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She remembered being hungry... [1]
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Date: 2025-03-21
..so hungry that a peeled raw potato tasted like an apple.
This memory belonged to my mother, who grew up during the Great Depression. Born in 1927, she passed in 2020, bless her soul, and when I was a child she shared stories with me about her experiences.
I’m guessing my mother would have been around four years old. Her family lived in Claremore, Oklahoma. My grandfather had served in the Navy, married, and had two children: my mother and her sister. They were luckier than many—lived in the country, raised chickens, and kept a garden. My grandfather was uneducated—he probably left school in early adolescence—but could put his hand to ‘most anything: carpentry, machinery maintenance, farm work. Times being what they were, the jobs dried up, and they ran short of food. He was a proud man, but faced with his family’s hunger he went to the relief office and came home with a sack of groceries. Her children were so hungry that my grandmother immediately pulled out the potatoes, peeled one, and gave it to my mother. Who was so hungry that she remembered it tasting as sweet as an apple.
That’s hungry.
Another memory my mother shared was about my grandmother. Remember, these were the times when men who had lost their jobs took to the rails and became hobos. My mother remembers multiple occasions where a man would show up at their back porch, hat in hand, and ask my grandmother if she had any food to spare. And poor as her family was, my grandmother never turned them down. She fetched a plate of whatever they had—sometimes it was just beans and biscuits—and gave it to them with a hearty welcome.
“We ate a lot of beans”, my mother told me, “and your grandmother fixed them all kinds of different ways. And when the depression was over and times were getting better, my father told her that he never wanted to see another bean on the table. So she never served them again.”
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