1.4 Teacher's guide: Impact of the Great Depression

By Kristin Post

Provided by UNC Libraries / Documenting the American South

Introductory script

Now that you’ve made predictions about how Stan Hyatt’s grandmother, we are going to listen to another excerpt where we learn more about her life.

Preliminary questions

1. You already know a little about Mr. Hyatt’s grandmother. She was self-sufficient and worked on a farm. What do you think her life was like before the Depression?
2. What do you think life was like for her after the Depression?

The recording

Play the Impact of the Great Depression oral history excerpt. Running time: 1 minute 32 seconds.

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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.

Follow-up questions

1. What were your predictions, and how close were they to the true story?
2. Do you think Mr. Hyatt’s grandmother felt rich before the Depression? How much money did she have in the bank?
3. We learned that Mr. Hyatt’s grandfather died at the start of the Depression. What might be the reasons for his death, and about how old do you think he might have been?
4. What kind of adjustments did his grandmother have to make after the Depression?
5. How do you think she felt about it?
6. We learned earlier that Mr. Hyatt hunted squirrel and his grandmother cooked it. What does this say about the availability of food in the years following the Depression?

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Related topics

• Search LEARN NC for more resources on American history, Great Depression, Madison County, North Carolina, Stan Hyatt, grandmothers, inference, poverty, prediction, and self-sufficiency.