Literature and Information

CONTENTS OF CURRICULUM UNIT 15.01.01

  1. Unit Guide
  1. Introduction
  2. Overview
  3. Content Objectives
  4. Rationale
  5. Background
  6. Teaching Strategies
  7. Classroom Activities
  8. Appendix on Implementing Pennsylvania Common Core Standards-English Language Arts
  9. Resources for Students
  10. Internet Resources
  11. Resources for Teachers
  12. Works Cited

Wandering Through the Bad Times: Children Making Their Way Through the Great Depression

Joyce Arnosky

Published September 2015

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Introduction

As a new mother, I often took advantage of those rare moments in the late afternoon when my baby boy decided he’d had enough and finally closed his eyes to nap. I would sit on the stoop, enjoying the quiet interlude before the hubbub began again as dinnertime drew near. Often on these occasions I was joined by my elderly neighbor, Renee, who, with cigarette and coffee mug in hand, would dispense in her gravelly voice bits of wisdom on marriage and child rearing. On one occasion, however, she was uncharacteristically still, gazing off into the distance at what I could not even imagine. “What are you thinking about?” I asked. She paused a moment before answering. Turning slowly to face me she said, “ I ever tell you about the time when I was a kid and I came home late from work and there was nobody, no nothin’ in the house. Everybody, everything, just gone. Gone.”

“This was 1932,” she continued, “mind you, this was during the Great Depression and I was eleven years old.” As the story unfolded I learned that she had gone to work at the mill, as she usually did –no school for her – there were mouths to feed and everyone who could work, did work. She returned late at night to find the house dark and empty of everything save a can of beans and a can opener placed in the middle of the floor. There was not even a hastily scribbled explanation tucked away in a secret place, nor whispered messages from neighbors on the lookout for her return. So eleven- year old Renee sat alone on the floor of a house empty of everything. Waiting. Just after midnight her sister crept through the window to fetch her and bring her to the family’s new digs. Her folks had not been able to pay the rent, so they’d left. They had decided not to tell her for fear that somehow she might give them away.

This story has stayed with me these many years. I connect to it as a parent as I can imagine and associate it with the anguish of leaving a child behind. On another level, it is my reference point for a period of history I had only read about, but that I now understand more completely in the terms of its human costs.

This story is history, but it will never find its way into a textbook. All history texts tell the story primarily through the actions and reactions of the adults. But children are part of the story as well, as Renee’s story illustrates. They live their lives in tandem with the adults, albeit experiencing the events in ways particular to their sensibilities. Rarely, if ever, do the histories stop to tell the story from the youngest members of that society, to represent it through their eyes.

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