The Great Depression

The Great Depression

Before the Depression started I had no complaints about my life. I had a beautiful wife named Grace and two twin boys named Jon and Jamie. We lived on a beautiful six acre lot with your typical white picket fence and the family dog Harley. I opened up my own shoe repair business in New York City after retiring from the mining field. In the past four years of owning the shoe shop I would say it had been very successful. I figured that the city is where most of the shopping is done and the more wealthy people live. I was correct until one day, Monday October, 21, 1929, was the day where everything began to take a turn for the worst (Josephson 32).

The week of Monday October, 21, 1929 was where all of the mess started. The prices in the stock market began to drop drastically out of nowhere. Leading high-grade stocks such as General Electric, American Telephone, and Commercial Solvents dropped a decent five to ten points a day easily; this type of decrease in the main stocks was normally unheard of. Public investors and speculators came from the streets to Wall Street just to bid up all of the stocks to unreal values then hypocritically run them back down. Little did we know, the whole world was selling America’s stocks (Josephson33).

The image of people running frantically down the streets, the worried looks on their faces, and the overwhelming sense of panic will never leave me. That week I did not have one new customer come into the shoe shop. Not only did I not get any new customers, my regulars did not even come in to pick up their polished shoes. Once that first week was over I knew that I would have to close the shop.

I decided to get away from the chaos in the city and go spend time with my family and comfort them in a time like this. The boys were young and hearing all different types of rumors circulating through school. For example the boys would hear things like “If your daddy doesn’t have a job then how are you going to eat?”...