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Jacob
McHenry Smith was walking down a busy street in Chicago, $.05 in his
pocket. The five cents would have
to keep his wife and three children alive for the next three days; he could go
without food until then. Four
months ago, this five cents would have been fifteen dollars. But that was before he lost all of his
money in the stock market. Now,
all Jacob and his family had to eat was five cents worth of stale, rotten
bread.
The Smiths
used to eat rich, tasteful food.
Instead of bread, they had juicy beef and veal with wonderful sauces and
spices. That was until the market crashed and they lost everything. Their house, furniture, and extravagant
food were no more.
Jacob walked on and came to a bread store. He had worn his jacket but had no need
to. It was finally warming up after
the long winter of 1929, which he and his family had barely survived. A sad looking, hollow-eyed man with red
hair handed him two loaves of stale bread in exchange for JacobÕs nickel. As he walked home to the tarpaper shack
that the Smiths were forced to live in, Jacob realized that all of the people
on the street looked like the bread man; sad, lonely and starved, all of this
because of the lack of money. And
because of the lack of money, the every present lack of food.