All We Really Needed: Growing Up in a Pennsylvania Steel Town During the Great Depression
by Lois R. Allen
McKeesport, Pennsylvania, a town of fifty-four thousand in 1930, is twelve miles from Pittsburgh by land and fifteen miles from Pittsburgh going by the Monongahela River. When the Great Depression hit in 1929, even steel towns like McKeesport were hit hard, eventually affecting the lives of most residents, including our parents and us four children. We learned to adapt to hand-me-down clothes and to having the gas or electric shut off. We even became adept at stuffing cardboard in our shoes to cover the holes in our leather soles. Despite sickness and quarantines and Daddy’s losing his wholesale butter business, we lived very happy childhoods, along with our neighbors, fellow students, and churchgoers, who were also struggling. Most of all, we knew every day that our parents loved us and cared deeply about us.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lois R. Allen spent most of her childhood where she was born, in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, during the Great Depression. She graduated from Slippery Rock State Teachers College (now Slippery Rock University) with majors in mathematics and English, and she earned an M.Ed. from Duke University. For forty years, she taught mathematics at Allegheny Campus of Community College of Allegheny County in Pittsburgh. Now living in a suburb of Pittsburgh, she is working on a book about waiting tables at a Boardwalk hotel in 1947 Atlantic City.
(2008, paperback, 104 pages)
Availability: Usually ships in 2-3 business days.
McKeesport, Pennsylvania, a town of fifty-four thousand in 1930, is twelve miles from Pittsburgh by land and fifteen miles from Pittsburgh going by the Monongahela River. When the Great Depression hit in 1929, even steel towns like McKeesport were hit hard, eventually affecting the lives of most residents, including our parents and us four children. We learned to adapt to hand-me-down clothes and to having the gas or electric shut off. We even became adept at stuffing cardboard in our shoes to cover the holes in our leather soles. Despite sickness and quarantines and Daddy’s losing his wholesale butter business, we lived very happy childhoods, along with our neighbors, fellow students, and churchgoers, who were also struggling. Most of all, we knew every day that our parents loved us and cared deeply about us.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lois R. Allen spent most of her childhood where she was born, in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, during the Great Depression. She graduated from Slippery Rock State Teachers College (now Slippery Rock University) with majors in mathematics and English, and she earned an M.Ed. from Duke University. For forty years, she taught mathematics at Allegheny Campus of Community College of Allegheny County in Pittsburgh. Now living in a suburb of Pittsburgh, she is working on a book about waiting tables at a Boardwalk hotel in 1947 Atlantic City.
(2008, paperback, 104 pages)
Availability: Usually ships in 2-3 business days.
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