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C h a p t e r 1 Moving into the Depression The Pre-Depression Years Before Jack and I met, we had lived in very different circumstances. Even the words we used for our basic biographies were different: Jack was born and bred in New York; I was born and reared in a small town in Tennessee. In addition, Jack came out of the New York Jewish middle-class tradition as the son of a fur importer; I came out of the southern “Jew store” tradition as the daughter of the owner of a modest dry goods establishment. It might be said that Jack’s Depression story had big-city notes, and mine had small-town southern ones. Still, they had the same underpinning: the businesses of both fathers had gone bust. Jack and I, like all of our generation, became Depression kids. The Great Depression had been with us for just about half of our young lives, and even if Jack and I had become Depression kids in different places and were born into different social and economic groups, we were both profoundly familiar with this sinister force and its soul-trying deprivations and restrictions . Still, Jack and I could not be said to have “suffered” as had so many other Depression kids. The Great Depression may have bent our families but it did not break them. Even if the means of both families had declined in substantial ways, the means had not entirely disappeared, and what was left of them provided not only the necessities but a little something beyond. Still, during those desperate years you had only to be alive to recognize the depth of the want and despair around you and to be devastated to know that the term “no means at all” applied to one-third of the nation. As my mother would say, tearful as always at the thought of need, “So many 2 Moving into the Depression people don’t have what to eat, don’t know where to turn.” It’s true that my mother cried easily—my father would tease and say, “Mama cries when somebody misses the bus”—but he didn’t tease her when she cried over the misery the Depression had wrought. And so despite that we were never truly—as Jack would say—kayoed by the Depression, we knew it intimately. It was ever there, in the background, or hovering overhead, or staring us down. We knew it was a thing of epic proportions, but considering that we had no other depression to compare it with, we didn’t call it the Great Depression, just the Depression. We used the word as a noun—“the Depression”; and we used it as an adjective—“a Depression job,” meaning a job not worthy of one’s accomplishments, or “a Depression thing to do,” like your mother using milk instead of cream in her coffee, or you never being allowed to throw anything out even if you couldn’t stand to look at it another minute. It’s a Love Match The grip of the Great Depression was still holding on when Jack and I met in Miami during the winter of 1940, when I was eighteen and a sophomore at the University of Miami, and Jack was twenty and a junior at the University of Florida. Our meeting went something like this: l. introductions; 2. a few exchanged words; 3. game over. Young as we were, we seemed to know almost at a glance that we need look no further, that we had found our life partners and forget about it. How did it happen like this? Perhaps we were prescient. Or perhaps the fact that Jack was a varsity basketball player at Florida’s flagship university went right to my head. As for Jack, the familiar accents of New York had become too familiar, and he found something refreshing in a southern one and decided to hold on. Or maybe Jack found me easy to tease and enjoyed trying out his terrible southern accent on things like, “Lord-a-mercy, derned if that don’t look gooder’n pie.” Or maybe I thought him “just so fascinatin’,” with his casual knowledge of all things New York, a city that was regarded by my family, with the very vocal exception of my father, as one of the two glamour capitals of the world, the other being St. Louis. From the moment Jack had first taken my hand as...

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