Milwaukeeans remember diverse effects of Depression

As bad as the Great Depression was in the years 1929-41, it didn’t afflict everybody equally.

Pearl Kurzon, 95, now lives in Glendale. She remembers how her parents, the Schneiders, had a general store on Milwaukee’s south side (S. 13th St.) during the 1930s. The family lived in apartments above the store, she said.

At one time that store employed “eight to ten people,” but the Depression forced her parents to lay them off, Kurzon said. Her parents, herself, her younger brother and sister and “a Polish girl” ran the store during that time.

But despite the cutbacks, the store continued to operate and “we always had plenty to eat,” she said. “We didn’t suffer, really.”

Two things helped. For one, the store and its owners had a good reputation in the “mostly Polish and German” neighborhood.

“They used to call us ‘the white Jews.’ That meant you were OK,” said Kurzon.

Second, the store received a contract from the government — Kurzon wasn’t sure whether it was state or federal — to sell shoes to families, Kurzon said. The government paid “a few cents for each pair,” she said.

“A dead neighborhood”

The Depression also inspired people to help each other. Milwaukeean Jim Rosenbaum, 60, remembers hearing a story about his late father, Francis Rosenbaum, M.D.

The elder Rosenbaum was originally from Kalamazoo, Mich., and he attended medical school during the Depression at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor before moving to Milwaukee.

One of his fellow students and friends was a young man from a poor Irish immigrant family. This friend worked several jobs to earn tuition money.

“My father gave lecture notes and lab notes” to his friend “when his job hours made it difficult to attend lectures and labs,” Rosenbaum said.

The elder Rosenbaum became a physician; the Irish friend, a hospital designer and administrator. But the two remained “lifelong friends.”

For many still alive today, the Depression fell during their childhood years, and so memories are not always clear. But one Milwaukeean remembers noticing something vividly.

Bernard Ottenstein, DDS, now 85, remembers a time when he was about nine years old, which would have been around 1933. He lived on Milwaukee’s west side and would walk after school about “five blocks” to the Talmud Torah, housed at what was Congregation Beth Israel’s building on N. Teutonia.

“Every house, almost consecutively, had a ‘For Sale’ sign” in front of it, he said in a telephone interview. “I never saw any activity or kids outside. It was like a dead neighborhood.” He didn’t understand until years later that “those houses were all foreclosed.”

His own family managed to endure. His fruit peddler father drove a truck carrying his wares out into the countryside; and was able to keep his wife and three children in a house in the area of 11th and Hadley Sts.

But, said Ottenstein, “Even to this day, I remember all those empty houses.” And he wrote in an e-mail to The Chronicle, “I hope I won’t see as many as I did then.”

Estelle Z. Katz, nee Zoghlin, grew up in Chicago and also had a father who was a fruit peddler. But, in either 1930 or 1931, her father left the family to go east to try to find work. “That was not unusual,” Katz said.

Katz, her three siblings and her mother moved in with her grandmother and her mother’s brother and sister — and only the latter two had jobs.

She remembered that her uncle was a salesman in a button factory, and that he often brought home cufflink pieces for the family to assemble at the table, which was how they contributed to the income.

But Katz didn’t understand at the time that economic conditions were difficult. “We didn’t have anything to compare it to,” she said. “Kids accepted [that] there was not very much money around.”

Moreover, “there were highlights even in the midst of poverty,” like the Chicago World’s Fair of 1933, which sometimes had days allowing people to enter the grounds for free.

Eventually, her father was able to peddle fruit in Philadelphia, and the family joined him there for a year. By the latter 1930s, they came back to Chicago as things “gradually improved,” Katz said.