BLS: Seasonally Adjusted U6 Unemployment Rate is 9.9%

Bread line in New York City

While we can all remember seeing movies depicting the destitution of the 1930s, few remain today who remember the bread and soup lines of the Great Depression.  Our parents, grandparents and great grandparents, however, lived through it.

My mother told stories about how, in the 1930s she, her parents and four sisters lived in a one bedroom house (still standing on High Street in Washington Court House, Ohio) with a coal stove for heat, a wood stove for cooking, one bare light bulb hanging on the back porch and an outhouse.  There was no water heater and bathing was done in a wash tub.

She often spoke of what a treat it was at Christmas time, when the local doctor brought fruit baskets to his poor patients.  Fresh fruit was scarce and unaffordable.