I was young, but I was making this child nine, but putting her back. It’s sort of complicated. I put her back to when Mary Ann was really five and we lived on Strawberry Hill. But it’s a nine-year-old going on ten child that all this is happening to. But the Depression was a very important part of our lives as children and learning more about it as we grew older, a lot of things — like a puzzle, that kind of fits into place.
For example, one of my teachers at Heart School, the school that I went to, fourth grade, Mrs. Dunn, and her husband had served in World War Two and had come back gassed — World War One, and had come back gassed. And he and a bunch of other veterans would sit in front of the town hall down in Stanford with the sunshine — I always remember that — across from the bus stop, and they’d just go down there every day and just sit there together. And we didn’t know quite what was going on and it was only until years later that I understood.
But World War One was just a decade earlier. And a few weeks ago, I realized the time from the Civil War until what’s going on in this story is the same time frame as that story to right now. So it’s really uncanny. It is a history book. It is a book of history. But the Depression was so many things — families being on relief, hobos coming to your backdoor and mothers feeding them. That happened all the time and they were always fed. And we realized, we did know we were lucky, but at same time with a mother like mine — and I think a lot of mothers — there was always that poor, poor, poor thing in your head and how lucky you were to have food.
And so that whole business about Allie and Danny only having a nickel to get Good Humors where all the other children were given dimes
that is straight out of my childhood. And when I got the free stick and could get a coconut Good Humor
I’ve never forgotten it and I can still taste that coconut Good Humor because it was probably the only one I had as a kid. I did some research because I wanted to get things straight — dates and things a little bit. I didn’t bring as much politics into the book as I remembered because I remembered being the only child on the street. Our family was for Roosevelt and all the others were for Landon, so that is in the 1936 election, and being made to feel a real pariah because of that.
And the whole dirty Jew business. It didn’t take place the way I have it take place. But it was certainly, those names that I was called, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. I think for people who lived then, those were the days when a lot of Jewish families changed their names, changed their religions. We were very aware of that in Stanford, because it was quite a tight knit Jewish community, but we were a real minority, the neighborhoods that I grew up in, and very strong Catholic population, most of my friends were Catholic and Protestants as well. But it’s the Italians and the Catholics that we lived among much more. There are so many families that I remember with such warmth and I would really so like to track down, but you don’t know whether they are still alive.
It was such a neighborly feeling, place to live then. The Greco’s on one side. Once we moved to West Broad Street, when I was indeed ten years old, and already on the other side that we definitely decided she was a witch — we knew it, we knew it. We would race across her yard you know yelling, “Witch! Witch!” Poor old lady! I don’t know what she was thinking, but she scared us to death.