Two of the many things I got from my mother and father, not necessarily in the exact order of appearance: my mother would say, “Who the hell cares what they think! Say what’s on your mind as long as you’re telling the truth. If they can’t handle the truth, it’s too damn bad!”
“You know Harv, the Teddy bear is named for him”. And then my dad, who never went past the fourth grade, recited just about everything President Roosevelt had accomplished during his days in office.
And speaking of parental gifts, the year was 1929… New York City had a population of approximately 6.5 million. On Black Monday, October 28, 1929, the Dow Jones Industrial Average declined nearly 13 percent. When we had the historic market crash, my dad was twenty-seven years of age and married with one child, my oldest sister—da harv was a mere four years away from joining them. My mom and dad were flat broke: no business, no job, no money, and a few days from moving in with one of the many aunts and uncles who all happened to be in the same boat, paddling upstream as fast as they could. Between the two sides, nine brothers and sisters on my dad’s and another eight on my mother’s, contributed to unemployment soaring to a nifty 25% by the time they first heard little da harv complain about not having his own room.
And like so many of us today, their lives were deeply influenced by an even wider variety of medical problems for them to deal with. All the many things we take for granted were nonexistent in the late 1920s, and well into the very late 1930s.
There was no such a thing as “the middle class”. An up-to-date list of what the Americans of that particular era didn’t have is absolutely overpowering!
Imagine, if you will, what families had to live with and face on a life-threatening, daily basis. And then, before these stalwart people could catch their collective breaths, along comes one of the most despicable incidents of a lifetime: World War II was upon them. Our American spirit had been awakened by a sneak punch! Nothing before, or since, has exceeded the determination shown by the same people of my parent’s generation, who were struggling through an epic depressive decline to the welfare of the United States of America.
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