Having been born and raised during the height of the “Great Depression,” I feel this era was equal to a college education in itself. As a boy, of course, I didn’t understand all of it. I do recall, however, when we lost our shiny new 1933 Chevrolet because of a bad crop year.

With no regular income coming in, farmers paid their bills in the fall when they gathered their crops. I remember my father telling me how many nickels would be needed to pay the note that was due. We were not the only farm family that faced such a plight. There was virtually no money to be had.

Although we raised everything we needed on the little farm, once a year my mother would buy a supply of coffee, sugar and rice which happened to be the only thing we couldn’t grow on the farm. Corn provided feed for the livestock as well as meal and grits for us. The wheat crop gave us flour. We had a variety of fruit and nut trees. Chickens provided meat as well as eggs. The cow gave us butter and milk. The hog provided bacon, sausage and ham. I thought that we were the only family that was poor, but after I reached adulthood I realized everybody was in the same boat.

My father was a graduate of a business school in Augusta, Ga., but because of the economy, there were no jobs in that field available. My mother graduated from Lander College in 1906 with an associate degree in elementary education. She taught only a few years after my sister and I were getting up in size.

Even though there were many things we had to learn to do without, there was one thing my father made sure the family had. We received The Times and Democrat daily in the mail, and my mother always subscribed to the Ladies Home Journal and The Saturday Evening Post. These printed items taught me to love to read.

I never will forget thumbing through the pages and looking at the pretty advertisements therein. I’m not sure if it was either of these magazines or some other. I do remember, however, an advertisement on the inside of the cover sheet. It was a full page and showed a limousine with a beautiful young woman stepping out while the chauffeur held the door open for her. She was wearing a beautiful evening gown, a fur coat and a lot of diamonds. Waiting to escort her into the club was the man of her dreams. He held a bottle of whiskey. The caption under the picture read: “Men of distinction drink this kind of booze.”

I don’t drink whisky, but if I did, pictures like this might make me want to have a drink. There is another side of the coin for such an ad. There were no pictures following this ad that showed the man in the gutter 20 years later because he couldn’t handle a social drink.

I remember a man told me one time that he was teaching his son how to drink. The sad part of this statement was that he might not be able to have one drink socially. I am not criticizing those who enjoy a social drink. I’m merely suggesting that total abstinence would never provide any danger of a person becoming an alcoholic. There is a lesson to be learned from this. The old saying goes: “Everything that glitters is not gold.”

Lest we forget ...

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