My KC family achieved financial stability that feels unsure today | Opinion
This is a story of two Kansas City families in the 1930s. One family was rich; the other, poor. They were my families of origin, as you might guess.
My father’s father was a prosperous Kansas City businessman who at the height of his success had a tent and awning factory at 26th and Pennway streets with his two brothers. The “G” of their sign is still barely visible in the terracotta above the blue doorway of what once was the Carnie-Goudie Manufacturing Co. Now anchored by City Lifestyle Magazines and Anne’s Lofts, the building they constructed is 100 years old.
The company also made portable miniature golf courses, no doubt because my great-grandfather, the company’s co-founder, had immigrated from Scotland. The Great Depression hit the business hard and, according to an article in the April 20, 1931 Kansas City Star, it went into receivership.
My mother’s father was a plumber who lost his job in the Depression. Her mother worked as a seamstress at her brother-in-law’s Du-Rite Cleaners. My mother had a lot of responsibility for her younger brother, once taking him on a streetcar to the doctor to have a wound cauterized. She told of going to the corner grocery store for a nickel loaf of bread and being turned away because her family’s credit was used up. At the time my father and mother started seeing each other, my mother’s family was living in a hotel.
Dad buried silver in backyard
My parents moved to Texas when my father, who had gone to college on the GI Bill, took a job as a geologist. From my fourth-grade year through my high school graduation, we lived in Midland in a Federal Housing Administration-financed home.
I grew up comfortably middle class, secure in the knowledge that bank deposits were insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. According to a 2023 story on NPR, President Franklin D. Roosevelt told his listeners in his initial fireside chat on March 12, 1933: “I can assure you, my friends, that it is safer to keep your money in a reopened bank than it is to keep it under the mattress.”
My father must have missed or mistrusted FDR’s reassurance. As a child, I would open one of our massive encyclopedias to find pages cut to make a box to hold cash. Later my family lived in Dallas, where Dad buried silver in his suburban backyard, which abutted a golf course. With his drafting skills, he drew a treasure map to mark the location of the silver.
Having once lived in a hotel, my mother considered each of her suburban houses to be her castle. She attended two years of junior college, which she paid for herself with money earned working in the collection department of the phone company in Kansas City. She majored in home economics. I still have her notebook full of instructive entries on food preparation and the “Art of Pressing.” I didn’t inherit Mother’s cooking skill, but I do like to iron blouses, and I am, according to my friends, frugal to a fault, just as she was to the end of her life.
Trump no FDR on Social Security
FDR signed the Social Security Act into law in 1935. Besides trusting the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, I have always believed that the payments my husband and I have made all our working lives into Social Security would buttress our retirement. With Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s observation that his mother-in-law would not complain if she didn’t receive a Social Security check, and Elon Musk’s remark about Social Security being a Ponzi scheme, my confidence in the future of Social Security has been scorched.
Right after President Donald Trump — who clearly missed the history lesson on the disastrous consequences of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 — rocked the markets when he threw down his tariff gauntlets, my husband and I didn’t investigate our investment accounts. We were too scared. And, yes, we would notice if we didn’t receive a monthly Social Security payment, and our creditors would, too.
Following a visit from my husband’s older brother, who checks his retirement accounts daily, we peeked. We looked again recently, and it appears we have recovered our earlier losses and are just about even.
This administration has taken us back to a time before the 1930s, a time of social insecurity and financial fear. The social and financial safety nets we have taken for granted are in danger. We are living with hardships our parents and grandparents survived long ago.
And there are no reassuring fireside chats coming from the president currently in the White House.
This story was originally published June 26, 2025 at 5:08 AM.