Every few pages, in fact, Terkel's award-winning oral history fluoresces with surprisingly positive testimony: alongside fear, hunger, and desperation, there was also "fun" in soup lines, "hope" and "excitement" in job queues, and light-hearted resilience in the face of "hard times." But it isn't unique in its distance-emotional, social, and economic-from the worst of the '30s. Was Zerbe's experience unusual? It certainly departs from the usual Depression gloom. Yet for him "there was never any sign of poverty," just a few nattering headlines in the newspaper. Central Park was a jungle of cardboard shacks, unemployment hung above 20 percent. "The Thirties," he told Terkel, "was a glamorous, glittering moment." In Zerbe's New York City there were no bread lines, no apple salesmen, and certainly no worried faces as he partied in the Rainbow Room with Roosevelt's heirs. Jerome Zerbe, a celebrity photographer for Parade magazine, not only remained stylish during the downturn, he remembered it fondly. Early in Studs Terkel's Hard Times, before the tales of Depression-era woe get rolling, we hear from a startling young man.
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