The Great Depression hit Portland, Oregon in 1929,and like many other cities it had its struggles. Jobs were scarce and sometimes common sense was more scarce.

I was about nine and standing in line with my mom at the Pay n' Take-It grocery store on Lombard street. An angry man was shouting at the clerk at the cash register. He was holding up an open can of spinach and demanding his money back because the label showed a fried egg resting on the green contents.

The customer was irate because there was no egg in the can like the label showed. The clerk was trying to explain that it was just a drawing to show what an egg would look like if the spinach was on a plate and if the man had an egg he could fry it and put it on top of the spinach and it would go well together.

The clerk apologized but would not give the man his money back.

We watched him stalk out of the store and I thought about offering him one of my eggs from my Banty hens but knew my dad planned on having those eggs for Sunday breakfast.

We were lucky. Mom and dad had ten kids living in a rented 4-bedroom house, paying $15 a month when dad had the money. He was a traveling salesman and came home 10 times. I was number 8.

Welfare was similar as we know it today. We survived on federal relief (our pantry shelf had several cans of Argentine beef with labels that said Not-To-Be-Sold. Mom always turned the cans with the label away from view in case anyone walking by our pantry in the basement might see those cans. She never explained why someone would be walking by our pantry. 

Communities like White Center and Highline now have large facilities called food banks which serve thousands with a great variety of foodstuffs donated by a number of donors private and corporate.

Besides most of our food, once a year we got new clothes. I got a new pair of cords and some long underwear with a drop seat. My favorite donation was a black leatherette jacket with a sheepskin collar. For my feet,  I got a pair of black oxford shoes with a blunt nose which I loved because I was the Russett St. place kicker for our football games.

The jacket was nice, except when it rained. I walked to school rain or shine and in winter black dye always ran down my legs. I had to go in the drying-off room and wait till my inky legs dried out.

We might have been poor but I knew what a banana was. I never had one till my friend Alfred Bomber gave me his from his lunch bag when we sat together in the lunchroom.

 I peeled back the skin to take a bite and discovered a bunch of tiny black seeds in the middle. I was in shock so I ate all the way around the middle avoiding the seeds.

 He never offered me another banana.

               We also had free dental work at school where they brought in a big chair. I had two big baby teeth that stuck out like elephant tusks and two others behind them trying to come out of my gums.

               The doctor said he wanted to take out the front two but he could not get a good grip with his pliers. The ones behind slanted back toward my tonsils so he told me to take a pencil and pry on them and they would straighten out make the others fall out. I hated having four front teeth but he was right. I kept pushing on them with my pencil and they finally did fall out. I looked kind of funny I guess. It was also a great excuse for not turning in my homework. I had to use the pencil for my orthodontia treatments.

               We had little money for more than the basic necessities and I never heard of having an allowance. I sold magazines and perfume just to have change in my pockets. I got a paper route delivering the Oregon Journal when I was ten. 

Mom was very thrifty, teaching us kids to be frugal.

                If I wanted one of those sticks of licorice root to chew that cost a penny, I'd need to take it out of my savings. Sometimes I just carved out a hunk of tar from the street with my knife. All kids had what my dad called a pen knife. Road tar was just as chewy as gum tho it tasted terrible. It also explains why my teeth were often kind of black.

Jerry Robinson is our publisher. You can reach him via email at Publisher@robinsonnews.com