[PRCo]

[Fred Schneider]

I found this neat little item while scanning the Pittsburgh Press issues on-line for the winter of 1935.   Your parents told you about the Great Depression.   Here is one chart ... one graph that explains it all.
This might also give you a clue how to relate what is happening today for your kids and grandkids to what your parents and grandparents experienced.   

The unemployment estimates that we have today were the result of the depression.   We didn't have them in the 1930s.   We didn't really know how many people were out of work.   Local area unemployment numbers didn't become available until 1950.    But you can only imagine if industrial out was down 60% in 1932, how many people were not working!

What I want you to look at is to the right of this article ... the business index in the Pittsburgh District from 1930 to 1935.  

The Pittsburgh District was a primary steel, glass, coke, coal producing, plumbing supply and electrical supply area for the nation and it mirrored what was happening in other areas.   The primary corporations were U. S. Steel, Jones and Laughlin Steel, Wheeling Pittsburgh Steel, Westinghouse Electric, Westinghouse Air Brake, Armstrong Cork, Crane Plumbing, Pittsburgh Glass (now PPG), Koppers Company, Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa).   If the auto industry went down, Pittsburgh went down.   Many of the coal mines and coke ovens were captive ... owned by the steel companies.   If housing went down, Pittsburgh went down.  If anything went down, the railroad car loadings went down.   

They claim to have adjusted this chart seasonally but I still see strong valleys in January and peaks in the summer so I question how valid the adjustments were.   I am strongly tempted to look not at the graph from one month to the next but to look at January versus January versus January.   

But it you think this are bad now ... notice that index in Pittsburgh in 1932 had dropped to 40% of what we had before the Depression.   Steel output was down to a low of less than one quarter of what the mills were churning out in the 1920s. 

You heard about bank failures?   No wonder, everybody was trying to live off their savings not to mention the bank scandals they had then.    

http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=aXEbAAAAIBAJ&sjid=kksEAAAAIBAJ&pg=1409%2C6237383

His is being sent to my high school class list as well as my railway list of friends.  Lancaster, Pennsylvania was somewhat different from Pittsburgh.

Lancaster didn't really understand the word Depression.   I had one friend who just died this year at the fine young age of 96.  His father abandoned the family when Jim graduated from high school in June 1932 at the bottom of the depression.   Jim claimed it was terrible, that "I had to work three jobs to make $22 a week" to support mother and sister and myself.   Well guess what guys, we did have that kind of data.   The average factory wage for the entire USA in  January 1935 was about $21 and change.  Lancaster, because it was a soft-goods and farming area, was lower than the national average.   Jim had more money in his pocket in 1932 than the average bloke.  A lot of Lancaster's work was piece work and a lot of it was taken home under contract from the garment factories ... you worked but you just had less to do.   But people still had to dress.   Farmers still worked because we still had to eat.   

And up in Hershey life went on like nothing ever happened because a man named Milton Hershey had a one-man welfare program going.   It was during the Depression that the hotel was built, the air strip, the arena, the theater.   There was work for people in his town.   A former boss of mine who lived there explained those people were isolated from the real world.