TV's Mildred Pierce and The Great Depression, Blog Part I

Born in 1923, my father grew up during the Great Depression. My father's grandfather, Meyer, was an immigrant from Latvia and he had worked in the local public school system before he owned a small corner grocery store in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania's Hill District. In the early 1930s, people bought their groceries on account. After the Depression hit, eventually many people couldn't pay their grocery bills. In those days because of that, Meyer couldn't pay his bills, either. To keep his store from going under, Meyer approached the Hebrew Free Loan Association and asked for a loan. Meyer took my father, who was a child, with him, to the loan meeting. The men on the Loan Committee knew my great-grandfather from the public school system, from when they were school children. They loaned my great-grandfather $500 which was a lot of money then and sealed the deal with a handshake.

My father's aunt was a ticket taker for a movie theater. So, while my grandmother worked in a millenary shop selling hats, the movie theater was my father's babysitter.

My father has seen Joan Crawford as Mildred Pierce. He saw that movie again on television two weeks ago, and now, we're watching the HBO miniseries, Mildred Pierce, currently in its third installment of a five part series.

It's no coincidence that there is a re-make of Mildred Pierce at this point in time. If you pay attention to the background sound, you can hear Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivering a speech about unscrupulous bankers. There are parallels between then and now.

Mildred Pierce starts out during the early 1930s, when the depression was hitting its hardest, and the turn of life was at its cusp. It was a boom bust period, from the late 1920s to the early 30s, and life's changes were affecting everyone, hitting them right where they lived. Those changes were difficult to absorb, mentally. Moraes, customs, value systems, life's expectations were at a crossroads, but the full realization of the necessary adjustments forced by those changes were difficult to grasp.

The Mildred Pierce story is about a well-off middle class housewife, during that period, who divorces a cheating husband, and how she and those around her handle the near-dire circumstances in which they find themselves in. It's a heart-wrenching and heroic story, an actress's dream.

To be Continued in TV's Mildred Pierce and The Great Depression, Blog Part II

---Oz