The Great Depression Recalled: Part 2

                                                       (Continued from Part 1)

     Then as now, families found pleasure in CCC-built public projects such as Matheson Hammock Park and Beach on Biscayne Bay.  Stood up 37 days after Roosevelt’s inauguration, the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) camped in tents and rough barracks in woodlands and rural areas all over the nation. A few veterans of the Spanish-American War and WW-I plus unemployed, fit young men, aged 18-26, enlisted for renewable six-month terms.  The Corps topped out at 300,000.  Needs of members, including health care, were provided.  They were paid a small wage, a portion required to be sent home.  “CCC boys,” as we knew them, had planted more than 3 billion trees and devoted one and a quarter million man-days to flood and other disaster relief by 1941. Their handiwork remains visible throughout the nation.

 

      In the summer of 1935, our family motored up into the backwoods of Virginia, climbing higher and higher.  Suddenly, we found ourselves in a massive construction site.  We drove for  miles on an unpaved roadway running almost on the mountain tops.  We waved as we slowly passed sweating CCC boys working with picks, shovels and some heavy equipment.  Beside, below and high above us, the magnificent Skyline Drive was being hewn out of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Running more than 100 scenic miles, this national treasure is enjoyed today by millions of American families.

     A few years later, we traveled the unique Overseas Highway, built after the vicious September 1935 hurricane destroyed the railroad that had run along its right-of-way and killed many people and CCC workers on the Upper Keys.  The PWA (Public Works Administration) helped jurisdictions in Florida finance construction of the highway which island-hops across marvelous seascapes to picturesque Key West.  The Overseas Highway was a major defense asset during WW-II and the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.

     We were young when President Roosevelt broadcast his “Fireside Chats” promising better days to come.  As we rode our bikes around town, we saw people working on government projects that we liked.  We enjoyed using those that were completed, but worried about the "skeleton" buildings of the infant University of Miami.  They remained incomplete for lack of funding until after WW-II and the demands of the GI Bill of Rights emerged.

     People seemed to agree with what FDR said and did.  Once, however, we heard an adult blame a series of atrocious tennis shots squarely on his “damn New Deal tennis racket.”  A few people called recovery programs “socialistic” or “un-American.”  As kids, of course, we did not understand the important issues underlying such comments.

     Dear Reader, please do not allow these narrow childhood recollections of that horrible time to mislead you.  People who were hungry were in pain for themselves, surely, but they were in agony because of their inability to succor their children.  They cringed as the hated flapping sound of shoes in need of half-soling echoed from empty storefronts.  We were among the fortunate ones for whom basic needs were always fulfilled.  For us, things seemed OK.  This was far from the case for homeless and jobless families until, once again, they found work building the muscle and  sinew of the Allied war boot that ground the dictators into the dirt.

     Let us continue our work to avoid such a catastrophe, Billy Hawkfinder