There is no question that these are hard times for many citizens. Folks are losing their jobs and the search for another is often futile. But a comparison of today’s hard times with the hard times of the “Great Depression” puts things in a vastly different perspective.

Many have survived the depression of the 1930s, but their numbers are getting more scarce every year. Some say that because everyone was poor, most did not know just how poor they were.

People did whatever was necessary to put food on the table. Almost every family had chickens, and many had cows. Extra work was required just to put milk and eggs on the table for breakfast.

My father was a Baptist preacher who occasionally preached a revival. In those days, they did not cut the revivals short. A church took the full dose of Sunday-through-Sunday services, with a full service every night. Families hosted the visiting preacher for the evening meal. Naturally when the preacher dined with a family, it had its best menu, which means my father had chicken for seven days running. It’s a wonder he didn’t cackle instead of preach his sermons.

If you milked a cow, you had to have dairy feed for the cow to eat while you milked her. Dairy feed sacks were printed with colorful patterns, and many a farm girl came to school wearing feed sack dresses. In fact, the Wake County Home Demonstration Agent staged contests for the prettiest dresses made from feed sacks. They were great as “hand me downs” because they hardly ever wore out!

In Zebulon, a square dance on Vance Street in front of what now is Whitley Galleries brought large crowds to town. To slick up the street, corn meal was spread all across it. Nobody complained about the police blocking traffic, because there was hardn’t any night-time traffic to block. And few automobiles in the day time.

Occasionally an amateur competition was held, and singers, guitar player, tap dancers, and an occasional instrumentalist was featured. The favorite was a violinist who became so enthralled with his own playing that he fell off the stage.

During the early 1930s, the government distributed surplus flour to keep some families from literally starving to death. In similar manner to some of today’s needy, recipients ridiculed the flour. “It is so bad even my pigs wouldn’t eat it,” some said.

Few boys could afford a store-bought baseball. No matter. A substitute could be made with a golf ball for a core, tobacco twine wound around the ball until it was the right size, and friction tape to hold it all together. You want a kite? Don’t bother buying one. Go to Broughton’s Woods, cut a couple of reeds, tied them together, put some tobacco twine around the perimeter, paste some paper on the frame, get some rags to make a tail, and you could enjoy yourself all afternoon flying your kite.

To attract people to Zebulon on Wednesday nights, merchants sponsored a motion picture projected on the side of the building that later became the Wakelon Theater. The parking lot now located on the corner of Vance and Arendell Avenues would be filled with excited watchers by the time the show began. A little more daring recreation was available down on the railroad when a freight train was rearranging its cars.

In the 1930s, Zebulon had four tracks crossing Arendell Avenue. This made it a convenient place for freights to shift cars in whatever order they wanted them. Some of the more daring teenage boys rode empty boxcards to and free until the train began picking up speed to leave town. It was too much effort for the flagman to chase young boys from the tracks. They sometimes could enjoy 30-to-45 minutes of riding back and forth in the local railroad yard before the train headed for parts unknown.

When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, construction at Camp Davis, Camp Butner, and Fort Bragg, added to the shipyards at Norfolk and Wilmington, provided better pay for farmers than did their farms that had provided them such a tough living. Many decided to abandon their farms, auctioning their livestock and equipment. Farmers had sale flyers printed to advertise their sales, and there were so many auctions that farmers began checking with the print shop to find an open date for a sale.

By and by we had the Wakelon Theatre in Zebulon. It was not often we had a first-run movie in our town, but usually we did enjoy the pictures the second time around. There was one show on Monday and Tuesday, a second feature and a “continued” on Wednesday, a third on Thursday and Friday, and a western and another “continued” on Saturday. To add to the excitement, the theater offered a jack pot on Saturday.

I still remember the Bryant siblings—three remarkably talented children who sang each Saturday in front of the Wakelon Theater until they received 45 cents—enough to pay admission for all three to see the cowboy show. The Zebulon Record varied each week from four pages to 12 pages. Reporters called “community correspondents” sent in the news from every crossroads, and it was printed! Mrs. Vera Rhodes was the most popular. Staley Denton, linotype operator, set the submissions exactly as they were written. The newspaper had subscribers who paid for the Record only to read what Mrs. Rhodes wrote each week.

One week, following the death of a prominent citizen, Mrs. Rhodes wrote “I never enjoyed a funeral so much!” Nobody was insulted. Everyone knew what the lovely lady meant.

Another lady had a short career as a community reporter. “Mr. Johnny Jones and Mrs. Ella Mae Earp spent the weekend at Carolina Beach,” she wrote. Problem was that Mrs. Jones and Mr. Earp did not know their mates were at Carolina Beach until they read it in the newspaper. Instead of a column, the following week there came a note saying: “My neighbors don’t want me to report the news any more.”

The 1930s were interesting times, and we survived that decade; but don’t let anyone tell you they were enjoyable times. Despite present day problems that are difficult and sometimes impossible to solve, today’s times are not nearly as tough.

The tough thirties are much more pleasant to talk about than to live through. It must truly have been the “greatest generation” that survived it.