Olive O'Mara, West Valley City, Utah: an interview by Becky B. Lloyd, June 22, 2002: Saving the legacy tape no. 569 and 570

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OLIVE O'MARA 22 2 2 Buick and all that sort of thing. Yet the Depression hit him terribl . Y u ur y u ant t hear all this? BEC: Yes. OLI: I told you I have a memory (laughs). BEC: That's great. It's wonderful. OLI: He lost, you know, all this money, because he gave credit to people. He had this little store at the bottom-not a little store; it was a big one. A&P they called it, on this side and another rental store down at the bottom, then these apartments at the top. And he had the store on the left, but he gave credit to people right and left. I mean, what are you going to do, if people are your own neighbors. You don't let them go hungry. Nobody tried to cheat him. They just didn't have it. And so he lost his money and I remember seeing him sit an awful lot quietly, right across the street. Granddad developed a cancer of the lymph nodes; they call it Hodgkin's Disease. The only member of his entire family who ever got it. I think it was depression; it was a loss of everything. Grandmother, on the other hand, in order to keep the building and to keep us all financially with our heads above water, used the basement of the building-and it was a big basement-to sell second-hand furniture. She bought cheaply, second-hand furniture and sold it. Well, that caused Granddad and his sons to just wring their hands. They were humiliated beyond belief that Grandma would do this. But Grandma was very practical and said, "There's no need for blacksmiths anymore. What do you know how to do? The store is gone. This is what I can do." But I remember and I'm so ashamed of-I love my father-but I'm ashamed that he was so resentful that his mother was running a second-hand store. Well, that she was working at all. But that's how the Depression affected us in one small way. 11