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"We were so poor, mama would bleach the coffee grounds and serve 'em as grits the next morning." The Great Depression was no joking matter to the people who experienced it. Consider these scenes ...

A fourth grade school classroom, with a teacher looking down at a girl in ragged clothes. "You look pale, dear. You should go home and get something to eat."(The little girl answers, "I can't. It's my sister's turn to eat today."

A rundown village in Appalachia ... Eleanor Roosevelt is watching a sad little boy stroking a pet rabbit. The boy's sister looks up at Mrs. Roosevelt and says, "He thinks we're not going to eat it, but we are."

I'm too young to remember those dark days, but I've heard about them from my Mom and others who were touched by the Depression. Two classes of society existed then: the haves and the have-nots. It hit the poor hardest. Many sank into shame and despair.

How the times have changed. We live in a throwaway society today, but back then a scrap of most anything was prized. People throw away things today that Depression-era sufferers would have considered treasure. My Granddad Poland had a saying, "Keep something seven years, and you'll find another use for it." That philosophy trickled down to my Dad who kept things ranging from heaps of tangled metal, broken equipment, and lumber scraps to PVC pipe. Someday, he'd need it.

The Great Depression, this country's worst economic crisis, taught several generations unforgettable lessons. One Georgia woman, a child of that era, remembers how her family made a stepladder into a Christmas tree. They wrapped tissue paper around the ladder and would place candles upon the steps. They could only light them now and then or they'd burn up before Christmas day. She has no memory of any toys come Christmas, just homemade gloves and scarves. Things that helped them weather the winter.

Back then people had no money to buy dishes so companies gave away "depression glass." There was, however, plenty of heartbreak to go around. Said one man, "My daddy was the strongest man I know, but the Depression brought him to his knees."

People who endured the Depression learned lifelong lessons. My Granddad Walker told me something I never forgot. "It doesn't matter how much money you make," he said, "what matters is how much you keep."

Yes, what you managed to hang on to mattered, but it was near impossible. Down here in cotton country, the boll weevil's devastation greased the way for the Great Depression. Many farmers abandoned their land. Banks took it, if they hadn't failed.

People went hungry. It makes one dredge up Scarlett O'Hara's infamous lines, a reference to how Union troops marched through Georgia scorching anything remotely resembling food. "As God is my witness, they're not going to lick me. I'm going to live through this and when it's all over, I'll never be hungry again. No, nor any of my folk. If I have to lie, steal, cheat, or kill. As God is my witness, I'll never be hungry again."

During the Depression, a biscuit was a banquet come Sundays. Everybody was in the same boat, a boat called Abject Poverty. Some good came from the misery though.

My Aunt Evelyn remembers how people stuck together and made do ... "We didn't eat eggs, we traded them and bartered them for things we didn't have. It was a time when everybody had dresses made from bolts of cloth provided by the WPA so everybody looked alike. She remembers wearing dresses made from flour sacks that she had to wash a lot to get the numbers and printing out.

Aunt Evelyn and Mom both remember working hard as children. "On Saturdays," Aunt Evelyn said, "we'd dig up white dirt (kaolin) and whitewash the fireplaces and chimneys, and brush the yards with brush brooms to clean up behind the chickens."

She remembers how neighbors helped each other. "We shared a good garden with those whose garden failed. Daddy would kill a beef every year. Neighbors would do the same thing. He'd put it in a wagon and take it to the neighbors and share part of it. When they killed a beef they did the same thing. So everyone had some beef that way."

Some beef ... a miracle in the 1930s, a time known in some regions as the "Dirty 30s." While people in the South suffered mightily, people in the prairie lands suffered even more. Severe drought along with decades of destructive farming methods gave us the Dust Bowl.

During the drought of the 1930s, soil had no grass to keep it in place. It turned to dust and blew eastward and southward in monstrous dark clouds. "Black Blizzards" and "Black Rollers" turned day to night and chickens roosted during the blackness.

The media, then as now, covered such tragedies. In the summer of 1936, James Agee, a writer, and Walker Evans, a photographer, set out on assignment for Fortune magazine. Their mission was to document the lives of Southern sharecroppers. They lived with three different families in Alabama, where people were suffering mightily. From there, a haunting book, an American classic, arose from the dust and poverty of the mid '30s, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. I own the book and it's among the books I prize. The title comes from a passage in Ecclesiasticus that begins, "Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us."

What Evans and Agee accomplished stands as an undisputed masterpiece of the 20th Century. It paints an unforgettable portrait of human dignity and the American soul under grueling conditions. You'll not forget Evans' images of gaunt faces, mistrusting eyes, and families huddled in bare shacks in the Depression-era Deep South. Agee's combination of reporting with literary passages etches indelible ruts across the soul of anyone with a trace of compassion. He gave us a poetic look at poverty and revealed a segment of America invisible to most, an America mired in dire straits.

It wasn't easy. Agee and Evans were to spend eight weeks during the summer of 1936 working and living among three white sharecropping families deep in desperate poverty. They were unwelcome intruders. Would you want a writer and a photographer to live with you in your worst time ever?

The three families did not want these better-dressed, well-fed strangers among their midst. The men, however, respectful of these plain folk and in a strange way finding them noble, nonetheless made themselves a home among them. They slept, ate, and shared days and nights with them. When their work was done, they told one family, the Tengles, it was time for to leave for good.

Elizabeth Tengle recalls that moment. "They said they was leaving and wouldn't be back, and mama's children cried. Every one of us cried. They were so good to us, you know. They told us not to cry. And Ruth told them, she said, "Yore going to leave and ain't never gonna come back?"

Heartfelt honesty ...

As surely as fire tempers steel, hard times shape people's character. With Thanksgiving approaching and with the Depression and Dust Bowl Eras long in our rearview mirrors, we owe these people some belated respect. They received no bailouts. They simply picked up and survived. True pioneers in the American spirit.

Perhaps their spirits walk among us still. I wonder what the ghosts of front-line Depression-era folks think. On every corner they see a fast-food restaurant. They see well-fed people so overweight they struggle to get out of their cars. They see people wearing a dazzling array of clothes holding strange contraptions things to their ears talking to themselves. What might these phantoms think of our extravagance and us? I think I know; I bet you do too.

Life hammered a realistic outlook into the psyche of the people who came from the Depression and Dust Bowl era. They clung to what worked and they passed their proven beliefs and knowledge on. Some survivors' children hold those same virtues today. They're not about self-indulgence and the immediate gratification material things offer. And that's a lesson we all could benefit from, if only we stop long enough to reflect and absorb it.

Email Tom with feedback and ideas for new columns. tompo l@earthlink.net