Depression Era Frugality

[jayem]

Yeah, my maternal great-grandparents had it pretty bad. It's a shady story, but all I know is my great-grandfather for blacklisted, and ended up going insane. Murder/suicide with my great-grandmother. My grandmother (oldest, at 9) and her 5 other brothers and sisters ended up going to an orphanage.

My grandmother would tell my mom how she and her mother would pick dandelions and other edible flowers/green for food. They would also scrape the cream off milk to make (I think) butter, and keep the hardened grease leftover from frying meat as lard for further usage. Any oils used for cooking was strained and poured into a jar to be reused. My grandmother kept doing this, and my mom still does it today. We have like a jug of used canola oil in our fridge.

I don't know if it's from growing up in an orphanage during the Depression, or just an orphanage in general... but my grandmother had some pretty disturbing stories. I guess paper was in great demand, and if a child tore a piece and needed a new sheet for writing they were punished by getting their wrists whipped--or worse, depending on the nun. Same with breaking pencils or spilling ink. She also told me a story that had to do with sanitary napkins... which I will not repeat.

We had a very limited income growing up, so my mom was pretty thrifty. We also reuse plastic baggies, and I never brought a brown-bagged lunch to school... always plastic shopping bags. I went to one of those grade schools where we were ordered to cover our books (since we didn't buy them), and my mom would always request paper bags during back to school season to make book covers out of. If we're almost our of liquid soap, but there's still a bit left my mom will pour some water in the bottle to get the very last drop out of it. She'll also do this with shampoo. She makes tons of soups in big, huge pots and freezes them before the winter... so there's never a chance we'll be out of food. After Thanksgiving, we'll make a soup from the leftover turkey/vegetable remnants. Oh, and she saves EVERY SINGLE PACKET of take-out ketchup/soy sauce/salsa... you name it. This bothers me, since the first shelf in our fridge is dedicated to mini-packets of spicy mustard and soy sauce. She does the same with the little packets of salt and pepper. All my clothing growing up were my brothers and cousins hand-me-downs, and any old pair of jeans or long-sleeved t-shirt was cut down to make either shorts or a short sleeved tee. Socks with holes are cut to make rags. Oh, and we reuse plastic water bottles. One water bottle can usually last a few weeks to a month, given it's washed out often. Oh, also, any plastic containers or jars get reused. We must have a million butter containers holding various things throughout this house. Buttons are kept, same with safety pins and hangers.

 

[Foofoogal]

Dad even had to pay interest on his loan from grandpa to buy his first house.

fftopic:

We have loaned money to both our children and charge 10% interest. Some of my family think we are mean but I tell them they can either waste the money now or have it all back when we are gone. I look at it as being good stewards of their inheritance.
My children always had chores for allowance also. They both are now good with money.
As no.9 of 11 chores didn't kill me and I appreciate the time I learned hard work ethics as my honey did also.

 

[alexandra]

My only surviving Grandmother happened to be one of the lucky "well off" people during the depression. She always says she never knew of the hardships many people had to face. They still had their houses and cottages and servants and everything...realistically they probably gained from the depression.

That said, she still does almost all of the things mentioned in this thread and always has. She saves everything and uses everything. She has special door/window systems that HAVE to be kept the way she puts them for maximum heat/cold saving during the winter or summer. I'd like to say that it was because she was young in the depression, but I know it's not. I guess it's just the way she is!

 

[Fletch]

Very well-to-do people, the cash-rich, had a chance then. The emerging white collar middleclass (such as my paternal grands) was more often than not badly humbled. They were the ones who had come up in the 20s and expected so much of the future. Many continued to live below their means for life, just in case.

My pgf, an ad salesman, was part of the information economy, such as it was then. He never had to dig ditches or do door to door - he ended up running weekly newspapers in rural Iowa - but relatives did. 2 of my great uncles, both good salesmen, had to leave Des Moines in 1932 for Atlanta to flog greeting cards door to door. People in the South still hung onto the niceties when they could - Midwesterners were if anything TOO practical. Well into his 80s Grandpa Paul offered Aunt Mary cash money to "help out" every time he visited. Annoyed, she always refused. That was just Paul, the preacher's son, for ya.

My maternal relatives in Connecticut were wholesale greengrocers until the business went under. They then went back to their old trade of operating restaurants, my mgf Angelo working as a waiter well into his 30s. There wasn't much cash but you always ate - Italians never starve. One of the places Angelo worked was a roadhouse, where his friend Francis Carlone would play piano in between tours with the Horace Heidt show band. He later became famous as Frankie Carle.

A note: Angelo, like me, was adult onset diabetic, largely self-educated and had a love of good clothes. He wore a tie and coat every day of his adult life, except the day in about 1930 when he hired out on an oyster boat. He got so sick he never went back. The highlight of his life, besides his 2 daughters, was the day in November 1933 when he was elected a Bridgeport alderman. He always claimed, I can't prove it, that he was the first Italian-American elected to public office in Connecticut. I never knew him. He died in 1955. Very quiet, mom tells me, but bigger than life.

 

[dhermann1]

My father's dad was a lineman for the phone company during the Depression, and never lost his job. So my dad's family never knew that kind of privation. My mother was an only child. Her mother was a New York City school teacher, and tho I believe there may have been a few payrolls missed by the City during that period, she always had a decent income. Her dad was a horse trainer/exercise rider, and worked very intermittently. But they were still able to have a live in house keeper throughout the Depression, and even took my mother on a 6 month trip to Europe in 1937 when she graduated from high school. But my mother told me that all through her childhood, nobody thought twice about having someone come to the back door and beg a meal. These folks were never refused.

 

[BonnieJean]

My grandmother saved hundreds of plastic whipped topping and butter containers. She also saved plastic bread wrappers. Whenever the family gathered at her place for dinner, she'd bring out her previously used foam plates. My hubby always commented on the fork marks on the plate. Grandma never saw a problem with that, she said they were clean. Weirded me out, though. My mom used to mix up powdered milk and add it to our regular store-bought milk when the container was half empty. Sometimes she would even mix up a whole gallon of the stuff. I can't stand powdered milk today because when I was a kid I drank some of mom's freshly mixed stuff before it was chilled. Nasty stuff! But I'll substitute powdered milk (reconstituted) for recipes that call for milk. Works great and no one notices.

My grandma (and my mom did it for years until she got a clothesdryer) always hung out her clothes on a line. I remember as a kid playing under the clean clothes and smelling the freshness as they flapped in the breeze--that is, until grandma caught me playing with her clean clothes--those were the days of the old wringer washer and tub. I'm grateful for my high efficient washer, but I've ditched the clothesdryer and opt for line drying now. Its also very theraputic for me.

 

[LizzieMaine]

My grandparents got hit hard by the Depression. Neither of them came from money -- my grandfather was one of eight kids in a working-class family, and had to quit school after the eighth grade to go to work. My grandmother finished high school, and hoped to go to nursing school -- but the Depression put the kibosh on that and she ended up working 12 hours a day as a waitress in a lunchroom. My grandfather worked days in a barrel factory until it went out of business, and spend nights as the leader of a six-piece dance band that played smalltime vaudeville and dance-hall dates around northern New England and the maritimes. By the time they got married in the winter of 1933, most of that work had dried up and there was very little money to be found -- they spent the first year of their marriage in a tar-paper house. Had the WPA not come along, they might well have starved.

They never had electricity or running water until shortly after my mother was born in 1939, and they couldn't afford regular medical care until well into the postwar era. Because of that, my mother's childhood ear infection turned into a chronic abscess that left her deaf in one ear, and my uncle nearly died of rheumatic fever.

It wasn't until my grandfather got a chance to take over the lease on the gas station where he was working that things began to turn around a bit. By 1945, they were able to afford a mortgage to buy the little house where they'd spend the rest of their lives. But it was a nickel-and-dime life the whole way, and aside from the house, and despite their best efforts at scrimping and saving, the energy crunch in the 70s wrecked the business and they died broke. But they were very proud to have survived as much as they did for as long as they did, and the lessons of the Depression were drilled into me every day of my childhood. To this day, I cannot bring myself to throw away a bit of string, a paper bag, or a crumb of food.

 

[Foofoogal]

You see the prettiest girl on the right in front row. That is my Aunt Ola Mae. She ended up with money.

These kids are from West Texas. This is during the depression when most of their dads were in the very early oil business. I have more photos but it would scare you all.

They lived in tent cities as there was no houses yet. This is where my dads family was during the depression. You cannot grow much in the sands of West Texas.
My mom's family was in Louisiana on a farm and did better as they could eat off the land.

 

[Lola Getz]

Granny's making hand grenades in the basement, Lola.

Oh my gosh, Story, that was an eye opener! Who knew bacon grease could win the war?

My parents also have the obligatory drawer filled with excess twist ties and bread bag clips. If the world ever runs out of nails, my folks can keep their house standing by rigging it up with twist ties.

 

[BegintheBeguine]

http://www.tightwad.com/

Hey, all the threads or links we can use to save I say.
I have a homemade recipe for baby wipes if one need it.

May I have that recipe? Thanks in advance.
Ashley