The 1929 stock market crash is recalled as the financial reversal in the story of the boys’ maternal grandfather, James Chandler. Rather than narrating the crash itself, the account places it beside the family’s earlier prosperity and Chandler’s success as a fruit grower, making the collapse part of an inherited history of achievement and loss.

Family Prosperity Before the Crash

Wright Givens recounts that James Chandler patented the Rainier Delicious apple. Chandler had bought two dozen seedling trees from a peddler passing through Wenatchee; they proved to be Golden Reinettes from Virginia. After a windfall seedling produced unusually large, mild-yellow apples, Chandler bought the rights to propagate it and promoted the variety vigorously. He even built an iron cage around the tree to guard its bud sticks.

The account gives that horticultural success public markers: the American Pomological Society awarded Chandler its Wilder Medal in 1921, and in 1926 a carload of his apples was sent to the St. Louis Cardinals after their World Series victory. These details establish the scale of the family’s earlier standing before the recollection turns to the stock market.

Investment and Reversal

Wright says that the boys’ grandfather had once been wealthy but invested with too much confidence in the stock market before it crashed in 1929. The passage does not describe what Chandler bought, how much he lost, or the mechanics of the crash. It does, however, place his former fortune beside an overconfident investment and the ensuing collapse, marking the crash as the threshold after which that wealth belonged to the past.

Place in the Family Story

The crash reaches the reader through Wright’s account of family history, not through a narrated market scene. Its significance lies in the contrast the recollection constructs: Chandler’s painstaking cultivation and promotion of a successful apple variety stand alongside a fortune exposed to financial risk. As Wright tells the story, Ben Givens asks him to continue, while Aidan Givens has fallen asleep by the fire; the market collapse is thus one part of a longer family narrative being handed on in conversation.