Margaret Barrett: The Full Interview
Watch the full interview as Margaret (born in 1917) talks about bank closings, struggles in farming communities, her jobs and salary, going to school during the Depression, and the wonder of modern conveniences like electricity, indoor plumbing and the radio.
MARGARET: Well, my name is Margaret Genteman Barrett. I was born in O'Fallon, Missouri on a farm called, at the time, it was called Breezy Point, but it really became Fort Zumwalt.
MARGARET: December 13, 1917 was my birth date.
MARGARET: In 1929, I was twelve years old, and I really do remember how everyone was so disturbed about the crash of the stock market. And it affected the banks in our town. And there were two banks in our town at the time. One had been founded, oh my grandfather was one of the founders of the Bank of O'Fallon in 1903. And that bank survived, but the other bank in O'Fallon went bankrupt. And those people lost everything.
MARGARET: There were people without jobs, and people who-- really, people who suffered most were people who depended on their jobs, like, oh, just working for other people. And so they weren't hiring anybody anymore. And the farmers who were renters, they were hard hit too, because those years were very-- well, a farmer who rented, I think a third of whatever he grew, his crops, went to the landlord. And if he didn't have a good crop that year, well, everybody suffered then. And that's why during the Depression years, the government started what they called the Production Credit Association for farmers. And that allowed them to make loans through the government on their cattle, their crops, their intended crops, because they bought, they made loans to buy seed to plant and for feed for their cattle that they owned. And my father was the secretary treasurer of the St. Charles County Production Credit Association. And he had this little office in town, which was one of his supplementary jobs, because he lived on a farm, of course. And they had the dairy farm. And I worked for him when I was 16, the summer between my senior and junior year, that was 1934. And I took applications from these farmers who came in. And some of them were so poor, they just wanted to buy or borrow $50 to buy seed to plant. And to do this, they had to fill out-- well, I asked the questions, and I had the forms. And they had to list everything they owned-- all the cows, horses, pigs. And whatever they owned, if they were renters, they had to list that as collateral for the loan and agree, if it was for a crop. Then they took a lien on the crop that was to be planted too. So they were pretty sure being paid back. [CHUCKLES] And I took applications that one summer between my junior and senior year. And then the next year after I graduated, I went to work full time there for my dad. Well, my dad was the boss, and I was one of the secretaries. And there was another girl who also took applications. And I think some of these farmers-- they came in, and here was this little girl taking applications and asking them all these questions about everything they owned and how they were going to repay these loans. I worked there for him for a year and a half. And then they moved the office to St. Charles, and my dad quit that. And someone else took over. And so I went to St. Louis. I came down to St. Louis at the age of 19 in 1937 and stayed with my cousins, the Debrechts, for three days. And I went went downtown and registered with an employment agency. And I had a job within three days with-- my first job was with the Diamond Match Company, and I worked for them for four years.
MARGARET: My first salary was $18 a week. Oh, when I worked for the PCA, that was only $30 a month. And then after I worked there full time, they did raise it to $60 a month.
MARGARET: I boarded with a lady that my, who was originally from O'Fallon. And my dad knew her and knew her family. Otherwise, he would never have let me go. [CHUCKLES]
HOST: And how much did you have to pay, do you remember [INAUDIBLE]?
MARGARET: I think it was something like $8.
HOST: And did you walk to work?
MARGARET: Oh, we took the streetcar.
HOST: Took the streetcar?
MARGARET: Yeah.
HOST: And where was Diamond Match Company?
MARGARET: Diamond Match was in the Pierce building, downtown. And I lived with this lady on Pestalozzi Street right off Grand.
MARGARET: Oh, yes. When we were on a farm, there was a family that were our neighbors, and the father was out of a job. And they had six children, I guess. And the boys were a little older than my brothers. And my dad always hired them, one after another as they grew up, as hired people, as hired men. And my dad used to let the father come and hunt in our woods. And he would shoot squirrels and rabbits for his family to live off of. My dad let him do that. And then too during the Depression, there were a lot of, I guess you would call them vagrants or hobos, who would walk along Highway 40, which was a quarter of a mile from our house. And they would come down to our house and ask for food. And Mom would always give them food. She would make sandwiches, or whatever we were having. She would make that, give them a dinner, but she always asked them to chop some wood. So they would chop wood while she fixed their dinner and their lunch. And then they would sit out on the back porch and eat their lunch, and then they would go on. But that happened quite often during the Depression.
MARGARET: We had chickens. My mother had chickens, and she would sell eggs in town to the store to buy staples and whatever meat at the butcher shop, because we had dairy cows. We weren't butchering them. And things like that. And during the summer, she used to pick blackberries. In fact, all of us kids-- we had several blackberry patches, wild blackberries. And she would sell them mostly to people in town and then in St. Charles. She had one customer in St. Charles who used to buy 10 gallons-- $0.10 cents a gallon. That's what they paid her for a gallon of blackberries. And that's the way she got a little pin money, you know? And of course, the cows and the dairy brought in the rest of our money. But they were always building up the herd and buying food and feed for the chickens and the cows, and paying the hired men. And of course, they did have a mortgage on the farm. And my mother, especially, was always worrying about paying the interest on the mortgage. But my dad had several jobs outside of the farm.
MARGARET: My mother made all our clothes. She made coats. She made all our dresses.
MARGARET: The chicken feed came in sacks that were made to be used as dresses. And she used those to make little cotton dresses for us children. And she used them as dishtowels and things like that, you know? And also then, feed for the cattle came in burlap sacks. And she made whatever she could. Out of that, she made mattress covers. And I think whatever she could use them for, she used those too. But I was still wearing some dresses she made me after I got married in 1940 that were made out of those sacks. And that's the way we survived.
MARGARET: There were only about 50 children in the high school, but the grade school had about 160. So most of the children who lived on farms did not get to go to high school. And some who started out only went two years. And our high school took children from Dardenne, St. Paul, Flint Hill, and Wentzville too. That was the only Catholic high school in the area, so we had students from all those other parishes. Well we did take in one of Dad's cousins. He was a young man, Leander was his name, Leander Debrecht. And he stayed with mom and dad for a year and went to high school. That was during the Depression, yeah.
MARGARET: We didn't have electricity until about 1933 when the lines came along the highway. And then, of course, they had to build the line from a quarter a mile from the highway down to our farm. And that's when we got electricity. Before that, we just had lamps. And we used to sit around the dining room table or the kitchen table doing our homework by the light of the lamps.
MARGARET: We did not have indoor plumbing until the late '30s, I guess. So we did have a bathroom, but the bathroom was used for storage. But it didn't have fixtures in it until the late 1930s, yeah. We did without a lot of things that they have now, you know? But I never felt that I was deprived.
MARGARET: Well, in the 1920s, my dad built his own radio. It was a little box, about this big. And he built it himself. And he would-- of course, he was the only one who could listen to it. But yeah, we had a radio. Then later in the '30s, we had a radio. Yeah.
HOST: Were you able to hear President Roosevelt in the fireside chats?
MARGARET: Yes, uh-huh.
HOST: Do you recall any--
MARGARET: We used to sit around and listen to Amos and Andy and all those, Fibber McGee, and things like that, Kate Smith. Yes. Yes, we had the radio then.
Watch in Segments: Margaret Barrett
- Introduction
- Where did you live during that time?
- Did you notice people helping each other more during the Depression?
- What things did your family do to get through the Great Depression?
- What was school like during the Depression?
- Did you have modern conveniences in your home like electricity?
- Did you have a radio during the Depression?
The Great Depression Interview series, recorded in 2008, is made up of conversations with St. Louis-area residents who lived through the Great Depression. The interviews provide students with first-person accounts of life between 1929 and 1940. Teachers can get students talking about the videos with discussion questions (PDF) based on the interviews.
For additional Great Depression-related multimedia resources, from newsreels to oral histories, visit our audio and video collections.