Color photos of post-Depression America

[Dick Whitman]

I could look at these for hours.

Rarely Seen Color Images of America Emerging From the Great Depression

 

[Songbird]

Is that Rosie the Riveter in the first photo, red bandana chuggin' what she's chuggin'?

 

[TheSportsPredictor]

That would cut into your posting time here.

 

[Dick Whitman]

Not really. I have two screens at my desk. #21stCentury

 

[TigerVols]

Thanks for posting. Awesome.

 

[BTExpress]

Love seeing that stuff. Although there is not a single good Andy Griffith Show episode in color, however.

 

[Riptide]

Would those women rather be beautiful or smart?

 

[Evil ... Thy name is Orville Redenbacher!!]

Love seeing that stuff. Although there is not a single good Andy Griffith Show episode in color, however.

Howard Sprague catching Old Sam is the only one that comes close.

 

[old_tony]

I generally think of photos from the early 40s as the WWII era rather than the "emerging from Depression" era. But they are great photos. Now I might have to buy that book.

 

[Machine Head]

Smithsonian Magazine did a piece on Pie Town and Russell Lee years ago:

The name alone would make a stomach-growling man wish to get up and go there: PieTown. And then too, there are the old photographs—those moving gelatin-silver prints, and the equally beautiful ones made in Kodachrome color, six and a half decades ago, at the heel of the Depression, on the eve of a global war, by a gifted, itinerant, government, documentary photographer working on behalf of FDR’s New Deal. His name was Russell Lee. His Pie Town images—and there are something like 600 of them preserved in the archives of the Library of Congress—portrayed this little clot of high-mountain-desert New Mexico humanity in all of its redemptive, communal, hard-won glory. Many were published last year in Bound for Glory, Americain Color 1939-43. But let’s get back to pie for a minute.


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There's a book about Doris Claudill:

Pie Town Woman: The Hard Life and Good Times of a New Mexico Homesteader

Been meaning to buy it forever. I'll be passing through New Mexico in a bit and want to pass through Pie Town. Haven't the last few times, but hope to this time.

 

[Riptide]

I'll be passing through New Mexico in a bit and want to pass through Pie Town. Haven't the last few times, but hope to this time.

That should inspire this local headline:
Machine Head in Pie Town

 

[Machine Head]

 

[Shropshire Slasher]

I generally think of photos from the early 40s as the WWII era rather than the "emerging from Depression" era. But they are great photos. Now I might have to buy that book.

They hate the military!

 

[Dick Whitman]

I generally think of photos from the early 40s as the WWII era rather than the "emerging from Depression" era. But they are great photos. Now I might have to buy that book.

Of course you do!

 

[old_tony]

Of course you do!

Yes. I have a brain.

 

[Mr. Sunshine]

Lots of Republican children in that second photo.

 

[dixiehack]

Pie Town Woman: The Hard Life and Good Times of a New Mexico Homesteader

Through the middle of fifth grade, I went to school in the same building my mom had, Homestead Elementary. It, like the surrounding houses and the tower next door where we had Cub Scout meetings, was built out of Crab Orchard sandstone quarried by dispossessed coal miners and dirt farmers who drug their families to an obscure part of Tennessee hoping to rebuild their shattered lives. Maybe a mile or two down the road was a state park built by the sweat and blood of the CCC boys, which practically served as summer headquarters for us and all of mom's side of the family.

It was like growing up in a time capsule, and I appreciated exactly none of it until years later and hundreds of miles away.