The Great Depression Recalled: Part One

     President-elect Franklin Delano Roosevelt rode his open convertible into Miami’s Bayfront Park on a February evening only days before his inauguration in 1933.  After he made his remarks to the crowd, shots rang out and Mayor Cermak of Chicago, with whom he had been conversing, slumped down, mortally wounded.  FDR comforted the Mayor in his car as they sped to the hospital.  Well past his bedtime, a 2nd grader listened to confused radio reports.

     Children shared campaign excitement as Roosevelt sought to unseat President Hoover.  “Happy days are here again” was played incessantly on the radio and by bands serenading crowds supporting FDR.  Many youngsters had mixed emotions about the election because grownups were saying, “If Hoover is re-elected, grass will grow in the streets.”  The picture was interesting, but could we still ride our bikes, we wondered?

     Overheard conversations created concern, but kids could not really tell which families were being hurt by “Old Man Depression.”  We noticed that some classmates could not pay small sums for things in school.  No one seemed to go without, though.  We came to know that our selfless teachers often shared their meager resources with our less fortunate classmates.

     Families may conceal their difficulties, but New Deal publicists saw to it that their candle was never under a bushel.  In our town, a red, white and blue WPA (Works Progress Administration) sign backstopped work crews constructing our badly needed Fire-Police Station.  Some seventy years later, plans are afoot to convert that magnificent building, built of quarried Miami limestone, to use as a town museum.  It is said that financing may be sought from the new Stimulus Program. Miami stadium, later renamed “The Orange Bowl,” also was built at that time with federal financing.  Over decades, it became a major tourist attraction.

     In numerous post offices and court houses, WPA artists were employed to adorn interior walls with art deco murals and tile mosaics, some of them key attractions today.  Other WPA programs employed clerks, archivists and students to preserve genealogical records that still bring eureka moments to family researchers.  WPA mathematicians, equipped with then state-of-the-art electromechanical desk calculators, labored to create very accurate 12-place tables of logarithms and other mathematical functions.  During WW-II, such math tables helped assure the accuracy of U.S. field artillery and naval gunfire.

                                                                  End Part 1