Virginia Soto was born the year before the stock market crash that plunged the country into the Great Depression.

Her father, an immigrant from Mexico, and two uncles were working in the zinc, copper and lead mines in Terrero, N.M. Life was simple. Her grandfather planted a few acres on Rowe Mesa in corn, beans and chile. A great-uncle owned livestock and supplied the family with occasional beef. They supplemented their diet with butter, cheese and juice from a federal surplus commodities program.

Things got worse in 1939, when the mines closed. Soto's family moved to Santa Fe, where she and eight other relatives shared one large room on Sandoval Street. Their home had no electricity or indoor bathroom. Soto's father earned a little money doing odd jobs such as chopping wood and helping a friend who was a mechanic. The family survived mainly on the federal welfare payments her grandparents received. For entertainment, they listened to a battery-operated radio.

Times were "rough," Soto, a go-getting volunteer at the Pasatiempo Senior Center, recalled recently. "We just survived, really."

While life was hard, Soto doesn't remember being unhappy. "The best part was the closeness of the family," she said. "We held each other up. That's something we do not see now."

Santa Feans who were children during the Great Depression have differing recollections about how arduous life was here. While some like Soto recall the effect of the worsening economic situation on their families, others say nothing much changed. Santa Fe was already poor, they pointed out. There was no industry. Its barter economy had long sustained people. The population was only around 10,000. And as a state capital, there were still steady jobs to be had for some. Some better-off families even visited the World's Fair in Chicago in 1933.

Author Pen LaFarge, who has interviewed local people who lived through the Depression, said, "I get the feeling it didn't make a tremendous difference here. People "survived by hook and by crook, just as they always did."

Don van Soelen's father, an artist who came to New Mexico to recuperate from tuberculosis, built a house in Tesuque in 1925, two years after Don was born. People would trade vegetables for a load of wood, he said, but "in my family, there wasn't any real hardship that I'm aware of."

Van Soelen said his father continued to sell some paintings during the Depression and was able to withdraw his money from an Albuquerque bank before the crash. (They lived in Connecticut during the mid-1930s.) Later, his father was hired by the Works Progress Administration, a federal New Deal program to paint murals around New Mexico.

But Dorothy Sprague said her father lost his business — a store selling candy, cigars and newspapers in Raton. She remembers the desperation of coal miners who moved into town after losing their jobs.

The economy was picking up a little in 1937 when Sprague moved to Santa Fe. She rented a room for $20 a month, earned $90 a month working for the state Public Welfare Department — and ate at the Canton Café, where you could get a steak dinner for 50 cents.

"The Depression was very bad," she said. "There were so many things we wanted and couldn't have. People were so poor. It was a very sad situation."

Edward "Gonzo" Gonzales said his father owned a meat market (next to where the Lensic is now) and was able to save $15,000 that he planned to use to expand into the grocery business. But, when the bank failed in Santa Fe, Gonzales' father lost almost all of his nest egg. Later, he became head butcher at Kaune's grocery store. "I don't think my family ever recovered financially," Gonzales said.

Nonetheless, all 12 children attended private schools. Gonzales said he worked at St. Michael's College to pay his $5-a-month tuition. At Halloween and at Christmas, he said, his mother would hand out food and clothing to poor people who came to the door of their house on Armijo Street.

Mary Jean Cook's father had come to New Mexico by freight train from Oklahoma, and she and her mother joined him in Santa Fe in the late 1930s. She recalls attending the senior prom in a hand-me-down dress. "The Indians were really suffering," she said, recalling that her father, who worked at Kaune's, would give them some meat and leftover baked goods when they came into the store on Saturday nights. At the same time, there were some "high livers" in town who spared no expense on their parties. She said the Kaune's deliverymen did not like to bring groceries to poet Witter Bynner's house because all the guests were "in the nude."

Fabián Chávez, a former state legislator, said his father, a cabinetmaker, was for a time more or less steadily employed as a carpenter at the José E. Roybal grocery store and the adjoining Roybal home. "At the end of the month, Dad and Mr. Roybal would square off for the work Dad had done" in exchange for groceries, Chávez said.

In 1930, his father lost the family home on Acequia Madre. Several years later, thanks to a program started by President Franklin Roosevelt, he was able to buy it back. And by 1932, Fabián Chávez Sr. had a steady job as superintendent of the state Capitol Building facilities.

"I have no bad memories," Chávez said. "We always had clothes, and we always had food." And the pleasures of going to the movies or strolling around the Plaza were free or cheap. "I didn't see people standing in soup lines or selling apples on the street. Not here."

By the time of the stock market crash, Sam Adelo, a retired attorney who still works as a court interpreter, was just a boy of 6, but he was already learning how to weigh coffee, beans and rice at his father's general store in Pecos. Business was steady, owing mainly to the families of the 700 or so miners employed in the area. "We didn't feel the Depression in Pecos the way they did in other places because there was work in the mines," he said. And prosperous families from Chicago and other places were still spending the summer at resorts like the Valley Ranch (now the site of a seminary), he added.

When the mines closed, the local economy worsened. People had a harder time paying their bills at the store, and Adelo's father extended credit to them. Eventually, many residents left Terrero and Pecos for Santa Fe or manufacturing jobs in California. Adelo said his mother would sometimes load his little red wagon with flour, baking powder, lard, beans and rice and ask him to deliver the provisions to a poor family. Okies, their trucks loaded with their possessions, were a familiar sight driving down Route 66.

By 1936, Adelo was a boarding student at St. Michael's College, where he swept floors and waited tables to pay part of his tuition. On weekends, he and his friends would go to the movies (for 25 cents) or hang out at the pool hall on the Plaza. "People had more time then," he said. "And what they demanded was very little compared to now."

To younger people facing a new Great Depression, Adelo had this advice: "Tighten your belts a little; make your life more simple."

Contact Anne Constable at 986-3022 or aconstable@sfnewmexican.com.