Mennonite Weekly Review

Don Burkhart, 77, a child of the 1930s and a member of my congregation, remembers eating “pap soup” — a combination of flour, butter and milk topped with brown sugar — during his growing up years in Lancaster County, Pa.

Dick Benner, of Harrisonburg, Va., is a consultant to Media for Living, producer of outreach tools for churches.

While the family always had enough to eat during the Great Depression, he remembers his dad buying one bag of coal at a time to heat the house during the winter. The only extra money they had was from the dressed chickens his parents sold at the Saturday farmer’s market, along with produce grown in their garden and greenhouse.

Burkhart was one of several retirees now living at Virginia Mennonite Retirement Community, where I spent a morning recently seeking out stories from the Great Depression.

Dick Bickerson, 89, a retired university business professor who grew up in the eastern Kentucky coal fields, said his coal-mining family and small community would not have survived without the help of government sending in weekly shipments of cheese, flour, sugar and salt — the staples for daily cooking.

Rural families lived off the land and wildlife. Each had a family cow for fresh milk and a flock of chickens for eggs and meat. “We even cut down the tall weeds, nicknamed ‘Hoover Hay,’ to feed to the cows. There were very few cars in the village, only gaslights and no indoor plumbing.”

These stories sound to someone of my generation like something out of a historical novel. But this was not fiction. The characters were not creations of an imaginative writer. These people were real and their stories all too true. It is hard to overdramatize the hardships of that era.

As I listened to story after story, hardship upon hardship, an overwhelming awe welled up within me. A kind of ancestral reverence took me to a world unfamiliar to my own privacy-protected, market-driven cultural surroundings. Adversity to us is an enigma, affluence a birth-right.

How could these people endure such deprivation and poverty, year after year, with little hope that things would get better? How could they keep their spirits intact, their sense of purpose strong?

When I looked into their eyes, some of them still retaining a twinkle, I found my answer.

These experiences, seeming so cruel to us today, gave them a set of priorities that put life in proper perspective. To this day, they take nothing for granted and live in a spirit of gratitude.