This is an I-Heart podcast.

This is our American stories and one of our favorite regular segments is our American Dreamer series. And today, Alex Cortez brings us

the voice of an American classic. When I grew up the word depression, then entered my vocabulary,

I didn't enter my consciousness. And little did I know, I lived through it.

But I didn't know it was going on

because I was well taken care of by loving parents

and a family environment.

We're listening to Donald Sturm,

whose parents were German immigrants that settled in Brooklyn, New York.

My father had some securities, owned some real estate, and Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn,

or wherever it is, and lost everything. I never recovered financially and wound up getting jobs in a restaurant business

no longer as a manager because those jobs became few and far between

and wound up being a waiter for the rest of his life.

He worked hard to bring home money

so that he could take care of his family.

And he did so in a very heroic way.

I never heard him complain.

He didn't achieve much, financially speaking. But he had a great family family and he was a great father.

I grew up in a very dense neighborhood in the sense that there was lots of people.

Nobody had much money. There were five of us in the building.

We lived on the, I think the third or fourth floor is a walk up. There was no elevator.

We had one bedroom. I shared room with my two sisters. They slept on a bed together and I slept on a cot.

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