At 91, Spokane Valley, Wash. resident Jean Nellavene Repp, has experienced an array of dips and peaks in the American economy, including the Great Depressing of the 1930s.
She was born in 1917, the youngest of nine children and has spent much of her life — first as a child and then as a mother of four — on wheat farms in eastern Washington.
"I can remember when I came home from school and my mother told me the bank had closed," she recalls of the Great Depression of the 1930s.
"The banks closed and the stock market went caput and people who had been living pretty comfortably found themselves broke."
Repp continues: "Men worked for a $1 a day. Women – if  you could get a job for 50 cents a day, you were doing good."
"Sometimes you were lucky to have 2 cents to mail a letter."
Today the circumstances are different, but "This is probably as scary as they get. We went into World War II to make the rich guys rich again," she says. "We're already in a war; I don't know what were' going to do to get out of this."

The highlight of my stop in Ritzville was talking to the guys outside Tracy Jirava's auto shop. I stopped to look at a 1989 Camaro with its guts hanging out. (I own a third-gen. Camaro and have definitely been there!)

The car belongs to 19-year-old Eric Hille.

 
"It's probably the most boring town you're ever gonna find," he says of Ritzville. But he concedes it's a good place to be American, though the  current state of our economy "is kind of ridiculous."
"I hope Obama fixes it."

Also outside the shop was retired World War II veteran and Ritzville City Council member Barney Streeter, 85.

Serving in the sixth infantry division of the U.S. Army, Streeter spent time on the ground in North Africa and in Italy, including "five months of hell" on a beach in  Anzio.

"I fought for that old flag and I'm still proud," he says.

(Sadly, I'm not sure he'll be checkin' out my blog. "I'm old-fashioned. I don't go on the Internet," he tells me.)