Ray Werner: The Depression shaped my generation. But what legacy will we leave?

Like many of us out there, I’m worried about a new Great Depression. And like fewer of us, I was born in the last one — in 1938.

My parents, Chuck and Pauline, met and married in 1926. They started their family a year later in Freedom, Beaver County, in a house on the side of a hill. (Heck, the whole town is on the side of a hill.) When the market crashed in 1929, bringing with it 25% unemployment, they had three children and would have another three at the tail end of the long recovery.

Most remarkable is not that they survived under such turmoil, but that they never complained about it, rarely talked about it, unless asked, and catch this — they left America in a better place for their children and grandchildren.

We may be the first generation of Americans to leave a burden on the shoulders of our children and grandchildren that will take them a lifetime to crawl out of.

Can hardly call that a better place, can we? Oh, they can find happiness, for happiness is found in staying together, and family values, and faith, and forgiveness and all our God-imbued gifts if we chose to savor and safeguard them.

But the financial burden and the mistrust and fear of the unknown must be met with a resilience none of us ever anticipated, and the mean-spirited reactions and angst by some of us, especially by our leaders, is discouraging.

But here we are.

My father worked a lot of different jobs to keep his family going. When the Depression hit, and jobs all but evaporated, there was no government bailout check.

But he found a way. He cut hair. He worked on roads for the Works Progress Administration, while it lasted. And he baked bread. Did he ever. Loads of it. Truckloads, you could say.

Able to do just about anything with his hands, he used them to create a living. He and a buddy baked bread all night and borrowed another friend’s truck to ride around and sell it during the day, and made a dollar a day each. Hours melted into days, mornings into nights, months into years.

Chuck and Pauline raised chickens and never had to buy an egg. Their garden was enormous, and we kids spent days spading it in the spring and watering and weeding it in the summer. We’d grab a tomato or stalk of rhubarb when we went out to play basketball in the alley or baseball up at the cemetery. (Some unknown vet’s plaque in the ground was home plate.)

The neighbors shared everything, including their songs and stories and everything under the sun they “put up.” The war came and went and I remember being allowed to march one block in the victory parade, throwing torn newspaper in the air.

There were elections and disputes and issues but you never heard an argument in our kitchen or a neighbor calling the president names, or, worse, the president calling someone else names. Heads down, they moved forward, to the best decade we ever had, in the 1950s, onward to the decade of the 1990s, and finally to one of the best, where we are now. Or were. Until the pandemic hit.

Will we leave this world a better place? The answer may not be the one we want to hear. We may need the resilience and spirit and grace of those who put us into this world to help get us out of it. And we will need all that and more from our own children.

We have a very short window to decide what our legacy will be. Before it goes out the window.

Ray Werner, a retired advertising executive, is a playwright and bread-baker (taught by his father) who lives in Point Breeze . His recent TEDx Talk at Point Park University is “Reawakening Life-Shaping Moments That Make Us Who We Are.”