You should have seen the things they were giving babies instead of milk. I remember seeing them put salt-pork gravy in milk bottles and putting a nip… - Studs Terkel

You try to fill up your time with trying to think about other things: what you’re going to do on the weekend or about your family. You have to use your imagination. If you don’t have a very good one and you bore easily, you’re in trouble. Just to fill in time, I write real bad poetry or letters to myself and to other people and never mail them. The letters are fantasies, sort of rambling, how I feel, how depressed I am.

There was none of this hatred you see now when strange people come to town, or strangers come to a neighborhood. They resent it, I don’t know why. That’s one of the things about the Depression. There was more camaraderie than there is now. Even more comradeship than the Commies could even dream about. That was one of the feelings that America lost. People had different ideas, they disagreed with one another. But there was a fine feeling among them. You were in trouble . . . damn it, if they could help ya, they would help ya.

The war was fun for America. I’m not talking about the poor souls who lost sons and daughters. But for the rest of us, the war was a hell of a good time. Farmers in South Dakota that I administered relief to and gave ’em bully beef and four dollars a week to feed their families, when I came home were worth a quarter-million dollars, right? It’s forgotten now.