The Interview

Transcript- Mary E. Wollmann

Mary has a different first hand impression of what happened during the 1930’s. She was 3 years old when the depression started and can clearly remember things when she turned 4 in 1931. She was 14 when the depression ended. She remembers hearing about the Stock Market crash of 1929 that is what she feels started the depression. Also, Mary felt that the depression was almost worldwide. Her family didn’t invest a lot of money in the bank, but they did speculate in buying land, in which they did lose a little money.

One of the main things that affected her personally was the weather, the very dry summers with no rain and the snowy winter that made driving very difficult. Also, during this time "you didn’t get everything that you wanted, you didn’t get the new dress in the store, your ma sewed it". She grew up on a farm. Her parents farmed the land, and her mom had a large garden. The farming, along with the large garden, provided most of the food for the family. It was hard to buy groceries for a family of 14.

Mary didn’t have much to say about the government of this time but she remembers her father talking about how much he thought of FDR. Her dad felt that FDR cared about poor people, and wanted to get people out of unemployment.

She said the people in the depression that suffered the most lived in the cities. "If you lived on a farm you usually had enough food."