Great Depression Facts

The first household refrigerators cost about $16,000, in today's money!

In the 1930's, American track star Jesse Owens used to race against horses and dogs to earn a living.

A cornhusking contest was a race to strip corn by hand, timed to the minute. In 1935, one of those contests drew 110,000 people to a cornfield in Newtown, Indiana. Two aerial bombs marked its start and finish, eighty minutes apart. Elmer Carlson of Iowa husked about 41½ bushels of corn by hand and won. NBC broadcast the whole contest live on national radio. Farmers still compete for the same title every October.

Plennie Wingo walked backwards out of Fort Worth in 1931, with mirrors fixed to his glasses and postcards at a quarter to pay his way, until Turkish police jailed him at the border and an American consul talked him into coming home from Istanbul. Guinness still lists the 8,000-mile trek as the longest walk ever made backwards.