50 Plus: Current recession rings familiar to Bedford couple

Editor's Note: This story is one of four in our latest 50 Plus series, highlighting people 50 years of age or older. This set's theme is people remembering the Great Depression.

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John Turner remembers when money was so scarce that he scrounged up jobs from his paper route to cutting greens.

He was eight years old when the Great Depression began.

The Bedford native found what work he could to help his parents support him and his four sisters.

In those days, food was grown in the backyard, and families and communities banded together to support each other and make ends meet, he said.

Things aren’t quite the same anymore, but the economic downturn seems familiar to John Turner and his wife, Polly.

“They call this a recession but it’s fast going into a depression, when people start drawing money out of banks,” he said. “Most people, if they got some money, they are holding on to it.”

Today’s way of life is so different than it was then, Polly Turner said. People don’t grow their own food anymore and the opportunities aren’t the same.

“I don’t know how you can compare it to,” she said. “I hope it doesn’t get that bad.”

John Turner ran a paper route.

He cut creasy greens out of a cornfield and sold them to a woman who bought as much as Turner could carry.

He ran cream routes, collecting the product to be used in the creamery where his father worked.

He also delivered feed on those routes and often received requests for specific patterns and colors of the 100-pound feed sacks.

“They’d give me a sample and say, ‘Bring back a bag that matches this,’” John Turner said.

In those days, the sacks were made of cotton and had flowery patterns, said Polly Turner.

“I wore plenty of pajamas and skirts made from those feed sacks,” she said.

At the skeet shooting club nearby, John Turner would search for clay disks that weren’t broken to sell for more money.

His father sold valve separators and milking machines and worked in the creamery.

“You didn’t know what he was going to bring home for working on the machinery,” John Turner said.

“He’d most of the time charge for the parts and not the labor. Most of his customers sold cream to him. He tried to help out as much as he could.”

John Turner played on a ball team. He said in those days students didn’t travel to the games in a bus. Instead, the prominent citizens had large cars and would take the students to their games.

“All the ball games were played in the day,” John Turner said. “Bedford didn’t have any lights.”

There were four streams that ran near where John Turner grew up.

He and his father would fish for trout and catfish up to the limit shortly after those streams were stocked. They could catch 20 fish each.

“I used to go squirrel hunting, rabbit hunting, all around in here,” John Turner said. “We used to hunt all over the county. Now there are very few places.”

The fire department sold brooms for $1.50 a piece to raise money.

“Everyone bought one, sometimes as many as three,” he said.