Where’s the Depression?
I interviewed my grandpa, John Jaros, about growing up in the Depression. He grew up in a poor town in southern Illinois. Everybody called him Dunca.

Born May 1, 1923. I’m 91 years old and still a little bold [laughs]. I was born in Nokomis Illinois, N-o-k-o-m-i-s, Illinois by the shores of gitchy goomy [smirks]. My parents were a John Jaros and a Suzie Jendgeloski. I was the second child.  My older sister was Athy her full name was Athanasia, she was named after a nun. I also had a younger brother named Clifford. 
We were very averous, we were very, very poor and we hardly had anything to eat. Our favorite food was mac n’ cheese ‘cause it was the cheapest then and we had no butter but we had olio. Olio is like margine, it was white and you put in the coloring. After you put in the coloring you mixed it up and it looked like butter, [short pause] so we were all fooled.
The first part of my childhood we lived, in Nokomis. Nokomis is a farming and coal mining town and we were tenant farmers. That meant we rented land from a farmer who owned it. Usually the farmhouse was empty and you got to live in the farmhouse for free and then you’d do all the work on the farm including plowing it, cultivating it, seeding it, and then you would get ? of the profit from selling the produce and the farmer would get 2/3s. I had lots of chores...oh god. You have to work, constantly! You had to get the eggs, you had to clean the chicken houses, you always had a farm dog and you had to take care of the farm the dog. And we always had pigs, so you had to feed the pigs. And the other animals we usually had were... goats we kept for their milk and we did have one cow, for cows milks and that saved us, you know, during the depression.
Farm life is like a lot of isolation, neighbors aren’t too close and, if you were lucky enough to have a neighbor who had children also, then you had somebody to play with. Otherwise, you had to play with your brothers and sisters. I was lucky, I had 2 boys that lived down about a mile and a half, so we would always meet each other and play, played in the creek and wade and throw stones and things like that.
I think I was 10 or something like that when the depression hit. And I remember many, many times standing in the poverty line with my little red wagon picking up dried, er I mean powdered milk and beans, and different kinda produce, potatoes. We ate a lot of potataes. Yeah, cause potatoes were very cheap and they were quite substantial. So we had a lot of potatas and beans, we had a lot of beans. So that would be my job, to go stand in line with the other kids with my red wagon. And get my commodities that we were allotted. We were allotted only so many and I would stand there and my sister, Athy, might be with me and we would get the commodities and bring ‘em home. That’s how we survived.
I went to a Catholic school and back then it was all nuns and priests and the nuns were very, very strict, you just looked sideways and they would hit you with their ruler on your knuckles! And then if you were very, very bad they let you go see the priest and they’d letchya have one. [Smiles] He’d pow ya once in the mouth. Then they allowed you to do anything I guess [pauses]. So, if a kid was very mean he’d get pounded by the priest. Then the priest would tell their father and their father would pound him too [laughs]. That’s what happened to me when I was bad and my father found out about it. He would give me a pounding.
When you’re poor and you don’t have a lot of things ya know, you feel like you’re not really up in times, you feel like you don’t belong to a better group. ‘Cause number one you couldn’t afford it, so you become more publicly shy, you weren’t next to work because you didn’t have anything to offer and that’s how my life was a as child. Because of it I tried to get my kids more and tried to make sure they didn’t got through life like that.

My grandpa later went on to serve as a fighter pilot in World War II. He was injured during the war and met my grandmother, a cadet nurse, in the hospital he was recovering in.