A Few More Comments on the Great Depression of 1929

A Few More Comments on the Great Depression

My husband Jerry Horn is the son of Frank Horn, now in his 80s, retired and basking in his hammock in Arizona sunshine. Frank and his sister Catherine lived with their mother, a “grass widow,” in  the vicinity of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, during the Great Depression. (Johnstown is remembered mostly for the failure of an earthen dam that contained a lake created for the pleasure of the wealthy. Its failure devastated the town downstream, and took the lives of several of Jerry’s ancestors.)  She was descended from the Shindlers, probably related to the German Otto Shindler of movie fame.  She was married to Mr. Armogast and bore Bill, but then was widowed. Her second husband was Herbert Horn, whose father was a  founder of Knight's Life Insurance of Pittsburg, which became American General Insurance, which in turn was one of the insurance companies that became AIG. Its  stock  served the family (or at least those who held on to their relativley small shares of  it--it was divided among many children) very well until the great depression of 2009. Frank's father Herbert ran ran a plumbing business until it failed during the Great Depression of 1929, after which he was not well known to his children. However, he did set up a trust that helped launch his grandchildren, Jerry included. Frank says:

I've been reminded of some of the things I'd probably blocked from my memory. My sister and I used to walk along the railroad track by the Schindler farm and pick up coal that had fallen off the coal cars. The farm had an outhouse and no running water. No electricity or phone. Nothing was wasted. But they had a lot of friends and people looked after each other.

In comparison, the Horn family was at the other end of the spectrum. We floated somewhere in the middle, after my dad's business failed and he left town.

Johnstown was a steel mill town surrounded by coal mines. When they all shut down, things got really bad for a lot of people, especially the recent immigrants. The Horn family were fat cats, and the Schindlers were railroad folks with friends. Many of them had small farms. We were never hungry -- our Aunt Mary, our mother's sister, kept the Schindler farm going and brought us food that they had grown, stored, or traded.

"Railroaders" seem to have the kind of attitude that the early CAA [Civilian Aviation Administration, forerunner of the FAA] people had -- my Grandfather Schindler had friends all over the East, and they could travel on some kind of pass after retirement. The railroads kept running, anyway!!

Jerry's Uncle Bill got his business started from zero, "liberating" copper and other materials from abandoned mines and mills. He ended up putting his three kids through college, owning several mines, and running a small business making mine cars for small operators. I think he bought his first airplane in 1936. I doubt if either he or the plane got properly licensed for some years. Bill quit school about the 7th grade. If he had a proper education, it is hard to imagine which way his life might have gone.