With modern economic woes on everyone’s mind, today’s generation may wonder how those from the Great Depression were able to do it. How did they handle a time and environment so fraught with difficulty?

Orville Elliot, a 92-year-old Sumner resident who entered puberty as the United States exited prosperity, has a simple answer.

“All I know is that I went through part of it,” he said. “I didn’t know any better. It was tough times all over.

“What little work I could get was for a dollar a day. I would do anything I could get.”

Elliot was proud to say even when times were tough, he never had to draw on unemployment. He always worked, whether it was carpentry, boat shops or the shipyards.

From the late 1960s to the mid ‘90s, he operated his own filter business in Sumner.

Elliot is a born-and-raised Washington resident. He was born in Seattle in 1917, where he stayed until moving to Sumner in 1963. When Elliot was a child, the newly-completed Smith Tower was the tallest office building west of the Mississippi, having just stolen the title from Tacoma’s National Realty Building.

When he was a bit older, he watched as landscapers shipped the Denny Hill piece-by-piece down a conveyer into the bay, until it was flat land.

Elliot left school during the 10th grade due to illness and an inconvenient distance from the nearest school, which was only 1.5 miles away but required a 5-mile trip to reach its location across the Puget Sound.

Instead he worked odd jobs, doing carpentry for The Boeing Co. for more than a year and then moving onto a local shipyard.

At the shipyard, he galvanized steel. It was involved work that required him to spend long hours fusing raw steel with molten zinc, turning it into a rust-resistant alloy.

“I eventually left the shipyards, and the reason for that was because I was galvanized so bad I almost died,” he said.

Galvanized steel can be handled in the same way as untreated steel, with one key difference: welding galvanized steel releases poisonous zinc fumes from its rust-resistant coating. During a long shift of breathing zinc and burning steel, Elliot had scorched his lungs.

He was placed out of commission for three months, relegated to near-total bed rest. Largely unable to eat due to the pain, he dropped down to 126 pounds, resembling a scarecrow.

“They had respirators (medical ventilators) back then, to help patients breathe, but every time they put them on it was cold air,” Elliot said. “You would catch a cold. So they tried to keep you on the least of it.”

Elliot eventually recovered, with some lasting effects. His illness would keep him out of the draft for World War II, classifying him as “a broken-down 4F-er,” he said.

In 1935, when Elliot was 18, he attended Sunday services at a storefront mission and met a girl who had just moved from Wyoming. That girl was 15-year-old Betty, who would become Elliot’s significant other.

“She was so young I had to put her on layaway,” Elliot said.

Four years later, when Betty was 19 and Elliot was 23, they married in the storefront mission where they met. It was a simple ceremony: they woke up, got married and paid the preacher $5.

Together, they had two boys and two girls – Keith, Russell, Orline and Eunice.

The family moved to Sumner in 1963, feeling their prior neighborhood in Seattle wasn’t a good place to raise children. There, too, Elliot saw a community change.

“Sumner went from a nice little country town to a mess,” Elliot said. “They did away with 90 percent of the farming. They brought in big stores and traffic. It’s not very desirable anymore.”

He opened his business, Elliot’s Filters, as he entered his 50s and stayed in business for almost 30 years, closing in 1996.

He toiled for a year, both operating his business and taking carpentry jobs, before seeing a cent of profit, he said.

After closing his business, Elliot retired at 79, having spent nearly 70 of them working almost nonstop.

Betty died in 2007, after which Elliot moved into Puyallup Merrill Gardens retirement community.

“We were married just under 68 years,” he said. “As for my favorite memory of our marriage, I have 68 years of them.”

Today, Elliot spends his time listening to music. He and fellow Merrill resident Leonard McKibbon go out to find live country and western as often as they can.

They visit the Sumner Senior Center and listen to the band two to three times a week.