Family History from the 1930's

So I figured that I should take advantage of the historical energy this class has provided and ask the matriarch of my family, my mom's mother, about her experiences in the 1930's. Here is the report according to my mom. My grandma's name is Eileen Betleski.

In 1929, when the stock market crashed, Grandma was 11 years old. Her parents were very young—her mother married Great-Grandpa James when she was 16. She gave birth to Eileen’s older (only) brother, Kenneth, before she was 18 and gave birth to Eileen when she was around 20. [I will checks these ages with Grandma later this evening.] So, Marie and James were roughly 32 and 33 years of age at the time of the crash; their children were 14, 11, 3, and 1. Everything was very bleak very quickly for many of their friends, neighbors, and family members because most people lost their jobs right away. Almost everybody in the Curran family (Eileen’s parents, aunts, and uncles) worked for the New York Athletic Club as doorman,

bookkeeper, maid, etc.

My mother tells the story from that time period that when she entered high school at George Washington High School (you should look up a picture of the school online—you will be astonished at the size of this structure), she had only one blouse to wear to school. She probably only had one skirt, too, but it was the blouse that she had to wash by hand each night, dry in the kitchen over the stove, and iron in the morning to be fresh and clean each day. It was red and she loved it (at first), but the routine of keeping it clean was tedious. They didn’t have money to spend on more clothes for her, so that blouse had to be sufficient for a long time. Her dream of the future before the stock crash was to attend Vassar College. Her Uncle C.B. had promised that he would send her there. He was an executive with Standard Oil and a millionaire, to boot. He lost most of his money in the crash, and even though he sued the stock firm which had managed his investments, he recouped very little of the pile he had accumulated. Poof! Went the dream of Vassar. When Eileen completed high school, her father was sick with a lung infection and had developed pneumonia. The drug of choice to combat infection at that time was sulfa compound; unfortunately, the federal approval to use the new wonder drug, Penicillin, had not been granted yet, so Great-Grandpa James died in the year just after Eileen graduated from high school – 1939.

Here is the a model image of the high school my mom refers to. Thanks for reading about my personal family history.