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Woman recalls 1930’s hard times

By Joanne Bratton
Daily Leader
Mon Mar 30, 2009, 02:00 PM CDT
Stuttgart, Ark. -

MOUNTAIN HOME (AP) — Elva Moore and her family might not have survived the Great Depression if her parents had not worked hard to be self-sufficient.

“I was old enough to know what the Depression was,” said Moore, 93, of Mountain Home. Moore was about 14, living in the Texas panhandle with her parents and seven siblings, when the stock market crashed in 1929.

Even now, when she’s watching television and hears talk of the struggling economy, she hears some of the same things she heard as a child, she said.

“When people panic, you’re in trouble,” she said.

Moore’s father, James A. Wood, told her he didn’t think the banks would fail if people left it in the banks, but people started to panic and took out their money, she said.

Although her family was better off than most because they grew or raised nearly everything they used, Moore remembers her family losing a couple of hundred dollars when their local bank closed.

“It hurt because that’s about all you had,” she said.

Moore’s father was a cotton farmer, like many others in the area. They were dependent on the weather, which could be unrelentingly dry. In bad seasons, cotton could drop from about 20 cents to 5 cents a pound, leaving many farmers unable to break even, she said.

Those who suffered most lived in town and many relied on the government to provide them food, Moore said.

“It was a bad time for people, more especially for city people,” Moore said. “Jobs were lost and they did not have any income.”

Moore’s family had cows, pigs, turkeys, chickens and a large garden, she said. Every year her family canned meat and fruit and her father sugar-cured bacon. The cured meat hung in their meat house in 100-pound flour sacks and would keep all summer, she said.

“We always had plenty to eat,” she said, adding she remembered frying up the bacon, picking fresh tomatoes and eating bacon and tomato sandwiches.

Her family gave back to the community by helping neighbors and kinfolk who needed help planting or picking cotton, she said. She also remembered her mother, Jettie Lee, sitting up all night with people who were sick, as the nearby town had only one doctor.

“My dad was a good worker, and my mom was a good worker,” she said, adding she and all her siblings were raised to work hard.

To infuse money into the economy, Moore remembers President Franklin D. Roosevelt getting Congress to pass the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933, which paid farmers not to grow crops or raise animals, to reduce surpluses. Moore remembers her family plowing up part of their cotton crop and killing a cow, but they were allowed to keep the meat.

Moore said she felt one of the contributors to the Great Depression was the weather. Some seasons weren’t rainy and dust storms would settle over the area.

In one spectacular memory, Moore said she was in a wagon with her husband, Arvle Moore, who spotted a black cloud. It was in the afternoon and they hoped it was a sign of much-needed rain. The black cloud came up higher, faster, and quickly bore down on them, she recounted.
“It was as black as night,” she said.

Her father tied up the horses and wagon as they completed their one-mile trip and everyone ran into the cellar. They later discovered it was a wind-storm that picked up and carried black dirt from another area, she said.

After living in Texas, Moore moved to California and eventually to Arkansas, where she lived on a farm in Gassville for many years before moving to Mountain Home.

During the current uncertain economic times, Moore says she watches the news and hears some of the same things she heard back then. She has the same opinion as her father did — leave money in the banks.

But Moore said she doesn’t spend time worrying about the economy.

“I’ve experienced all of that,” she said.

Information from: The Baxter Bulletin, http://www.baxterbulletin.com