MOUNT VERNON — Chuck Whitney — who will be 90 in August — is a storyteller and an avid researcher of history. He lived through the Great Depression, but he doesn’t have the photographs to prove it.
“Nobody had any money to take pictures,” he said.
From 1929 until the mid-1930s, the United States was devastated by what came to be known as the Great Depression, a sort of economic perfect storm of debt, the crash of the stock market, recession, fear, panic and greed. Despite the devastation, Americans came to each others’ aid, found ways to cope and cut back and, despite it all, managed to persevere until it was over.
Today, the offspring of those who lived through the Depression carry the memory.
“I couldn’t find anybody who knew about it first-hand,” said Whitney, who grew up on a dairy farm in southern Michigan. “Unless they were 90 years old, they didn’t live through it.”
For general facts in his research, he turned to his “Almanac of American History” written by Arthur Schlesinger.
“It began on Oct. 27, 1929,” said Whitney. “Sixteen million shares were sold at declining prices. Eventually 30 billion shares were wiped out. Everybody uses the term ‘great’ as though it was a wonderful ballgame or something like that, but it sure wasn’t.”
The event hit farmers and agriculture particularly hard.
“Back then, farmers were the major portion of the population. A lot of the programs [president Franklin Delano] Roosevelt started were aimed at farmers. The Depression was extremely hard on them,” he said. “There were two kinds of farmers, those who inherited his farm and the equipment from his father or grandfather, didn’t have a mortgage and had some money in his pocket, and those who during the 1920s had purchased a farm and were still paying off the mortgage. The second group was squeezed right to the barn door.”
If people didn’t have cash on hand when the stock market crashed and the banks closed, there was nowhere to get any.
“By December 1930,” said Whitney, “there had been 1,300 bank closings. There was no way to get money. Everything people had was in that bank.”
On March 4, 1933, Roosevelt was inaugurated and inherited the gigantic nationwide disaster; he immediately set out to repair the damage.
“The very next day,” Whitney said, “he issued a proclamation declaring a four-day bank holiday. Every bank in the United States was closed. That was to help check the panic. Up until then, people had been withdrawing their money in a run on the banks. When it happened, my father had 78 cents in his pocket. The milk check came that day, but there was no way it could be cashed. He had to sell a dairy cow. It was one emergency after another.”
He told about a man who drove his car without antifreeze because he couldn’t afford to buy any. The school board refused to re-hire a married teacher because she and her family would have two incomes, which was considered unfair. Business owners tightened their belts. The suicide rate shot upward. An employer told his two employees that one would have to be let go, and asked them to decide. They chose to accept half their previous income so both could stay employed. Whitney’s grandfather lost his job, and the grandparents moved to Whitney’s family’s farm.
“It got to be a scary situation, like a black cloud over the whole community,” he said. “There was no place to work off the farm. Families doubled up and shared houses. We altered hand-me-down clothes. My sister and I got tired of having cold, wet feet because of the holes in our shoes. Every day we cut out cardboard to put in them. But then we found some flexible leather to cut out. It would last a week. Boy, we thought we were really rich.
“We wanted to go to the county fair and we’d just threshed the wheat. We sold 10 bushels for 44 cents a bushel, so we had $4.40 to go to the fair that day. We didn’t think anything about it.”
Despite the hardships, Whitney managed to graduate from high school, find a job at the local grain elevator and attend Michigan State University. He worked for the Farm Equipment Association in Kentucky, then came to Knox County to run its Ohio office. Whitney and his wife, Edith, have been married 67 years.
“I’m not retired,” he said. “Everybody thinks I’m retired but I keep on working.”
He and his daughter, Pam Gray, have a barn consulting business that keeps them busy evaluating old barns and advising the owners on how to repair and preserve them. He estimates they’ve evaluated 700 barns in the last seven or eight years.
“The Depression was a wonderful lesson on life,” Whitney said. “Everyone learned the value of a job and the value of a dollar. Today, people ask how people could live under such pressure. They can’t imagine it. But we did it. You hid your pride and kept on going. ”
