John Wolfe was 5 years old, riding in the front seat of the family car with his sister, his mother at the wheel. All of a sudden, a runaway trolley car from the Spring Grove-to-Hanover line barreled toward them.
His mother’s instincts kicked in. She instructed him to jump into the backseat.
He did—and it likely saved his life. Tragically, his mother was killed upon impact, and his sister died days later.
“I go to bed with that memory every night,” said Wolfe of York, now 94. “I tried to live a life my mother would be proud of.”
To Wolfe, that accident, in 1930, is synonymous with the country’s spiral into the Great Depression.
In the midst of today’s COVID-19 pandemic, record unemployment figures, and economic uncertainties, are there comparisons to the Depression era?
Karen Hendricks 