Depression- Eda Barney Van Lew

“I interviewed my grandmother, Eda (Barney) Van Lew. She was born July 24, 1924, so she was 5 yrs. old when the Depression began in 1929. She and her family lived outside of South Glens Falls, N.Y. in a small, cement house called a bungaloo. She had two sisters, Dorothy and Kristine, who were both younger than her. Her parents wanted to sell their house to move to a bigger one. They sold it to a family whose husband and father had lost his job and had no money to pay for it. They then had to take the house back and didn’t get to live in the bigger, better house.

The Depression didn’t affect her family as much as it did the people around them. Eda’s father had a job with the power company, which back then made a family pretty well set. She felt that they were one of the lucky ones. When asked about how much things cost back then, she couldn’t really say. She was a daydreamer and always had her nose in a book. She didn’t care much about any material things. “My mother did all the shopping”, she said, often being cautious about what she bought.

Her family owned a Buick, which back then was a pretty nice car. She told me that you could buy a beautiful car for under $1000 back then. She remembers that she could go to the movies for a quarter. “They weren’t the best movies, but my boyfriend and I enjoyed them.” I asked her about her opinion on Franklin D. Roosevelt and the first thing that came to her mind was that his New Deal helped her father’s brother out. Her uncle lived in the North where there weren’t that many jobs. She remembers her dad talking about how Roosevelt was wonderful for creating the WPA which gave her uncle Charles a job in forest management. “It was labor, but it was a job that gave him a pay check and food on the table.

I asked her if she thinks there will be another depression in the future, she said that there should never be a big one again, because all the banks are protected now, but nothing’s impossible. She also said that there’s a mini depression going on in Glens Falls now. The businesses are leaving and a lot of people are losing their jobs. I asked her why and she said that all the big companies like G.E. are down sizing and letting a lot of people go. She said that many people won’t buy a house because they don’t know if they’ll have a job next week to pay for it.

When asked where she was on December 7, 1941, she said that she thinks it was an early Sun. morning, she can’t remember exactly. She does remember that she was in her post graduate year in high school. In her history class they had non-stop discussions about it. She also remembers that her boyfriend, whom she married, was enlisted in the army and had been sent home, which made her very happy.

She told me that the New Deal helped her out when she was in nursing school. There was a government agency called cypend that sponsored them and helped pay for her uniform, books, and the tuition fee. That helped her family a lot because her and her sister were both going through nursing school, and the government paid $25 a month for tuition. Her last comment about the Depression was that she remembered that stockings were scarce and she had to mend and make her own stockings, which were needed a lot.”

—–by Adrienne, March 1996, for a school project