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Economy evokes memories
While Robert Simon was building his real estate career in Manhattan, Pat Kane's parents were taking in boarders and giving handouts to hobos on their back porch in California's San Fernando Valley. Virginia Scott and her musical family were performing on radio in New York and Chicago as Bernice Davis Wilson was living a simple country life in Clifton.
As this country grapples with a new financial crisis, economists and pundits are routinely invoking the Great Depression, which began Oct. 29, 1929, with the stock market crash. To those who know the era only from history books, the 10-year Depression stirs up images of bread lines, shoes repaired with cardboard and out-of-work men in tattered suits selling apples on the streets.
Those iconic images have some basis in reality, but area residents who lived through the Depression all have very different memories of the time – mainly fond recollections of childhood.
"I did not know I was poor until I went to high school," said Bernice Davis Wilson, 79, who still lives a few doors down from where she grew up, on what is now Wolf Run Shoals Road in Clifton. "We grew up without so many things and I didn't know anything different."
The Davises had no electricity, no running water and didn't even have a well at first -- they would draw water from a spring in the woods. They had a garden and fruit trees and raised pigs and chickens on their 25 acres, so the family never went hungry. Neighbors also came together to support one another in times of need, like when her father had to be hospitalized for an illness, neighbors pitched in money to help cover the bills.
While they didn't have many toys, Wilson and her brother made their own fun, playing in the wooded areas of rural Fairfax.
"I remember my childhood as being very happy," Wilson said.
Ernie Sult, 83, remembers his family struggling after his father was laid off from Potomac Yards in Alexandria during the Depression. He recalls the bank book for his family of four dropping below $100, which was scary even in 1930s dollars. But, he said, "I was never in rags and I never starved." Sult is now a resident of Greenspring Village in Springfield.
In California, where the effects of the Depression hit harder and lingered longer, Pat Kane, 72, said his family remained upbeat despite the signs of what they saw around them. His mother took a job as a secretary at a movie theater and the family rented out rooms for extra cash.
As a child, it was "kind of fun" to see the neighborhood's homeless camps, and Kane recalls the out-of-work men walking along the Los Angeles River, looking for handouts of food and odd jobs.
"I saw the results of lack," he said.
Others were more sheltered from the down economy.
Robert Simon, 94, who would later go on to create the planned community of Reston, was in college when the stock market crashed in 1929. While on his last fling to Europe as a young man, he got word that his father died and returned to the states to take over his father's real estate business in Manhattan. He remembers renegotiating mortgages on some of the properties his father owned to keep them from going into foreclosure.
"Clearly this is the kind of thing that should be negotiated today," said Simon, who still resides in Reston.
While he does recall seeing people in nice clothes selling apples in the streets of New York, "I guess I really was sheltered" from the effects of the Depression, Simon said.
Similarly, Virginia Scott, 93, said her family was too busy with their career in show business to feel any hardship.
"We were so busy during that time that we didn't notice any Depression," said Scott, a Greenspring resident.
Scott and her six siblings performed on NBC radio shows in New York and "Don McNeil's Breakfast Club" in Chicago before going to Hollywood to sing for a couple films, with the likes of Bing Crosby and Judy Garland.
Their experiences during the 1930s have affected the way all of these seniors view today's economic troubles.
Simon said he expects the current crisis to get worse before it gets better, with the credit card market crashing and repossessions hitting a high.
Recalling that it used to take 40 percent down to get a mortgage, Simon said the real estate market of a few years ago was "madness."
"I think money is our god and greed is our motivation," he said. "The golden rule is out the window."
"I certainly have empathy for unemployed people," Simon said. "I also have empathy for the homeowner who is approached by the broker."
Things will get better in the end, Kane said, a lesson he learned from living through hard times.
"Just be patient and look out the window," he said. "It will climb up; from the bad comes good."
Wilson said growing up poor taught her the value of hard work and living an ethical life.
"I wouldn't change one thing about it – not one thing," she said.
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