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Dan Kegley/Sherman Brown, whose sharp memory gives no clue beyond its expansive content to his turning 98 on Thanksgiving day, holds wool cards his mother used in preparing yarn with which she made the family’s socks.

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Voice from the Great Depression: Jobs are key

By DAN KEGLEY/Staff

Sherman Brown was 19 and in his first year of marriage and starting a family when the stock market collapse in 1929 ushered in the Great Depression.  While many commentators, including President-elect Barack Obama, say those hard years were worse than the financial crisis now gripping the country and much of the world, Brown believes we are witnessing history repeating itself.
“It will be as bad this time or worse than it was then,” Brown said in the living room of his trailer south of Chilhowie where the furnace kept Monday’s cold and its scattering of snowflakes at bay.
At 18 Brown had married Rosie Hayes, a year younger than he and who would bear him five boys and two girls, starting in those watershed years some say are the best yardstick for measuring the depth of financial trouble the United States faces.
As a young husband and father in Casey County, Ky., where he was born, Brown knew those hard times, hearing “of people starving to death,” he said, though not in his home county.
He had been “lucky enough” to afford a new wagon and a pair of mules in a time when many families’ financial destinies were handed to them. He said families had few financial planning decisions to make. “We just did what we could,” he said.
With his wagon and mules, Brown went to work for his father-in-law, hauling his logs to a sawmill, a job that was steady but didn’t pay much, “but I made it.”
For Brown, like for many rural folks, hard times did not have their start at the advent of the 1930s. “When I was growing up was the hardest time,” he said. “When I was old enough to hold a plow up, I had to quit school and go to the farm.”
Whatever was eaten in the Brown household was produced in the fields around it. “When Hoover was in, we had to raise stuff to have anything to eat,” he said. “Corn, wheat, oats. We raised our bread, and hogs.”
His mother sold eggs for 10 cents a dozen, sometimes to a peddler who came by on a weekly route buying and selling produce. When he couldn’t pay, he issued a due bill to pay off the following week.
Brown sees a big difference in the sustenance living he knew and the lifestyle of current generations. “People now wouldn’t work if they had a job,” he said.
It was jobs that ended the Great Depression and jobs that will end the current crisis, Brown believes.
“Roosevelt got jobs,” he said, through programs like the Work Progress Administration and its National Youth Administration. “He got it started. Looks like that’s about all we can do now, get little jobs going. When people go back to work, you’ll know it’s getting better.”
That day, however, will be later in coming than expected, he said. “I think it will last longer than they talk it will.”
Beside Brown’s living room chair sits a collection of pipes. One is from a grandson in China and bears a carved dragon’s head. Each still holds the cold ashes of tobacco that recently glowed perhaps as Brown thought about the state of the economy. He agrees, for instance, with Congressional proposals to help the big automakers, but not with the bailout for the investment banks.
“They’ve sent so much overseas, they ought to spend a little on the United States,” he said. “I think they made a mistake bailing out these big banks,” which, he said, should pay that money back into the U.S. treasury.
Beside Brown’s pipes on the table sit pouches of chewing tobacco that he uses when he’s not smoking a pipe, like when company drops by and he puts a thumb over his pipe bowl to snuff the embers.
His twin loves are smoking and eating, neither on the list of good choices cardiologists and other doctors recommend for long, healthful living. He loves ham, and fries his own sausage and eggs.
In spite of tobacco and pork, Sherman Brown will be 98 on Thanksgiving, with no plans in particular for the dual holiday other than partaking of two turkeys at family gatherings.
He has neither high blood pressure nor heart problems, and spent but a day in the hospital for gallstones’ removal about three years ago, he said.
A cane and a hearing problem are about the only signs Brown might have been around to see the Great Depression. The key may be a lean lifetime of hard work. Since his boyhood on the Kentucky farm, he built houses, worked at the ammunition plant at Radford, B&O Railroad in Cincinnati, and in West Virginia coal mines. He worked on the Laurel Springs Dairy outside Marion. He retired as a greens keeper at Holston Hills Country Club.
He was still planting tobacco when he was 85.
“I’ve done just a little bit of everything,” he said.
He’s now seen the country elect its first African American to the White House, a president-elect who takes a more optimistic view of the country’s fate than does Brown. Obama told Steve Kroft on “60 Minutes” Sunday that the current conditions “are as bad as we’ve seen” since the 1930s, but not as bad as when more banks collapsed and almost a third of the working population was jobless.
Brown believes change is coming to Washington. Obama, he said, will do things the current administration did not, but should have.
“I think this president will do what he can for the poor people,” Brown said. “The one that’s been in for eight years did everything for the rich people.”