To read the recollections of Katherine McIntosh is to travel to another time of economic privation, and realize that however bad things are now, they were far worse then. McIntosh, now a senior citizen, was four years old when the photographer Dorothea Lange took pictures of her family as part of a WPA project documenting life in the migrant farm camps during the Great Depression.
McIntosh now works as a housecleaner in California, and says she's proud she to be employed and sheltered -- two necessities that must have seemed like luxuries when she and her six siblings lived in tent cities or beat-up cars, going to school only sporadically, and enduring the taunts of better-off children when they did.
Her mother was just 32 when the iconic photo was taken; McIntosh is the child on the left, burying her face behind her mother's shoulder. Her advice to the rest of us, who haven't been through tough times before? Don't live paycheck to paycheck. Keep some savings. And make sure you have clean sheets.
More by this author:
