I was born in 1929, and in the 50 years from 1930 to 1980, I've been able to live an unbelievably varied century. Before, you could never have seen such intense change in a 50-year span.
If you listen to Louis Armstrong from 1929, you will never hear anything better than that really, and you will never hear anything more free than that.
SOME YEARS, like some poets,and politicians and some lovely women, are singled out for fame far beyond the common lot, and 1929 was clearly such a year.
I told them that my grandfather had died in the Great Crash of 1929 - a stockbroker jumped out of a window and crushed him and his pushcart down below.
Alas, in 1929 came the Stock Market crash and everything changed and became worrisome. People started practicing conservatism because of financial losses, myself included.
What happened was that for every $100 of money, by which I mean the cash that people keep in their pockets, and the deposits they have in the bank, for every $100 of money that there was in 1929, by 1933 there was only $67. The Federal Reserve allowed the quantity of money to decline by a third. While, at all times, it had the possibilities and the power of preventing that from happening.
The election of Hoover. . . should result in continued prosperity for 1929.
Yes, I have played a blitz game once. It was on a train, in 1929.
