Daily reminders that we're in the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression prompted us to look for inspiration, in these hard times, from people who remember the 1930s.

How did their families make do with little or nothing? Some of their tales, like saving on dental bills by having your dad pull out teeth with a pliers, may no longer seem like such a good idea. But many suggestions for thrifty living are eternal.

We asked readers to share their memories, and we were contacted by hundreds of people ranging in age from their late 70s up to 100, who remember the Depression, which began in 1929 with the crash of the New York stock market and didn't end in the United States until World War II began. Everyone who shared their memories with us currently lives in Wisconsin, though many lived elsewhere during the Depression.

Here are some of their stories:

Clothing and shoes

Thomas Doyle wore the same pair of green corduroy knickers throughout the Depression, until there were no cords left and the elastic on the legs gave way. "Sister Remigia kindly announced that one person in her class had body odor and all of us should question our parents . . . Mom knew immediately that Sister was referring to me, so somehow she bought some gray-looking long pants. They were horrible, but cheap, and not knickers."

There was little stigma then about wearing hand-me-downs. Laverne Hagemann wore the same pair of bib overalls for years. "I'd wear them to school during the week and they'd be washed on the weekend." He had to share a pair of "good" shoes with his brother, which meant one brother had to put black polish on old work shoes when they went to church.

"We girls had to wear boys' overshoes," said Millie Kaufman Mader. It was another indignity meted out after her father lost his farm and she and her sister wept as their four horses were hauled away.

Wilma Bolssen, of Waunakee, recalled the petticoats her aunt made for her daughters from scraps of oilcloth salvaged from an old tablecloth.

When shoe soles wore out, people glued rubber, cardboard, paper or even cotton to the bottom of their shoes. Fabric was precious. Edna Hoffman recalled how her grandmother ripped apart an old adult winter coat, turned it inside out and sewed a new winter coat for her. She knew people who joined the military for the sole purpose of being provided with a warm overcoat. Some remember how their mothers patched clothes with cardboard if no scrap cloth was available.

Many readers recalled hearing their mothers' treadle Singer sewing machine late at night, as they sewed flour and feed sacks into pillow cases and clothing, or made clothing or rag rugs to sell to more affluent families. "I remember putting these sacks in lye water overnight and then use the scrub board and homemade soap my mother made to scrub the lettering off the sacks," said Genevieve Edge. "Then they were soaked in bleach water to soften them and make them white. . . . When sheets got thin in the middle they were cut to good parts and pillow cases were made from them." If there was money for a packet of dye, clothes were dyed when they became faded.

Haircuts were provided by parents, and some people remember having bowls set on their heads as the template for "bowl haircuts." Women who couldn't afford face powder sometimes put flour on their faces when they went to visit someone.

Housing

In some parts of the nation, homeless people lived in caves or even sewer pipes during the Depression.

In Wisconsin, many families doubled, or even tripled up. After Wil Selbrede's father lost his job, he moved his wife and six children into his mother's home in La Crosse's Coulee region.

"Grandma Emma was already sharing her house with Dad's sister and her husband and their large brood of kids . . . We five boys shared an old Army squad tent in the vacant field across the street. It was then, during my dawning puberty, that I felt the first real fears of poverty." Eventually his father, who found a steady job repairing toasters, was able to borrow $1,100 to buy a "gaunt, heatless house."

Many homes in the period had no running water, central heat, washing machine or indoor toilets. Older sisters moved into homes of more well-off families to care for children; big brothers joined the military because they had "no other prospects." When they left home, their rooms were often rented to boarders. Alice Mueller's family spent a summer living in her uncle's garage.

Young couples who could afford a lot for a home frequently dug their own basements with hand tools, then set bricks for the walls.

But even in hard times, many women tried to spruce up their homes. Lindy Peckman's family refreshed worn-out linoleum by sponging bright paint on it.

Health

Chic Young's father was returning home from a day of selling eggs door-to-door when a car accident fractured his skull. He was taken to a hospital, but no one there bothered to stop the bleeding because they didn't know who he was, or if he could pay. Health insurance, at that time, was a luxury for most people. Young's father survived, but after that couldn't turn his head without blacking out. He didn't receive any follow-up medical treatment because he couldn't pay, and he no longer trusted doctors or hospitals anyhow. He didn't see a doctor for the next ten years. "People who couldn't pay died," Young said. "Back then, health care was an afterthought. And there was no privacy in hospitals, except for the rich.''

Doctors didn't fare too well, either. Some saved money by performing surgeries in hotels instead of hospitals, and were paid in chickens or produce. Betty Rogers lived on a farm with no phone or car, so when someone got sick their father set out on horseback to fetch a doctor from town.

In 1936 James Leonard's widowed mother, who operated a truck farm, had five of her eight children quarantined with scarlet fever. "Sometimes neighbors would drop groceries on our doorstep, and then run,'' he recalled.

Frances Wright has had chronic, severe foot pain since she was a child because her feet were always shoved into shoes that were much too small.

Many people said they never saw a doctor or dentist during those years.

"I don't recall owning a toothbrush so maybe this is the reason I didn't have many friends at school," said Raymond Walker. "We certainly didn't have the money to buy that thing called toothpaste."

Betty Rogers recalled how "Mom developed terrible headaches and was told to have her teeth pulled. She did and never had false ones for years as there was no money."

Food and drink

As an agricultural state, Wisconsin was a relatively good place to live during the Depression. People living on farms, even if they couldn't afford anything else, often ate well. Even people with tiny yards planted vegetable gardens and made it through without starving by canning and preserving enough to keep them fed over the winter. The state's many bodies of water provided fish for many families, and households kept chickens and pigs.

But for the urban poor, and even those considered middle class by Great Depression standards, dinner was often a slice of bread covered with gravy made from scraps of butchers' cast-offs, like chicken necks, or even fake gravy -- flour mixed with grease and browned on the stove. Home cooks invented names for the concoctions they made with scraps and leftovers with names like "slum gum."

Cynthia Smith's mother made "grave yard stew": milk steamed with a lot of butter, pepper and squares of toasted bread floating in it; Maurice Collins remembers eating "minute pudding": white flour, cinnamon and sugar. "Anything to fill our stomachs," he said. "Fried eggplant took the place of meat."

People foraged for anything that could be eaten or sold: nuts, ginseng, edible weeds like dandelion greens, and mushrooms. Potatoes turned up everywhere, often in soups with nothing else but water, salt and pepper. Sandwiches were filled with salted lard. Forrest "Frosty" Mades recalled days when corn meal mush was breakfast, lunch and dinner for his family. "But I still like it," he said. For Virginia Swenson, it was sometimes oatmeal three times a day. Some people made their own root beer, though if too much yeast had been added to the jars, they'd explode.

Rabbits or piglets, which the children sometimes considered pets, also wound up on the dinner table. "Remember the starving Armenians!" was a phrase often repeated as Wil Selbrede's family sat down for the scant evening meal, which might consist of soup made of beef neck bones, which were often available free at the butcher shop.

Alice Weelti's father had a melon patch, which had to be guarded overnight to prevent thievery. Her father slept there on a folding cot in a shack with his gun and his dog. One night her brother was watching the melon patch when three or four culprits approached. "He grabbed the .22 revolver and shot, not in the air, but right at them. Fortunately, he didn't hit anyone and they went screaming back to the road, swearing because they got caught on the bared wire fence."

Kenneth Becker's father sometimes paid 25 cents for large snapping turtles, which made several meals of soup. He also gathered frogs, sell some for a penny and keep others to eat. Many people recall having no meat, other than squirrel hunted by their fathers, for much of their childhoods.

Desserts were rare and, for some, unheard of. One woman loved crumbled saltine crackers covered in chocolate sauce. In winter, a special treat for some was "snow ice cream" made by mixing freshly fallen snow with cream and sugar. Raymond Walker, of Madison, said there was often no food at home to take for lunch, so he asked the cafeteria cook if he could work in exchange for lunch and he became a "pot walloper" who scrubbed pots and silverware. "One day she gave me some Jell-O. I had never tasted anything this good."

For Thanksgiving feasts, it was common for men and boys to go out early in the day to hunt squirrels and rabbits.

Animals went hungry, too. Laverne Hagemann, who lived on his family's farm in Verona, recalls how even water was scarce during the Depression, when the epic drought of the Dust Bowl era deepened the miseries of both man and beast. "One summer it was 113 degrees in the shade. I'd have to lie outside at night, and the cattle had to eat leaves off the trees because their was no feed," he said. The family captured rain and snow in a cistern for bathing and washing dishes.

Social life

The Depression was not a time when few people spent money on leisure activities. Many recall taking walks in the evening, potluck or "scramble" dinners at church, dinner at grandma's house or penny bingo parties. Decks of cards were hard to come by, but most people socialized over games of cards. "Floors were cleared for occasional square dances in various homes,'' said Wilma Bolssen. "The whole family came and sleeping babies were tucked here and there until it was time to go home."

Several people said the big treat on Sunday night was to pop corn and sit around the radio with their families. A matinee cost 15 cents, and a splurge was a box of Cracker Jack.

Children played Lone Ranger and Robin Hood, kick-the-can, hide-and-seek, mumbly peg, jacks, marbles, board games or string games like cat's cradle. Some children, like Ann Burnett-Anderson, frequented the library to borrow books.

"We didn't have anything to play with so we used our imaginations," she said. "Kids today don't know what they're missing."

Children pitched in

Charles Ambrosavage grew up in Pennsylvania, one of the hardest-hit areas during the Depression. He was expected to go door-to-door selling milk from the family cow or huckleberries. He was asked to scramble onto coal cars to scoop up extra bits of coal to be used at home, and sent to dumps to find scrap metal and rags to sell. Boys were sent to feed mills to pick up discarded corn cobs, which burned fast and hot in space heaters when wood and coal wasn't available. Wood scraps from anywhere were highly prized.

Cynthia Smith had the job of scooting around on the floor of the beauty salon owned by her landlady, picking up lost hair pins with a magnet. Kenneth Becker tap danced at a Johnson Creek restaurant in exchange for a meal of fried fish and a soda.

After a car crash left Chic Young's father disabled, Young, at age 13, sat on his father's lap so he'd be high enough to drive the car so they could peddle produce door-to-door. During long days in winter Young's feet and fingers developed frostbite despite five layers of clothing. "We Depression Kids' were raised at a time when living in warm houses was rare, adequate food was rare and everybody did their best to survive."

Alice Mueller recalls her family spending evenings in their garden. "Even little children would pick potato bugs off plants and drop them into a can of kerosene; there were no chemical sprays back then."

Sherman Swenson often skipped classes at Doty School to sell magazines or The Capital Times, yelling "Extra! Extra! Read all about it!" on Madison streets. He may have been one of the earliest "latch-key kids": from the time he was 7 he'd come home to an empty apartment, open a can of soup and heat it on a gas burner.

Hobos

For those living near railroad tracks, the raggedy men who jumped off freight cars were nothing to fear. "My father was among the thousands who traveled the country looking for jobs," said Barbara Jones, who wore the same red sweater every day one winter. Her mother, meanwhile, took a job teaching in a two-room school and slept in the cloak room there on weeknights.

Many remember hobos coming to their doors, asking for food in exchange for doing odd jobs. Mothers with extra food offered a sandwich, a glass of milk, a piece of pie or cookies. The "tramps," in exchange, chopped wood, mowed grass or did odd jobs.

Gifts

"For Christmas we got mittens and pajamas mom made," said Virginia McGinnis. "It was a big deal. And I always got a new outfit my mom made for my baby doll. The gifts were wrapped in tissue, which was saved and reused. Cards were never signed -- you'd sign your name on a piece of paper and put it in the card, so the card could be reused." Greeting cards were made from old rolls of wallpaper.

Dale Mueller's father, who worked for the federal Works Progress Administration teaching men to use hand tools, turned staves from a beer kegs into sleds they called "godevils" for his children. Girls received doll wardrobes their mothers made from rags. School supplies, homemade socks or a tie were also coveted gifts.

"I remember a Christmas during the Depression when our stockings contained an orange and a banana, and we thought it was the greatest thing ever," said Genevieve Edge. "We did not get such things normally."

Many people who grew up during the Depression use the phrase: "We never knew we were poor, because everybody was in the same boat." Others, though, did realize how poor they were.

"The subject of money was forbidden in the family; the continual lack of it an unspoken perpetual cloud over everything," said Wil Selbrede. "In desperate times, the local butcher or grocer would run a temporary tab, but it was always a source of unspoken shame to my parents and not discussed. My father was emotionally broken by the stress of rearing a large family on a small but secure salary, a job he never dared to leave."

Transportation

Cars bought when times were good often sat unused when their owners could no longer afford a dollar for about six gallons of gas. Others used them only for critical missions. Most men who owned cars did all their own repairs, changed the oil, spark plugs and brake linings, and patched tires and cloth roofs.

Many families considered bus fare a luxury, so everyone was expected to walk. Most people recalled the exact number of miles they walked to school; and sometimes returning home in winter with ice on their hair and eyelashes.

Single mothers

Many families fractured during the Depression, with fathers riding the rails to find work or just vanishing to avoid the burden of providing for their families. Frances Wright's father sent his wife and two daughters back home to the Midwest on a Greyhound bus after his business in California failed, and he never made good on his promise that they'd reunite. "I remember watching my mother's furniture being auctioned off, and then they held up my navy blue doll buggy . . .

"In those days single women weren't welcome anywhere," she said. One of her mother's jobs was plucking chickens in a poultry factory, up to her knees in feathers. She was ridiculed by lawyers when she tried to seek child support payments from her husband. "I remember seeing my mother and grandmother crying because they had to accept welfare. We got cans of welfare meat,' which we suspected was horsemeat, which we ate with wormy rice." One night there was no food in the house at all. "I remember me and my sister sitting at that rickety table with empty bowls in front of us. My mother filled them with boiling water, then put bacon grease in them. She called it 'poor-man's soup.' One night there was nothing on the table but one bowl of black potatoes. I wanted to ask, 'Is that all there is?' But I didn't, because I knew how sad Mother was that Daddy had turned his back on us. She never really got over the trauma of that time. I felt guilty I was born -- if I hadn't been born she'd only have had my sister to take care of. I learned you can't really count on anything, not even your daddy."

Life lessons

The mantra of the Great Depression was "Use it up, Wear it out, Make it do, Or do without."

Everyone interviewed for this story said that growing up in the Depression made them frugal, no matter how much money they had later in life. Many said it made them stronger as well, though they're haunted by memories of how their elders were beaten down by the struggle. They remember parents and grandparents who never recovered financially, physically or mentally from the ordeal. Here are some of their thoughts:

"I learned how to take care of myself, and I don't mind working for it. I hardly ever buy anything that's not on sale -- I always look through the grocery ads for sales. It became a habit and it's a good habit." Ann Burnett Andersen

"Throwing money at things is not the answer; the answer is training people to do things themselves. We did things for ourselves and were proud to be Americans. We took care of each other. If somebody got sick their friends would go and do their chores. In some ways it was a much better time because people treated each other better." Dale Mueller

"No TVs were around enticing us to covet what we didn't need or should have. Few people were rich, but there's a difference between being poor and being poverty stricken. Poverty stricken seems to be when all hope is gone. . . We knew and appreciated where everything came from, and gave thanks for it. We made what we could, wasted nothing, lived 'green' and recycled everything before those words were popular," said Alice Mueller

Contributors

Contributors to this report include: Frances Wright, Genevieve Kaminskas, Betty Rogers, Carolyn Strohschein, Chuck Sterrenberg, Rena Hesebeck, Erhardt Propst, Tom Kennedy, Shirley Lankan, Rose Roh, Edna Hoffman, Charlie Ambrosavage, Virginia McGinnis, Chic Young, Frank Ernst, Laverne Hagemann, Raymond Walker, Cynthia Smith, Barbara Jones, Alice Punwar, Millie Kaufman/Mader, Kenneth Becker, Dale Mueller, Clinton Severson, Wil Selbrede, Maurice Collins, Sue Heathman, Gladys Johnson, Alice Mueller, Wilma Bolssen, Forest "Frosty" Mades, Virginia Swenson, Vellorean Field, Dr. T.J. Doyle, Alice Waelti, Ann Burnett Andersen, Miles Duckert, James Leonard, Genevieve Edge, Roland Liebenow, Blanch Murtagh, Geraldine Bipes, Inez Stewart and Milo Frey.