What do you remember from your first recession?
Posted at 6:00 AM on July 27, 2009
by Eric Ringham
(9 Comments)
Filed under: Economy
Economic hardship can be a formative experience for young people, marking them for the rest of their lives. Today on "All Things Considered" and at MPRNewsQ.org, young people are telling their stories of life in a recession. What do you remember from your first recession?
Comments (9)
There were no jobs available. After graduating with my Bachelors of Science, I enrolled in graduate school and it was the best thing I ever did. I'm now a university professor and I'm glad I took the time to find/discover my passion.
I remember being a pre-teen watching President Ford on TV. He held up a button with the word "WIN" (for "Whip Inflation Now"). Even at my young age, I knew that wearing a button was a silly way to try to bring down prices.
I was an apprentice plumber in the early 80s in waterloo Ia. Home of a large John Deere tractor factory. One of our jobs was to winterize vacant homes of the laid off workers. There were so many that the realtors got together and removed the signs from the block becouse it looked like the whole block was for sale. I later on left that community for Colorado and was delayed a bit waiting for a u- haul trailer.They were all going out but none comming in! - Paul
I remember that my dad's company made some big paycuts and we started having SPAM for dinner one night a week! (I didn't mind since SPAM is yummy when you are a kid!)
I was a young child in the Reagan doldroms of the early 80s, but I remember the portable laundry machine we bought used because we couldn't afford a new permanent one. My father was on loan to a college in another city and we would drive out to visit him weekly, bringing the portable laundry machine, hook it up in the basement of the apartment building the college had put him up in, and do his laundry for him. People would offer to buy it from us often, because they needed something similiar. I think we sometimes did other people's laundries for a small amount as well.
I also remember watching the news every evening. The Dow Jones was right around 3000, and I was into numbers, but every evening it would have gone down or up just a tiny amount. For years it seemed like it was stuck right around 3000.
The first recession I remember and was aware of was in the 80s. I remember my parents fighting about money, and worries about losing our home when my father was laid off for two years. The experience taught me many things, the most important of which was a basic frugality that stays with me to this day.
That it wasn't so bad. As a high school student with no work experience, I got the first job I applied for in the early 1980s.
In the reporting about current economic conditions, I have been surprised to hear that unemployment was high at that time.
Like the climate created by Obama of today, I remember the hopelessness and malaise of Jimmy Carter era. What's different today is that Obama's policies are accelerating our economy's irreversible decline. Carter at least moved cautiously when he destroyed our economy.
When I pulled up to the gas pump that day in 1974, I noted the price...and vowed that I would NEVER again pay more than 40 cents per gallon.
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