Getting By Together: Montclair Remembers the Great Depression
This episode of Montclair Stories explores how Montclair residents experienced the Great Depression, drawing on oral histories from individuals born between 1918 and 1936. Their recollections reveal hardship, ingenuity, and deep community interdependence.
Family Businesses as Lifelines
Molly DiGeronimo DiCarlo (b. 1918) described her family’s tailor shop as a stabilizing force. “We got along fine…my father and uncle had a tailor business, so they always had an income,” though it was modest and supported two large families.
Shirley Saunders Lovejoy (b. 1928) credited her family’s hardware store with keeping them afloat as residents turned to do-it-yourself (DIY) repairs: “People started doing things on their own to save money, and they would come to the store to buy things.”
The Monaco sisters—Marilyn, Joan, and Linda—recounted how their grandparents lost two commercial buildings to foreclosure. Their grandparents and mother improvised by turning part of her grandfather’s Bloomfield Avenue bicycle store into a hat‑making business.
Mutual Aid and Community Support
Joanne Bello‑Stivale remembered her mother leading the Independent Women’s League, a group of more than 100 women who helped each other get by during the difficult times.
Her father found work through the Works Progress Administration (WPA), digging ditches for “10 cents,” and the family took in relatives who couldn’t afford rent. She noted that “the only way that people got through it was to help each other.”
Financial Loss and Adjustment
Adele Buck (b. 1927) shared that her father, an engineer, kept his job but saw his salary reduced from $4,000 to $3,000.
Barbara Eberhardt (b. 1924) described her family losing their home after her father—once a millionaire—retired early to live off the stock market just before the 1929 crash.
Bill Treene (b. 1936), though too young to personally recall many details of the Depression years, became aware that his father’s once‑thriving textile sample book business had collapsed as clothing sales plummeted. The family went from having “everything we needed, anytime we wanted it…and then we had to be more careful."
Experiences of Relative Privilege
Connie Du Hamel noted that her grandparents were fortunate to continue to have the means to employ domestic workers during the Depression, reflecting how some Montclair families maintained pre‑crash lifestyles. “Help was reasonable and everybody wanted a job.”
Visible Signs of Crisis
Anne Purdue von Hoffman (b. 1928) remembered exploring abandoned mansions along Upper Mountain Avenue, where families had “picked up and left because the bank was going to ruin them.” Some homes appeared frozen in time, with food still on the table.
These stories collectively illustrate how Montclair, like the nation, endured the Depression through resilience, resourcefulness, and community care.The stories captured in these oral histories paint a picture of free-range childhoods where kids “rode bikes, played baseball, went to camp, got bored, got creative, and got into mischief, ” defining an era of play in Montclair from the 1930s through the early 1960s.
This blog is an edited summary of an episode of the Montclair History Center’s oral history series, prepared for Radio Free Montclair. Listen to the episode by hitting play below Or, read the full transcript of the episode online here.
Stay tuned for more radio episodes (and blogs) based on our oral history series!
Explore more oral histories from the Montclair History Center, which were recorded in 2018 to commemorate Montclair’s 150th anniversary.
Stay tuned for more radio episodes (and blogs) based on our oral history series!
To explore more oral histories from the Montclair History Center, which were recorded in 2018 to commemorate Montclair’s 150th anniversary, visit online here.