Personal Narrative: Life During The Great Depression

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Life during the Great Depression Most of the population today, mainly the younger generations, do not know exactly how good they have it or how much worse the quality of life can be. Personally, I’ve been fortunate enough in my life to not have experienced too many hardships. It was a real eye-opener for me after my interview with Mary Fowler, Great Depression survivor. She has been a close friend to my grandmother for as long as I can remember, but I have never heard her real story. I made usual trek home this past weekend. With Morgantown being about 3 hours away from home, I unfortunately have to ride a charter bus. It’s basically a greyhound with an extensive amount of decals on the side that blows it name completely out of proportion …show more content…

So her, her mom, and her sisters usually took care of all the planting, weeding, harvesting the garden, and harvesting the fruit. There was absolutely no electric washing machines, henceforth several hours of scrubbing on a washboard wasn’t uncommon either. “I remember as a child, no more then 10 years old, seemed like my job was to, lots of big brothers and a father and irrigating, and what-not, their socks were so dirty that it seemed like every Saturday my job was to scrub these dirty socks on the wash board. I use to hate Saturdays.” (Fowler) She recalled one time in her youth of a sudden drop in price for cattle, and it was after the great depression had already began. The government ended up buying some of the cattle that year. Her dad had an old white dairy cow that the whole family was just in love with. Sadly, the old cow grew elderly and they could now longer afford to feed her. It was quite unsettling what she told me the government would do to a lot of the heads of cattle that the bought.
“Literally, they dug a big pit, and they dropped the cattle up there and shot them. Covered them over and didn't save the meat for nobody or anything. They just shot the cattle in this big trench and covered them over and let them stay

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