Dennis Neutze

Ed Linz is a man for all seasons: Naval Academy graduate, commanding officer of a nuclear submarine, high school physics teacher for 30 years, and a heart transplant recipient. Sometime in the 1990s, after his parents had passed away, Linz realized he had missed the opportunity to gather information from his parents about a rather neglected part of the American story. Linz set out to remedy that, gathering first-hand knowledge from others of his parents' generation by interviewing dozens of living Americans who had experienced the Great Depression. He recognized that the story could not be told adequately just by interviewing individuals in the area in which he lived. Linz spent considerable time traveling to disparate parts of the country to locate and record interviews with an eclectic group of individuals from all walks of life who had lived through the Depression. His mix of interviews spanned an African-American turpentine worker from Georgia to a few individuals who would be described today as privileged, with lots of farmers, teachers, nurses and a used car salesmen in between. After this significant effort in collecting the interviews, life intervened. There was simply no time to take on the task of transcribing the interviews. So the interview tapes sat for more than two decades. Then the pandemic came along and Linz, like millions of Americans, suddenly had more time than he wanted on his hands. The interview tapes were resurrected and transcribed. The interviews tell the story of the Depression. But something was missing that Linz provides: context, details, and explanations that make the interviews come alive. Far from the delay in transcription being an impediment, the delay actually enhanced the story by allowing comparison to what many Americans have experienced during the pandemic. For anyone looking to learn what life was like in America during this somewhat overlooked period in our history, Ed Linz's "They Never Threw Anything Away" is the right starting point.  It is an insightful and readable history lesson that makes the reader believe that he or she experienced the era in real time.