JOE BRADISH INTERVIEW - THE GREAT DEPRESSION

Things were tough. And like they used to say, the kids at school, "Well, we had meat at our house last night, but I didn't get any." Another kid says, "Well don't feel bad. See my hand? We had meat and my brother, I was reaching for it and my brother beat me to it and stabbed me in the hand." And so they made light of the depression. And of course, for me, at my age, there were no jobs, so what do you do, excepting farm work. And we had what you might call a poor farm. It wasn't much of a farm, a lot of trees. So you worked on that clearing stumps and things like that working for the neighbor farms that would hire boys chopping out thistles and something for a dollar a day and "found." That means, his wife brought out a sandwich and that was the found. And they used to say, like I said earlier, we weren't that far from Chicago and they said, one kid said, reading the paper, "You think it's tough here, its really tough in Chicago." He said, "The breadlines have even stopped. They’re starting to use crackers."