The banks were closing. The stock market tumbled. Working families were losing their homes to foreclosure.
The details read like headlines from news stories this week. But those same circumstances — and the fear and uncertainty that came along with them — ushered in the Great Depression of 1929.
Today, as forclosure rates continue to rise and banks are not in a position to help, there are experts who predict that a similar situation could potentially be on the horizon.
On the heels of the stock market suffering the largest decline in history Monday, southern New Jersey residents who lived through the Great Depression of the early 1930s are reflecting on a period that some fear will take place all over again.

Regina Schaffer

Jim Polise, Millville

Sophie Nestor, Absecon

Sophie Nestor considers herself one of the lucky ones.
In the aftermath of the Great Depression, Nestor, 90, watched as family after family on the street she grew up on, Winchester Avenue in Ventnor, were forced to leave their homes after foreclosures.
Her father, Prodromos Prodromou, a Greek immigrant, made a decent living as a hat cleaner in a barber shop on Atlantic Avenue. Nestor lived in a home with a one-car garage that actually held a car. Her father, she recalled, worked out an arrangement that allowed him and her mother to keep their home. Nestor was in middle school at the time — and her father always tried to make the best of things — so she doesn’t remember him sharing the details of that arrangement.
“We were lucky we didn’t lose our house,” Nestor said at her home in Absecon. “Whatever connections he made, it worked.”
There were sacrifices to make, however. Nestor recalls wearing the same old clothes over and over, and eating the same food. They had a modest garden behind their home, where Nestor’s mother grew figs, grapes and pears.
“We had to make do with what we had,” Nestor said. “A shirt had to last four years. We had to live very plainly with whatever we had.”
Nestor looks back on it all with pride. Her father, she said, was a hard-working man who did what he had to do. She wonders what the latest economic downturn will bring, she said, but she’s not worried about herself — she said the little savings she has is not invested in the stock market.
“We had tough times before, but we managed,” Nestor said. “We were very lucky, considering the circumstances around us. Thank God.”
Staff writer Regina Schaffer

Mary Lorenzi, Barnegat Township

Mary Lorenzi was living with her parents and three brothers in East Paterson, which is now Elmwood Park, Bergen County, when the Great Depression hit.
“I was just a young girl, about 16 or 18, when I had to quit school to go work. My mother and father both worked in a wool mill and my older brother was a presser for dresses,” she said. “My teachers tried coaxing me to stay in school. They told me ‘You can graduate. You don’t have to leave.’ But I knew that I needed to work to help put food on our table, and my parents didn’t stop me.”
She was not the only one in her class who made that decision.
“Times were tough for everybody. All of the kids in my class dropped out to go work. No one was left. I can’t pick out one year being worse than any other, because they were all bad. We couldn’t buy any new things, and we’d have to wear the same old clothes all the time,” she said.
Lorenzi, 95, had a variety of jobs during that time, but said she would always remember her first.
“I made $4 a week making pockets for sheepskin coats. It wasn’t a lot of money, but it was enough to help buy food,” she said.
Her family could afford to eat, but there was little variety.
“We ate vegetables every night for years,” she said. “When there was enough money, we had meat on Saturday and spaghetti and meatballs on Sunday. If it was a holiday, we’d have chicken. But other than that, it was just a lot of vegetables and pasta.”
Every two weeks, Lorenzi, of Barnegat Township, would take a ferry to the Bronx, N.Y., to visit her grandmother. It was on those trips that she noticed how the Depression affected everyone differently.
“The people there seemed to be much happier. They wore nicer clothes and had more money because they had access to better jobs,” she said.
Staff writer Rob Spahr

Dorothy Waltermire, Middle Township

Dorothy Waltermire and her three siblings grew up in the 1930s in East Greenbush, N.Y., a small country town outside Albany.
Her father worked as an auto mechanic. They kept chickens and had an old horse.
Waltermire, of Middle Township, said the family’s farming life insulated them from the initial shock of the Great Depression. But that would not last.
“We lived in a big rambling house with a porch that went across the entire front. It was so big that we all had our own rooms,” she said.
The children were not privy to the specifics of their family’s financial plight, but their stomachs were keenly aware of it. They survived one whole winter on stewed tomatoes and other vegetables they canned in the fall, she said.
But it was when the bank foreclosed on the family’s farmhouse in 1932 that the full weight of the Depression landed on them. The bank demanded full payment on the home — $330 they simply did not have. They were forced to move out, even though the house sat empty for months.
“Both my mother and father cried. It was the first time I had ever seen him cry,” she recalled.
Fortunately for them, her father owned the small property next to the house. With the help of neighbors, they built a new home heated with a wood stove.
She worked after school and on Saturdays, watching a wealthier family’s children for $3 per week.
Her father, who inhaled noxious mustard gas while fighting in World War I, died from respiratory problems soon after their new house was built but before he had a chance to move her prized upright piano. Waltermire never saw it again.
When he died, the household chores fell to her as the oldest. She used to take the family’s horse to a neighbor’s woodlot and haul logs back for firewood.
Staff writer Michael Miller