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 nipple on, and the baby sucking this salt-pork gravy. A real blue baby, dying of starvation. In house after house, I saw that sort of thing.
—John Beecher, activist poet and journalist who wrote about the Southern United States during the Great Depression, from Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression by Studs Terkel
That was a time when people’s emotions were raw to begin with. Everyone knew the Depression would be endless. So laughter was hard to find. We all fought in our own way. Mine was the marathons. They helped me survive. Helped a lot of people survive. I was part of the little army that won the war of the Depression.
—June Havoc, vaudevillian, marathon dancer, and sister of Gypsy Rose Lee, in her memoir Early Havoc
