‘Iron woman’ helps them survive Great Depression
“Growing up during the Great Depression, times were so bad. My folks were very poor back in those days. It was a hard life. You just existed. You didn’t have really anything. It was just the very essentials. Just exactly what you could get by on, that’s pretty much what you got.
“The only meat we had mostly came from a hog that we killed during the wintertime. They used salt and brown sugar to keep it from spoiling, because we didn’t have an ice box. We lived off the land. There was a lot of wild stuff that you could eat, like red berries, blackberries, mustang grapes, possum grapes, and things like that.
“I was an outside boy. So I spent most of my time in the woods with my old dog and my slingshot. That was up until I was about 9 or 10. Then my dad left the family because of us being so poor and everything. He couldn’t handle it. He just gave up and took off.
“My mother was left with seven children, including a brand new baby. It was very difficult for her. She was crippled for 55 years of her life. She had polio and walked on crutches.
“But I was from a family that just never would give up. Looking back on it all now, it’s unbelievable how we made it through. My mother deserves a great deal of the credit. She was an iron woman. You just couldn’t keep her down.”
— Fred Sneed, 97
(Note: Fred Sneed passed away on Aug. 29, 2021.)
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