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A Strength in Adversity

As you may be aware, my mother has recently moved from the house that my family moved into in 1956, almost 50 years ago. My siblings and I are working to get the house ready for sale. It’s a somewhat bittersweet experience. There are many memories in that house, as well as an ultra-minimal degree of organization in storage areas, so that one may encounter unexpected mementos, recalling very different emotions, at practically any moment. For instance, I have picked up a pile of magazines from 1985 and found some of my 8^th-grade school papers beneath them.

My brother and sisters have divided up the responsibilities, and one of mine is to go through old financial records, determining what should be kept and what should be recycled. Not entirely to my surprise, some of the records I have come across in the attic are those of my grandparents, on both my father’s and my mother’s sides. As I went through those records, I found myself thinking about my grandparents at greater length than I have done for quite a while.

My grandparents were in the “prime of their lives” at the time of the Great Depression. My grandparents Sasso both worked for the Chicago Transit Authority – incidentally, that’s how they met each other! My grandfather Nevins grew up on a farm in Highland Park , Illinois . That community has become an upper-middle class suburb of Chicago , and the farms that once were there are now long gone. My father and mother were in elementary school in 1929 when the stock market crashed. My grandparents, responsible not only for themselves, but for their children, faced a degree of adversity beyond anything that I have faced in my adulthood.

The family stories that I have heard about how the Sasso and Nevins families worked their way through the Depression have a common theme. Like so many of the other families at that time, they shared what they had in community, and discovered that together, they had enough. They cared for and with each other, and they found in relationship the resources necessary to carry them through a time of scarcity.

I remember one story that my mother tells about how a neighborhood grocery store helped families purchase children’s clothing. Apparently the heads of some households had decreed, as a means of conserving scarce financial resources, that groceries could be purchased, but any and all new clothes were “off limits” as unnecessary. For adult clothing, this may have been an appropriate response, but there is a limit to how long a growing child can continue to wear the same clothes, even with creative alterations. One obvious response to this problem was the sharing of clothes from one family to another, but the grocery store owner responded by adding a new service. The store would receive and pay for orders from clothing stores, hold the merchandise for the family that had ordered it, and add the charges to their grocery bill. In this way, when the new clothing was truly needed, it could be obtained. From one perspective, this was a creative business strategy, but from another, it was an act of community service and assistance. I suspect that there are many more stories like this about how families and communities coped with the rigors of the Depression.

Few, if any, human lives are lived entirely without adversity. When it arrives in the lives that we share, as it inevitably will, may we remember that the relationships we build within a true community will provide more than enough to get us through!

Yours in community, (signed) Bill S.