Buddy, can you spare a dime?
One of the things I remember as a kid was my mother talking about the Depression. She was a child of the '20s, and her preteen and teen years were spent in Chicago throughout the Depression. Much of what she said centered on how horrible it was and how her family lived on welfare, and she tended to refer to the Depression in a Scarlett O'Hara style, swearing she wouldn't be that poor again. Beyond that I had no information except what I learned about that era in school. My sister unearthed some documents that helped me understand a little of what my grandparents and their brood had to deal with in financial terms. I'm going to refer to my grandparents by their first names, William and Lulu. William and Lulu married in 1918, and by 1925 Lulu was a widow. William had served in the Marines, then a part of the U.S. Navy, and spent part of his service in the U.S. Virgin Islands, where he contracted tuberculosis, a disease he never really recovered from and one that was res...