Depression mentality

Depression.

I'm not talking about feeling the Prozac blues, or stinging disappointments on those occasions when the bluebird of happiness suddenly poops on your ice cream cone. I'm talking about the big one, Depression with a capital D, the one that started on Black Tuesday, 1929.

That would be the Great Depression.

Google it if you want to know how it started and what brought it to a close. I'm more interested in the mindset of people who lived through it and the extent to which it affected their saving and spending patterns as adults.

I ran a quick Google check this evening to see if I could find any good stories about Depression-era families. Although I found plenty of photos and letters to Mrs. Roosevelt pleading for assistance, there wasn't really anything in the way of evidence about how people who lived through it lived after it. That's too bad; I think it would make a good topic for someone's research paper. In any case, I can give you some anecdotal evidence: my parents were born in the mid-twenties in Canada and although they don't remember the crash, they spent their formative years growing up in the Depression.

For anyone doing the math on that, yes, I am a change-of-life baby, and no, they won't tell me if it was an accident.

Things I remember from my childhood include my parents wanting to reuse everything. Leftovers? Check. Hand-me-downs? Check. Darned socks? Check. Cotton from the vitamin pills? Check. I remember that my mom never knitted (that went out the window when the bambinas started arriving), but she had some beautiful scraps of heavy wool in her sewing box, maybe half a ball each of several different colors. I really wanted to play with it when I was small, but she never let me: it was good wool and had to be saved.

I don't know what we were saving it for, but save it we did for decades.

On another occasion, my mom was making a birthday cake for me and the power went out. She immediately started managing my expectations: if the power didn't come back on in a little while, we'd have to make do without one. It never occurred to her that she could toss this one out and make another, or that we could just buy one. (We wouldn't have bought one; birthday cakes were too expensive). In her mind, we had one shot at a birthday cake and that was it.

You'd think that my parents were really poor, but they weren't. We were middle class, but certainly not poor. They were public-sector professionals, both of them; my dad was never without a job, and neither was my mom from the time I went to school. We didn't have a lot of luxuries, but we had enough necessities.

What we also had was something that I suspect a great many kids grow up without. Starting the week each of us was born, my folks put $20 per child away every week for our college educations. Over time, as their salaries increased, they increased the contributions. For twenty-four years (two kids, two years apart), they never missed putting that money aside. They funded education the same way they funded retirement: every week, year after year.

The result?

By the time we got to college, their retirement and our educations were funded. We got part-time jobs in school and paid for books and pocket money on our own and later, for off-campus housing on our own, but regardless of whether we got any scholarships or not, eight years of private-school tuition money was there.

I wonder how many parents can say they've achieved that for their kids.

As a teenager, whenever I got exasperated with how tight with a buck my parents seemed, they always gave me the same answer: We can't help it; we grew up in the Depression. Things are different for you kids. I never understood how the Depression experience of for-real scarcity and deprivation led to practicing artificial scarcity as a matter of course, but somehow it did. It made a huge difference: as public sector employees they never made a huge amount of money, but because they played a great game of financial defense, they were able to retire in comfort and travel the world many times over.

My folks are in their 80's now, and they've lightened up considerably. My mom finally got rid of the yarn, and they gave up darning socks and saving the cotton from the vitamins. They managed to impart some valuable knowledge to the kids along the way, though, and although it didn't sink in until we were adults ourselves, we both managed to kick ourselves into gear and put to practice the money-saving tools we learned from the time we were born. Neither of us is rich - yet - but we're ahead of the game for where the conventional wisdom says we should be, and we're bullish on the future.

In the meantime, I'm darning my socks.