History is all a matter of perspective. That was my opening statement in last week’s column. And it holds just as true for the good we remember about the so-called good old days, as for the bad we often ignore.

Most people — and I include myself — choose to forget the injurious things that have befallen us, our community, our state or nation, because thinking about them is painful. We just prefer to remember good times, it’s that simple.

You probably can find very few people who lived through the Great Depression thinking it was an agreeable time.

Fully a quarter of the nation was out of work. Soup lines were a common sight. People scraped out an existence as best they could, in a time of tremendous economic hardship for the industrialized world. The stock market crashed on Black Thursday in ’29 and banks closed all across America. And the seeds of the Second World War were being sown from the shambles left by the Great War.

Throw in the massive drought that struck the Great Plains during the Dust Bowl, and you have a recipe for misery.

And yet, out of this time came what our parents and grandparents called the “good old days.”

It was a time when simple was the norm, extravagance out of the ordinary.

It was a time when families came together and stayed together and found ways to live every day with their own hard work and their own imagination.

I heard many a story of the Great Depression from my dad and my grandparents, who had to fight their way out of the Dust Bowl in southwest Oklahoma.

At one point, my granddad sold Bibles door to door to help provide for my grandma and my dad. He worked in job after job, in small newspapers across this state, from the Gotebo Record to the Woodward News, from the Foss Enterprise to the El Reno American.

What I always heard most of this terrible time was families stayed together and helped one another. From the many old Kodak photos I’ve inherited, you can see it in their faces — a fierce pride for standing up to hard times and beating them back.

And it’s been so for untold families here in this state and across America.

I remember my dad telling me how hard it was to move from town to town. In all, he went to 17 different schools over his 12 years, from Keene, Texas, to Lincoln, Neb., and just about every small town in southwest Oklahoma.

That was the legacy of the Great Depression.

To his dying day, my dad refused to watch “The Waltons,” or any TV show that had to do with the Depression.

It was just too painful.

One of his stories in particular stayed with me all these years. It seems my dad, when just a boy of 8 or 9, was invited over after school to play and eat at a friends house in Granite, where he was born. He said all they had to eat was a piece of bread, smeared with fat that had been rendered from suet and beef bones.

That, my friends, was not uncommon during 1930s America.

Yet, most of the stories he told were happy stories, of memories and simple things — things the vast majority in this nation today can only read about.

Whenever my dad’s family got together, it was a fun time. I was lucky enough to experience that whenever we visited and all the relatives gathered in Gotebo, down in the short-grass country. If you couldn’t laugh and have a good time with my dad’s relatives ... well, there was something wrong with you.

My dad simply refused to think about the poverty he saw all around him when he was a boy, and learned how to get along with people and treat them the same way he wanted to be treated.

He never read that from a Bible verse or professed it to people in so many words or even pointed it out to those who treated him badly — he simply employed that simple notion to everyday life. Instead, my dad and my grandparents, like thousands of other Oklahomans, gritted it out and made lives for themselves as best they could. They overcame the “Grapes-of-Wrath” stigma of John Steinbeck’s Joad family. They kept smiling and laughing and staying hopeful. If their generations hadn’t, most of us wouldn’t be here today able to read these words and reminisce. The lesson was not lost on me.

In 1950, my dad and my grandpa fulfilled their dream of co-owning a weekly newspaper — the Oklahoma Hornet in Waukomis — and providing for their families.

And today, despite living through the depths of the Depression and selling Bibles door to door, my late grandpa’s name is recorded proudly in the Oklahoma Journalism Hall of Fame.

It’s a history lesson in determination and for today’s trying economic times. Because someday, these will be the “good old days.”



Christy is news editor at the News & Eagle, and can be reached at davidc@enidnews.com