The day my neighbors left

April 22, 11:06 AMSouth St. Paul ExaminerRob Shirk

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Migrant mother and children

The Great Recession met the Great Depression next door to me.

I grew up hearing of The Great Depression. My father, born in 1916, was a young man and a part of "The Greatest Generation", as Tom Brokow defines them in his 1998 book. I knew from study at school and talking with dad about how people's houses were repossessed by the banks. It was "Grapes Of Wrath" stuff. A bank now owns my neighbor's house. 2009 is starting to look more like 1931 every day.

My neighbor was from the Bronx and he never did let go of the Yankees.  Once in a while he could see his way clear to have an interest in the other local teams but he never could let go of The Yanks. Separated by a chain link fence we had hours of banter, razzing, and insults during the all too short warm months.

His wife and he had a child, born about six years ago, and even though she grew to be just a wisp of a little girl, it was great to see her grow up between the winters. They had a dog. They were working. We'd clean the outside of our stucco houses with a high pressure hose during the summer. We did what neighbors do. They had relationship problems, though, and my baseball sparring partner was no more. One day he was gone.

His wife, although gracious and friendly, was never as talkative as her husband, except that I knew she couldn't care less about baseball. No more sparring. She obviously had a  rough time ahead of her. She had joined the new working poor of America: single working mom with a kid, supporting what she had after a busted marriage.

Curiously enough, her occupation was a mortgage writer so she probably saw this economic disaster coming and just as the news was becoming more and more, well, depressing, she was moving. She never had a chance. I was walking with Buddy, the genius dog of the neighborhood, and as I passed by I saw all the toys, clothes, moving boxes, and so on and I asked where they were off to. They were moving in with her parents.  Oh, boy, It was sad.

The house has remained vacant all winter and spring. Our homes are built very close together in South St. Paul and there are a couple of rooms in our house where the window shades were drawn for privacy's sake. I guess that it's nice to have more sunlight in the house but it came at such a terrible expense.

My father would tell me of The Great Depression and the massive amounts of people without work. He would tell me of family farms being repossessed by the banks, families having to move in with relatives or someone. It was all so unimaginable and big and awful and heartrending and...

Every once in a while I see some movement over at our neighbor's house and I talk occasionally to the nice young man who is putzing around and ask about the fortunes of my neighbor. He replies that he really doesn't know these people, that he is merely doing a little upkeep for the bank. THE BANK. There it was right in front of me. That is what my dad was telling me about. That's what the newsreels showed while I was in school about people being tossed from the family farm into "who cares where". It did not, at the time, feel personal.

There are countless stories and statistics on the national and state levels about how bad the economy is and what the Barack Obama administration is doing about it. An interactive map by Chris Wilson of Slate.com on April 15 gives a reality check for everybody but the bottom line is that my neighbors are gone and I miss them very much. They are a casualty of The Great Recession.

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