[PRCo] Depression....

[Fred Schneider]

Want to know what the Depression meant?

In 1930 you could get a Model A Ford ... four cylinder engine with optional bumpers and a heater ... for $645.

Five years later a brand new Oldsmobile was listing at only $675.  The Fords and Chevrolets were in the 500s.   Of course that was a six cylinder Olds.   Those power packed (100 hp) eights went for $860 and up.     Of course when you were not powering a fluid coupling and the speed limit was 40 or 50, you didn't need a whole lot of power.    

The big thing for GM in 1935 was "Knee-action.

Still, I think my dad got 75,000 miles out of his 1939 Chevy and that was with new rings and valves and main bearings about half way through its life.   Even so it laid down one heck of a smoke screen by 1948.   Cars weren't made to last back then.   

But for the first time, those vehicles in the middle 1930s were streamlined --- aerodymamic --- pretty.   They took the people away from the streetcars in droves.

Might I suggest you go to the link below and look at the Oldsmobile advertisement.   They released the new cars in January that year.

http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=gQAdAAAAIBAJ&sjid=ZY4EAAAAIBAJ&pg=5057%2C3723555

Industrial production was BAD but starting to turn up.   Steel was getting stronger.   Packard was working 24 hours a day in their plant in Detroit churning out new automobiles.   Unfortunately, two years later we had a 'double-dip depression.'  

This tells it all ... this is the conspiracy ... the cars we loved that took the business away from the trolleys.   I remember my mother telling me that my father had two material dreams when he first met her in 1928.   One was a vacuum tube radio because he was tired of having to put his ear down next to the crystal set to hear sound.   The other was a new Model T Ford.   He built the radio him self, probably on the work bench in his future in-law's basement on Pittsburgh's North Side.   He bought the Model A when he graduated from Carnegie Tech in 1930.   He still had that Model A to take to Williamsburg, Virginia, on their honeymoon five years later.