My Father's experience of the Great Depression

My father was born in 1916. In 1934 he was valedictorian of his Senior High School Class.

He told me how at age 14 he secretly bought an old Harley Davidson 74 motorcycle (74 horsepower). He and his brother were secretly riding it (he didn't have permission to own this from his father and mother) and the went down a gravel road with his then 12 year old brother on the back and a big German Shepard ran out in front of him and though this killed the dog and broke his back it almost cost my father his leg which got under the motorcycle and ground up his leg some.

This became a problem because the hospital wanted to amputate his leg then in 1930 because they didn't have anti-biotics to prevent Gangrene from taking his leg then. My father's father refused to let them take off his leg at the knee no matter what so the didn't. So they gave my father morpheine for 6 weeks which he said was really crazy because it makes you hallucinate. Later he said he had a nervous breakdown after that but I don't think he or his family realized he was having withdrawals from morpheine back then. Most people didn't know about these kinds of things then. However, he kept his leg with little scarring even though the morpheine left psychological scars. But, at least he had his leg and then he focused on his studies and became Valedictorian of his Senior Class.

But then his father wouldn't let any of his three sons go to college which upset my father a lot because he wanted to go to college to become an electrical engineer instead of an Electrician like his father who was then a Successsful Electrical contractor in Seattle. So, his father hired the three boys just out of high school and made sure they had jobs, cars and money in their pockets all through the Great Depression. During the War since they were trained electricians who had also been to night school to learn their trade they were hired by the U.S. government to wire Liberty Ships there in Seattle throughout the war as a necessary deferred trade to ship supplies into the Pacific all over of food, planes, small ships like PT Boats, weapons and ammunition of all kinds in those Liberty ships built and then wired by my Uncle and my Dad all during World War II.

My father talks about his first regular part time job around 14 or 15 where he worked as a bag boy at a supermarket then. He said they paid him about 25 cents a day (money was worth a whole lot more then.

(For example, when I was 18 in 1966 minimum wage was around $1 an hour, you could buy a brand new volkswagon bug for about $800 and 2 years later when I was 20 I bought a brand new 1968 Camaro for 3500 which was a 327 and I eventually drove it about 145 miles per hour on one occasion in 1969 when I was 21.

So, how much you made per hour it was much much easier then for almost anyone to buy a car new or used even if you were 15 or 16 years old. My first car in 1964 was a 1956 Ford stationwagon blue and white that I called then my "Surfwagon".

So, if you can imagine working at a supermarket for 25 cents a day that's what one got in the mid 1930s. Having any job at all in the 1930s one considered themselves very lucky then because unemployment was nationwide at about 25% and some places it was 50% or more and many people starved and died or worse.

So, like then natural selection is in place in the U.S. and the rest of the world. And especially in the rest of the world many might not make it from age 18 to 30 right now because of the way things are in some parts of the world.

Refusing to give up no matter what from 18 to 30 is important so you can get beyond unrealistic expectations to wherever you wind up is important.

However, just remember in life, "Nothing ventured nothing gained."

In other words if you don't try to do something with your life you won't ever have a life.

Frustration is important to success. and never giving up trying is also important to not only success but to surviving at all the way the world is now.

People who own successful businesses now often failed at one or more businesses first. And people who own businesses learn a whole lot more from their failures than they ever do from their successes.