a sign saying, "Six gallons for 99 cents!" That worked for a few days until the Socony station posted "Six gallons for 98 cents! In less than a week, both gas stations went out of business. My father threw away the leather bowtie. We moved to a cold-water flat over a tire store where the rent was $5 a month. It was called that because there was no heat or hot water.

For kids like me, too old to be underfoot and too young to be in school, the Depression became a challenge. It was important not to be an added burden to our parents and we became self-sufficient quickly. My first order of business was to scout the empty lots that dotted the neighbourhood for discarded wooden boxes or anything that looked combustible. Cooking and heating in our flat was performed by a large, wood-burning stove in the kitchen. Buying wood was out of the question. The best source of wood was the empty crates outside the fruit and vegetable markets. That discovery also led a few of us kids to a solution to a common problem: always being hungry. We became adept at unashamedly stealing potatoes from the baskets outside a market. We'd target a different market each day, saunter past in twos or threes, and while one of us distracted the shopkeeper, the others pocketed the potatoes. We'd take them to an empty lot, build a small fire and bury the potatoes in the ashes. When we couldn't wait any longer, we'd dig them out, scrape off the black soot and eat them. More often than not, they weren't fully cooked, but it didn't matter. They were a filling alternative to the rations that faced us when we got home.

For the longest period of time, most of our meals at home revolved around Heinz ketchup. No Depression home was without it. Thinned with hot water, it served as a tasty soup. Add a kaiser roll (three for a nickel) and it was dinner. Poured straight from the bottle, it became a sauce for spaghetti. Lathered on a tough piece of cheap beef, it helped the chewing and made the meat palatable.


I never twigged to how my mother knew I was eating roasted mickeys, as we called our charred potatoes. She finally told me the tipoff was the rim of black around my lips and my teeth. She never asked how we got them.

A few odd jobs that my father found helped pay the rent and a little more. And somehow, my parents always found something to laugh about, which kept our spirits up. Then Roosevelt was elected and promised change, but it was a long time coming. I continued to scour the streets for empty pop bottles that returned a deposit of two cents each. We searched the trash bins outside bus stops and subway stations for newspapers that still had the White Castle coupons that appeared from time to time, offering six hamburgers for 25 cents.

As time went by, I got older and taller and began my schooling, I needed some new clothes and my parents took me to the Lower East Side, where pushcart vendors offered bargains in clothing. I remember that whatever we bought, it was always a size larger than it had to be, so I could grow into it. For years, I had one pair of shoes, from Thom McAn at $3.95, a major investment. As a result, they were periodically refurbished with soles and heels by the local shoemaker until I could no longer get my feet into them. Somewhere I have a fading photograph of a class picture, where all the boys were supposed to wear jackets. I didn't own one. One of the girls lent me her jacket for the picture, out of concern, and if you look closely, you can see that I'm the only boy with a jacket buttoning the wrong way.
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