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The lasting mark of the Great Depression is another theme in the book. In the final pages of Hard Times, a sensitive but befuddled teenager named Reed says of his father, "it wasn't as if it was a memory, but an open wound." (527) Terkel in his Personal Memoir at the beginning of the book admonishes his generation for neglecting to speak to the youth of the sixties about the Great Depression. They are not protecting their children, he argues, but depriving them.