I was reading the Globe and Mail a few days ago. It’s one of our best Canadian newspapers. Michael Kesterton writes something called “A Daily Miscellany of Information”. It’s my favorite part of the paper – a quirky, fascinating collection that covers both the sublime and the ridiculous. Click here to sample Kesterton’s work.
What fascinated me was an item he called Depression Pencils, which I’ve included below. It reminded me how important it is to delve deep when interviewing people about their life story. It’s in the details, like the story of depression pencils, that a whole period of history can be illuminated.
In a roundup of survivors’ anecdotes about the Depression, the Charleston (W. Va.) Gazette heard from Arlene Pettit, 83, a retired schoolteacher who, as a girl, used to watch with dismay as classmates sharpened pencils down to a nubbin. “I would tell them that we were only allowed one pencil at a time. A pencil cost a penny. My uncle owned a grocery store. If we didn’t have a penny, we would take him one egg and that would buy a pencil. My dad would not let us use the sharpener at school. We brought our pencil home and he would sharpen our lead every night, because it was hard to get even a penny. That sounds ridiculous, but that’s how things were in those days.”
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