For me, it would be my father Joe and his mother Leona. After my grandfather died in 1936, it was just the two of them, struggling through to make ends meet at the tail end of the depression. They had two cows, Babe and Boss, stabled on the property where my house now stands, which Grandpa Crook traded for back in the 1920s, and they owned the land where their house stood. They had chickens and they were beekeepers. In the 1940 census, Grandma is listed as working as a housekeeper for a private family, for which she made $39 in 1939; and Joe had been unemployed for many months, although somehow he'd managed to make $50. They lived in a house that the three of them had made out of boards salvaged from a burned hospital building. They scraped the burned parts off the boards, straightened the nails, and scavenged for other parts and pieces to build a house. I checked, and the person working at the local hardware store in the 1940 census made $1300 in 1939. Since Grandma started there the next year, 1941 signaled the end to her days of abject poverty. By 1941, Joe also had a job, working as a miner at Climax, Colorado, in the molybdenum mine. He enlisted as soon after Pearl Harbor as he could (January 1942, requiring a 6-hour drive over the mountains to Denver) Of course, I wouldn't know that much about them if they hadn't both been amazing (and amazingly truthful) storytellers.
