The impact of the Great Depression

Audio Transcript

Rob Amberg
So she made her own medicines, then.

Stan Hyatt
Some of them. I'm not saying she made everything, but she had an understanding, having been raised in the mountains back in the Depression era days and before, of self-reliance. She lost all that she had in the Depression. She and her husband had accumulated five or six thousand dollars, which was a lot of money in those days, and she lost it all. One day it was in the bank; the next day she went to Asheville and it was gone.

Rob Amberg
So that must have really tested her in terms of her self-sufficiency and self-reliance.

Stan Hyatt
It did. And about that same time her husband died, and so she had to raise six kids as a widow woman with no real income except off of the farm. Rob Amberg For you growing up, then, as a child and before you all moved to Cleveland, did you have a sense that this was in a way the perfect childhood? Or was it something that you felt you wanted to get away from?

Stan Hyatt
No, I never wanted to get away from western North Carolina. We were poor, and I realized we were poor, but it didn't bother me at all. I had the woods and the creeks, and the mountains to climb. I was the happiest kid in the world growing up, and had nothing [laughter] that people - I mean, material things - that people would consider something today.