What hard times really mean

Florence Owens Thompson was 32 years old and the mother of seven children when Dorothea Lange photographed her in a camp for migrant workers in California in 1936. The picture became an iconic image of the Great Depression. (Read that again. Look at the lines in her face and the expression in her eyes. She was 32 years old.)

Lange, who was photographing migrant workers at the time for the Resettlement Administration, remembered the photograph this way:

"I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean- to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it. (From: Popular Photography, Feb. 1960)."

CNN recently interviewed one of the children in the photograph. Katherine McIntosh was four when the famous photograph was taken. She is now 77. She remembers the migrant camp where the picture was taken. There was no food. "They lived in tents or in a car. Local kids would tease them, telling them to clean up and bathe. 'They'd tell you, "Go home and take a bath." You couldn't very well take a bath when you're out in a car [with] nowhere to go."

She adds, "We'd go home and cry."

Now, she cleans houses for a living. She's proud that she has kept a job and a roof over her head throughout her life. "Even today, when it comes to cleaning, I make sure things are clean. I can't stand dirty things," she says with a laugh.

I wonder what that New York Times mother, the lady who believes that hard times mean postponing the purchase of designer jeans so that she can buy "stuff" for her daughter, would think of Florence Owens Thompson. And even more, I wonder what Florence would think of her.