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I am too young to have lived through the Depression but my parents were deeply affected by that time. Dad lived on an apple ranch around Omak Washington in the Okanogon Valley. They had been moderately prosperous prior to the Depression but the failure of the markets for transportable food stuffs such as apples caused them to live for a number of years on the farm with no income. The year the apples rotted in piles in the orchard because there was no way to get them to market and no one was buying them even if they could be gotten to the stores, was a story Dad often told. Dad's stories of the hunger and fear that came with loosing the family farm to the apple packing house from whom they had borrowed money against the next crop, left a big impression on his children.
In sharp contrast to that story, my mother's parents worked for the Bureau of Reclamation on the big water projects that changed the shape of the West. Grampa worked on the Hoover dam, the Salton Sea & All American Canal and Grand Coulee water projects that spanned the Depression and World War II, from Yuma AZ to Ephrata WA. They were by comparison, a well to do family in terms of money but the living accomodations were often rough and hard to come by and being treated as transients by the locals also informed their sense of isolation from the communities that they lived in. As a child I played with the left over ration coupons and helped my grandmother can fruits and vegetables as a hedge against hunger. That deep need to hoard food against a possible future need was a deep and abiding tenent of both sets of grandparents.
Thanks for letting us share our stories.

posted 4 years, 8 months ago
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