Surviving tough times

In 1929, a 6-year-old boy and a 9-year-old girl, later called William Bairan and Margaret Kiefer, were among the least mighty of Americans. For them, 1929 wasn't a year of panic. It was a time for playing marbles, riding bicycles and minding their parents.

Still, even as they played and grew up during the Great Depression, these children paid attention. And as adults, Bairan, now 85, and Kiefer, 89, have stories and perspectives to offer on that trying time in our nation's history.

One lesson that their differing stories make clear: Even in the lost decade of the 1930s, when thousands of banks failed and as many as one in four Americans was unemployed at times, the Great Depression affected some families more than others.

Guillermo "Willie" Bairan, who spoke only Spanish as a child, remembers a hardscrabble but happy childhood. His family rolled cigars in Key West and Tampa until the factories shut down and his parents lost their jobs. Their life was somewhat eased when his stepfather got a job through a federal work program.

Kiefer's father, on the other hand, was an executive at one of the banking titans of Wall Street who kept his job. And while her father's fortunes and family were affected by the depression as well, they recovered sooner than most.

Both, though, talk of resilient parents and people who shared what they had in a time when people made do. They both recall childhood fun and games, but also tragic news and bitter acts by strangers.

Margaret Kiefer: People 'helped each other'

To Margaret Kiefer, born in 1920, it's easy to tell the difference between the current recession and the depression that wracked the nation in the 1930s.

"It's different," said Kiefer, who lives at Wesley Woods Center in Atlanta. "People who think they are poor [now] are not as poor as they were in the 1930s," said Kiefer. She remembers the jobless men standing in long bread and soup lines in those days in New York City.

"It's a matter of comparing the abundance now that people are used to living in. I think the fact is that in those days, we weren't used to so much so we didn't miss it so much," she said.

She admires President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and believes some of his programs to turn the nation around would be useful now. "My favorite thing was the CCC, the Civilian Conservation Corps. It put people back to work."

Kiefer knows she was fortunate 80 years ago, when the stock market suffered its worst crash in living memory. As the daughter of an executive at Chase National Bank, her sheltered life in a well-to-do neighborhood on Long Island could have come crashing down too, as it did for others.

She remembers the day her mother recognized a peddler at her back door as one of her husband's former colleagues. And the night her father came home badly shaken because a co-worker had jumped to his death.

"They lost everything. They invested. You know, it was similar to this condition today, how they over-invested. And then they lost their whole life's work, life's earnings," said Kiefer.

Kiefer's family didn't completely escape the depression's effects. After some of her father's investments soured, they moved to a small house on Long Island, about 50 miles from New York.

They lived in a tiny village with a grocery store but no bank or school. Her father made the long commute to work by train. Most of the time, she says, the 1930s didn't seem particularly bleak. "Children live in their own world. We played by the creek. We rode our bicycles a lot," she said.

Sometimes hardships were evident, however.

"I would hear my mother and father talking about [their neighbor] Charlie losing his job," she said. "Before long they were talking about how much money my father had loaned him. ... And I remember Charlie calling across the hedge, 'I'll pay you back when things break right.' "

In turn, she said, her mother paid Charlie's wife to make her some new clothes.

People "helped each other," she said.

Eventually, Kiefer said, her parents no longer felt welcome in the little town.

"My father ... commuted to work to New York. Well, that put the community kind of against him. He was an outsider. ... Also, we were Catholics. Roman Catholics. So we were considered outsiders from the first," she said.

"The Ku Klux Klan burned a cross on our back yard. ... I don't know whether people were desperate or whether it just that the Klan had been there for years and they decided to do something."

Not long after, Kiefer's family moved into New York City. A few years later, her father felt confident enough to have a large, new house built in an affluent Long Island suburb close to the city.

"I knew then that we had plenty of money," said Kiefer.

She went on to college, worked as a journalist and joined the Coast Guard during World War II. After the war, she went back to school, got a master's degree and became a teacher in Florida. She married and raised three sons.

"God has been good to us," she said.

William Bairan: 'We just thought that was life'

William Bairan, a retired X-ray technician who lives in Kennesaw, sees plenty of parallels between the current recession and life in the 1930s.

His wife, Annette Bairan, a 73-year-old nursing professor at Kennesaw State University, delayed retirement this year because of concerns about their retirement savings.

They're also worried about their children. Their daughter and her husband own a small glass business that has been hurt by the collapse of the housing market in Florida; their son runs the used car department at a Cadillac dealership that is likewise feeling the economy's struggles.

"We're worried that he might lose his job there," said Bairan. "Jobs are very, very few."

Jobs were scarce nearly eight decades ago, too, and Bairan recalls that his family and others had to go to extraordinary lengths to get by.

Still, it "wasn't so bad," he said. He and his brothers and cousins took the tough times in stride. "I guess we just thought that was life. That's the way it's supposed to be," he said.

Bairan, born in Key West in 1923, didn't have it easy by any means.

His father died of tuberculosis when Bairan was just 4. He was still a small boy when Key West's cigar factories closed in the early 1930s, pushing his and many families to Tampa in search of work. His mother found cigar factory work, and a second husband, there, but both lost jobs when that factory closed too.

It was a godsend, he said, when his stepfather landed a job working on local roads through the federal Works Progress Administration.

"You know, the WPA made all the difference in the world then," said Bairan.

To make ends meet, his mother, stepfather, some aunts and uncles and their children shared a modest house, splitting the weekly rent of $3 or $4. "We moved a lot," he recalled.

Bairan and the other kids spent their days playing baseball, marbles, tag and other games that they invented according to the season. His parents felt the hard times, he's sure. "They had worries. That's for sure. But they didn't pass it on to us," he said.

"We weren't eating the way we do now, but we did not go hungry," partly because bread and other goods were so cheap, he said. His cousins, who were older, sometimes brought home bananas that had fallen when trains were unloaded at a nearby warehouse.

When he grew older, Bairan said, he shined shoes, then bought an old bicycle and delivered newspapers, which allowed him to buy his own shoes and clothes. By his late teens, it seemed like the depression was nearly over.

"Both my parents were working," he said, back in the cigar factory. "That I remember."

But by then, the nation's factories were revving up to produce the weapons and other goods used in World War II. In 1942, Bairan, then 19, joined the Navy. He was involved in the D-Day invasion, and stayed in the Navy until 1948.

He went back to the sea in the merchant marine. But after an injury on his ship, an X-ray showed that he tuberculosis. He was cured after surgery and a year in a sanitarium, but the experience launched him toward a new career: X-ray technician. He went to school at Grady Hospital in Atlanta, then to work at Kennestone Hospital in Marietta.

"I met her," he said, pointing to his wife at the kitchen table in their Kennesaw home. I "married her in 1957, and stayed there 27 years."