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Over the Back Fence By HANK HENRY Pennies had real value in 1920-30s I really don't understand all of the ins and outs of inflation and economic policy, and why the stock market soars or falls after Alan Greenspan clears his throat. But I do remember how much inflation and deflation had to do with the lives of ordinary people in the 1920s and �30s. I was too young to remember much about the 1920s, but I have seen a lot of photographs about the decade that followed the First World War. There was a famous 1923 photograph of a man in Berlin pushing a wheelbarrow full of German currency which he hoped to trade for some bread. While much of Europe was in a recession during the twenties, Americans entered the Jazz Age imbibing bootleg booze in speakeasies and talking about their killings in the market where $10 of "margin" would give the purchaser one hundred dollars of stock. If the stock fell, the owner faced a margin call to make up the loss. That's what happened when the crash of 1929 occurred, and for many people everything changed. In the 1930s, my father was a circuit-riding preacher, the pastor of four different churches. Each of the churches made do with a Sunday School taught by lay teachers for three Sundays a month. My father would arrive to speak to the flock on the fourth Sunday. One summer, Dad had me come along as he held a weeklong revival. I spent three days with Dad and then took a Greyhound bus home. I must have been quite young, because Dad told me he would give the driver a dime to hold for me so I could take a taxi home from the bus station, a distance of about two miles. It turned out that Dad had forgotten to give the man a coin, but when the driver heard my story, he reached into his pocket and gave me one of his dimes. Can you imagine it, a taxi ride for a dime! The bus driver wasn't so rich he could give away dimes, but he did. Another instance of deflation occurred when a restaurant next to the capitol grounds in my home town of Austin served a huge, plate-sized, hamburger with everything on it for only eight cents. The restaurant had been there for many years, and someone told us that the same hamburger had cost as much as 25 cents in the previous decade. Many people today pass by pennies in the street without picking them up, but those copper coins had real value back then. As a kid with a sweet tooth, I bought candy whenever I could. Five pennies then would buy five fairly large pieces of candy, or a nickel would purchase a thin Hershey bar that was nearly the size of the same candy that costs about 40 cents these days. Bread was very cheap, with loaves selling for a dime or less. One day the mom-and-pop grocery store where my folks shopped participated in a bakery's celebration of a switch to sliced bread by giving away miniature loaves, each about 5 inches long. I can still remember how good the fresh bread smelled and tasted. Austin, Texas, where I grew up, didn't have any food riots or other violent incidents in the 1930s that I can remember, but many people were just an illness away from bankruptcy. The city had a population of about 75,000, plus another 15,000 students at the University of Texas. A large percentage of the population worked for the state in offices scattered throughout town. Budget cuts every biennium had whittled down the salaries of government workers and the university's academics until they were near the poverty level, although there was no federal or state agency charged with officially measuring poverty in those days. Those who had money were generous with what they had. They actually bought those apples that were being sold for five cents by the homeless, as can be seen in the newsreels of the first few years of the 1930s. People would go out of their way to be helpful. Not everybody was that way, of course. There can be a rotten apple in any barrel, but most people were law-abiding even when they were penniless. Farmers and other rural dwellers would leave home for long trips without locking the doors of their homes. Today, we are richer and poorer � richer with money, poorer because now everyone locks their doors. (Hank Henry is a retired Jackson County commissioner and a former radio and television announcer. Call him at 772-9055.) Obituaries | Sports | Business | Classifieds | Tempo | Prime Times | So Oregon Sites | Outdoor Journal | Subscribe | Contact | Movies | Advertise | Real Estate Showcase | Archive | Editorials | Letters to the editor | Religion | Wake-up Call | NIE | Cyber Chef | Job Network | So Oregon Weather | WSJ Northwest | Forums | AP Wire | AP Money | F.A.Q. | Awards Ottaway Newspapers, Inc. The Community Newspaper Subsidiary of Dow Jones & Co, Inc Copyright �The Mail Tribune 2000, Medford, Oregon USA