Last Updated on January 19, 2023 by C-CAR
My memory of lessons in school about the Great Depression goes something like this: “It began in 1929 when everyone lost their money in the stock market, the banks closed and everyone got food in bread lines until World War II.”
Most of what I really learned as a youth about the Depression came from my parents’ stories of unemployment, of shooting rabbits for food in the fields of Kansas, and listening to President Roosevelt’s Fireside Chats.
Those who suffered through it will never forget it, even as it fades into the history books.
On Oct. 29, 1929, the New York stock market crashed, and fortunes mostly built on speculation evaporated in the blink of any eye.
Three thousand miles away in the Inland Valley, there was hardly panic about the effects of Black Tuesday.
On the Oct. 29, the evening Pomona Progress-Bulletin reported that the Union Church of Narod (part of latter-day Montclair) had met to prepare for the Halloween party. The ladies had made avocado ice cream for dessert.
La Verne was planning its Armistice Day program, while everyone in the area was talking about a sheriff’s deputy being beaten in Redlands by several youths when he tried to breakup illegal drinking in those Prohibition days.
The fact was that in October 1929, even though local papers carried huge headlines about the crash, relatively few in the rural Inland Empire — like my parents — owned stock.
The first real indication of concern locally may have been an ad in newspapers by Ford Motor Co. on Nov. 1.
“Effective today, prices of Ford cars and trucks will be reduced,” said a statement of the firm’s confidence in prosperity (and perhaps recognition of the impending troubles). The full price of a Ford Town Car was cut from $1,400 to $1,200. A Tudor Sedan fell $20 to $530.
Local business leaders shrugged off what happened in New York by saying it would have little effect in the Inland Empire, where a strong business climate was bolstered by an expansive agricultural industry.
The Progress-Bulletin editorialized on Nov. 2 that the stock market crash was actually a good thing. Investors have sold their holdings and will now be able to use the money to invest in other things, like Southern California land. The only flaw in that logic was most speculators sold stocks for next to nothing and were wiped out.
A couple of days later, the newspapers offered some more down-to-earth advice to those worried about crash: “. . .Speculation is a very doubtful game … It’s far better to invest in real estate in the Pomona valley.”
The luckiest man in all of this was Ontario banker Oscar Arnold because nobody remembers the speech he gave on that Oct. 29. Bank deposits are higher than ever, he said, and good things will come from the stock market crash.
“A few more jolts on the New York stock market will be a boon to real estate,” the Ontario Daily Report quoted him. There’s no record of his thoughts on how the economy did in subsequent years.
On Oct. 30, Daily Report editor Crombie Allen agreed with Arnold’s views, saying the crash should “have a wholesome effect on business as a whole. People will return to the safe and sure way of investing in real estate and other local offerings.”
That is, if they had a dime to call their own.
