Wow, Jerry. When the Depression hit, my parents already had a large family- six children born by 1932 - and by the time I was born in 1935 things were not appreciably better. My mother said that the only time they didn't lose a lot of money is one year when she persuaded my father not to plant. (This was in North Dakota) Dad and his siblings and his father lost each of the sections of land they owned one by one and it finally got to the point where Dad took a distant farming job where he got home only every other weekend. My mother said that sometimes by the time he got home loaded with groceries they were very low on food. She said they never went hungry but that there were times that she would have had seconds if given the choice.

They tok the family to the very fertile - and rainy - Willamette Valley in Oregon in 1936 where my mother had spent her youth and from then on, life was better.

Your mother showed her mettle very early in her life, didn't she. (My mother said that the whole thing wouldn't have been so bad if they could have been sure that it would eventually pass.) Where is that house? I imagine it's in the city?

Looking at it now, do you see things that could have been done diffeently? That ladder is just incredible - by that, I don't mean, unbelievable - but what a way to have to live.