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On Dec 15, 1935, a High Point woman wrote President Franklin D. Roosevelt about her underwear.

She didn’t have any. Neither did anyone in her family.

"Please give my children and myself some underclothes or we will freeze to death (in) this cold weather," the woman pleaded. "We cannot make it."

The family also needed money for rent, food and fuel.

The woman said her husband made only $6.75 a week, not enough to feed and clothe a family of nine.

"I am in need bad," she wrote. " ... Please help me. Please."

In the winter of 1935, hard times had come to North Carolina.

The High Point woman and thousands like her found themselves mired in the depths of the Great Depression, an economic collapse that turned the 1930s into a period of desperation, deprivation and despair.

"No one lived through the 1930s without being affected by the Great Depression," said Anita Price Davis, who has written several books about the period. "Hard times touched every area of life in North Carolina."

Eighty years later, hard times have returned.

Economists describe the nation’s current economic woes as the worst since those bad old days. But most agree that today’s problems — as severe as they may be — can’t compare with what happened in the days leading up to and following the stock market crash of 1929.

Banks closed. Life savings disappeared. Industries failed. Unemployment soared to nearly 25 percent. Lenders foreclosed on homes, farms and businesses. Bankruptcies abounded. Suicides increased. Labor unrest erupted. Public schools and churches struggled to stay open. Couples delayed marriage. Birth rates fell. Families separated and never reunited. Otherwise law-abiding citizens stole food, clothing and fuel to provide for their families. Hospital charity cases mounted.

"It was so much worse than people today could possibly imagine," recalled Seth Macon, an 89-year-old Greensboro resident. "It’s amazing what we went through."

***

The stories of the Depression have been captured in a variety of voices, including oral histories, newspaper interviews and letters asking for assistance.

One from Mrs. L.D. Poythress of Burlington to North Carolina Gov. O. Max Gardner, written on Feb. 14, 1931 , typifies the suffering.

Poythress wanted Gardner to relocate her family to a farm where she and her husband could grow food to feed their six children, the youngest of whom was 8.

The family had fallen behind in its rent, been told to move and didn’t know where it would get its next meal.

"I don't want another winter to find me in this condition," she told Gardner. "... If I don't get where I can help my husband I will have to part with some of the children. For I won't sit here and see them suffer."

Gardner, who got half a dozen such requests a day, could offer no help. Even he faced hard times.

"I, like almost every friend I have in this country, have suffered tremendously," Gardner wrote a friend from New York, who asked for a $500 loan. "... My whole estate has collapsed."

The Depression hit some harder than others.

Historians say African Americans, women and youth suffered the most, along with construction workers, mill hands, store clerks and farmers, plus those who had invested heavily in the stock market or run up huge debts during the free-spending 1920s.

Yet some people seemed to have plenty of cash.

Ed Smalley, a one-time Greensboro grease monkey, told an employee with the Federal Writers’ Project, one of FDR's New Deal programs, about some of the customers who frequented the station where he worked.

"In the course of a week I would serve big cars from every state in the Union," Smalley recalled in an interview in the late 1930s. "... I’d often see a flashy roll as they paid their bills. They were rich folks, I guess."

Smalley had come to Greensboro after several months as a hobo, one of the thousands who rode freight trains from town to town looking for work. The city had at least two hobo villages near the Southern Railway tracks.

"Everywhere I went it was the same old story — 'No Help Wanted,'" Smalley recalled. " ... But there were lots of people on the road worse off than me. That summer I met whole families wandering around homeless, even women with babies in their arms."

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For many of North Carolina’s poorest residents, the Depression turned out to be just another chapter in the same sad book.

Among the hard hit, the Depression fostered a "make-do" attitude.

"What we have, we uses," Mary Rumbley of Burlington told a worker with the Writers’ Project in the late 1930s. "(W)hat we don’t have, we do without."

For many in the Piedmont , doing without proved painful. The need could be big or small.

"I am in a destitute condition and cannot get any help," Lonnie L. Lynch of Reidsville wrote Gov. Gardner on May 26, 1932. "I am a farmer and my horse has died. And I cannot get me another one."

Lynch had used the horse to haul wood because he couldn't afford a license for his Ford roadster. Now, he wanted Gardner to allow him to use the car without a tag “until I can do better. For I am in a bad fix by my horse dying.”

In Greensboro, five orphans showed up one day at the receiving center for the Children’s Home Society of North Carolina.

The oldest, a boy of about 12, said that for almost a year, he and his two brothers and two sisters had been on their own. He had taken care of them as best he could, but hunger and desperation had taken over.

As tears streamed down his face, the boy asked: "Can somebody help us young 'uns?"

***

By most accounts, the Depression reached its lowest point from mid-1932 through 1933. However, historians and economists disagree about how hard the collapse hit Guilford County.

Some contend that Greensboro and High Point got off lighter than some North Carolina cities, arguing that a so-called “depression-proof” industrial base helped keep the two cities going.

Others look at various economic indicators and see a bleaker picture.

"The depression has struck the city a hard blow," Albert S. Keister, a professor at what is now UNCG, wrote in a 1934 report called A City In Depression — Greensboro, North Carolina. "... (It) brought the people and government of the city into a serious plight by 1933."

That year, Keister said, about 20 percent of Greensboro residents received some form of financial assistance. And an estimated one in four didn’t have jobs.

Across the city, building permits, payrolls and real estate rentals declined. So did movie attendance, civic club memberships and auto purchases. Pledges to the Greensboro Community Chest fell by almost half.

The Salvation Army served soup daily to long lines of people outside its mission on South Elm Street.

Bank failures stunned the city. One bank failed twice.

"There was no money to circulate," recalled Buddy Weill, 84, a former real estate executive. "The only cash was what people had in their pockets."

From March to August 1933, Greensboro found itself without a commercial bank, making it the largest city in the nation without full financial services. People had to drive to High Point to do their banking.

Circumstances drove men to despair.

"I’ve thought about it a heap of times, wondering what’s kept me from killing myself," said John Vinson, a 57-year-old Greensboro mill worker. "There’s plenty of men had the trouble I’ve had that would have done it long ago."

Vinson told a Writers’ Project employee that his sick wife and child kept him going.

"I don’t care much for living myself," Vinson said, "but I’d hate to leave them in a fix."

The shortage of money left Guilford County government in a fix, too, forcing commissioners to make two $100,000 issues of scrip, a substitute for currency. That’s how the county paid its employees.

City governments weren't much better off. In 1933, Greensboro and High Point defaulted on their bonded indebtedness. That meant they had no money for street, water and sewage disposal projects.

In both cities, colleges struggled to survive as enrollments and appropriations plummeted.

In 1934, High Point College declared bankruptcy but managed to stay in business. One year, the school allowed some students to pay part of their expenses in vegetables, hog meat and chickens.

In 1932-33, at what is now UNCG, administrators admitted men for the first time because many Greensboro males couldn’t afford to go away to school and because the college needed the enrollment.

Public schools suffered as well. In Greensboro, teacher salaries fell to $608 in 1933-34, a decline of 50 percent in four years.

Across the county, families struggled to keep their homes.

By one benchmark, between 1934 and 1936, more than 23 percent of Guilford homeowners were delinquent on their payments. That compares to the statewide figure of 18 percent.

A Jan. 9, 1936, newspaper story described some of the hardships:

"Official sources said unprecedented suffering exists in High Point today," the story said. "Scores are without food and without prospects of getting any. Women and children suffer without breadwinners. Scores of homes are without fuel and subject to the inroads of cold and dampness. Sickness is gaining headway, whipped by cold and hunger.

"One family was reported to have burned all but three pieces of furniture in the home to provide heat in a room where a small child lies sick."

***

As bleak as life looked in the mid-1930s, the economic picture began to improve. Gradually, FDR’s New Deal programs put people back to work.

In 1936, Roosevelt visited North Carolina, including stops in Greensboro and High Point, and said the country had returned to “a practical prosperity,” meaning the economic system had begun to work again. But letters to Roosevelt and his wife showed that the suffering continued.

On Feb. 12, 1938, an 18-year-old Greensboro woman wrote Eleanor Roosevelt, asking for assistance.

She told the first lady she had been laid off on Jan. 1 and had been unable to find work since. Her father’s job as an advertising salesman had been cut to three days a week. Both parents were sick but couldn’t afford to buy medicine.

"We are so in debt and each week the bills are piling higher and higher that it just seems as if there was no way out," she wrote. "... If you could help us out with from $35 to $50 I believe we would be the happiest family in the world."

On Feb. 15 , she got a response from the first lady’s secretary.

"Mrs. Roosevelt has asked me to acknowledge your letter, which she read with sympathy," the letter read. "She is indeed sorry to know of your difficult situation, but regrets that she is unable to lend you the money needed. The number of demands on her resources makes it impossible for her to respond to the many requests for loans, much as she would like to do so."

The struggles of these letter writers no doubt continued, but their faith in Roosevelt remained strong.

"I do think Roosevelt is the biggest-hearted man we have ever had in the White House," Frank Martin, a 67-year-old former Greensboro mill work, said in a Writers' Project interview. "... It is the first time in my recollection that a president ever got up and said, 'I’m interested in and aim to do something for the working man.' (That) has made a lot of us feel a sight better, even when we haven’t much to eat in our homes."

Martin, who had a family of 14, had just lost his job.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The spelling and punctuation in some of the letters used in this story have been corrected to make them easier to read.

Contact Donald W. Patterson at 373-7027 or don.patterson@news-record.com