Journalist Hugh Sidey

It was a deprived existence by today's standards. We didn't understand that. Nobody had any money. We had been through miserable times economically: businesses folded, the drought, soil dried up and blew away, no crops, mortgages foreclosed, there was just a lot of suffering. My family was never cold or hungry and we had clothes, so we were relatively all right. But we had nothing else. My dad never took a vacation, we never went out of the state, there was no travel at all. This little town was all you had. In many ways it was a marvelous life. We made kites; we'd buy a nickel orange crate and cut the lumber up and make model planes; hiked; we swam in the old creeks around there. We were totally happy, but there was no money.

Source: Hugh Sidey, quoted in Roy Hoopes, Americans Remember the Home Front, 262