Bob Battersby

Transcript:

Author Bob Battersby on His Self-Published Book, We Had a Cat When We Lived in Babylon

A lot of people believed that if we hadn’t had the Depression, we wouldn’t have been able to cope with the World War. The title of the book, and it’s kind of an unusual title, We Had a Cat When We Lived in Babylon. The book is about how we got on during the Depression from about 1937 to 1947 when we emigrated from Long Island here to California. It’s about the things my folks had to do to survive the Depression and the things we did after the war started. America and the people that had to go through the Depression toughened up quite a bit before the war started so that when they were asked to pull their belts in another notch or do things that they haven’t done before or save things and have scrap drives and stuff like that, they were more prepared because they were already used to doing without. I hope my readers will take away a sense of history—there’s a bit of humor in it—and understanding of what people went through. It would be a good history lesson for people who are young. It would take them back to how their grandparents lived. For people who have lived through it, it will be a taste of nostalgia because the larger we live and the further we get away from that, the less they think about it.

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