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friends.” Sylvan kept up his membership in the club, despite his objections to its tacit discriminatory policies. “My father didn’t want to deprive his children of using the club, so he would occasionally go to dinner there, but he would be uncomfortable.”
    Sylvan and Pauline owned a pale pink one-story home on East Verde Lane, just a ten-minute walk from the country club. It had three bedrooms, a large high-ceilinged living room, a dining room, a family room, and a bedroom and bath for Eunice Turner, a black housekeeper the children called Turner.
    In 1932, when Joan was three, a family crisis erupted. Sylvan was seeking buyers for First National, a difficult assignment during a national epidemic of bank failures. “He became extremely worried that the stock-holders would be harmed if he couldn’t get a sale,” Cooney said, “and he began drinking heavily, using alcohol as self-medication the way people use Xanax or Valium today.”
    Sylvan and Pauline booked passage on an ocean liner, in the hope that time at sea would provide rest and relief from the pressure. But it was to no avail, as Sylvan began to unravel further onboard. “He had started to say some things that were off-kilter,” Cooney said, “and while on the cruise, he became a little paranoid, convinced that one of the passengers was a detective. That’s when my mother knew she’d better get him to a doctor.”
    Sylvan was having a nervous breakdown, a crushing case of depression. He needed uninterrupted rest, therapy, and a clean break from alcohol. “My mother moved all of us [temporarily] to California, where there was good psychiatric help,” Cooney said. For Joan, leaving Phoenix meant leaving Turner, whom she adored. “With three children, each a year and a half apart, my mother really didn’t have time to give to everybody . . . and a very demanding husband,” Cooney said. “So it was Turner who taught me how to tie my shoes and the ABCs. She gave me the love that I really wanted. Family lore has it that I always said ‘bye-bye’ to my mother when she would go out, but I would just sob when it was Turner’s day off. I’d go wandering back to her room, find her gone, and just throw a total tantrum.”
    Under proper care, Sylvan recovered within three months and was sent home with a stern recommendation: “The doctor said, ‘I think you’d better drink less,’ and Pop said, ‘Well, I’ll just stop’—and he did,” Cooney said. “Alcohol was never a problem again.”
    Poverty was pandemic in the early 1930s, and a steady stream of homeless, jobless, hungry men arrived in Phoenix seeking work, their possessions balled in burlap and slung over a shoulder. “Arizona was right in the middle of the national malaise,” said David Tatum, a curator with the Arizona Historical Society. 1 “Nobody was insulated from it. Farm workers from the Old South, Texas and Oklahoma looking for work in the cotton fields, along with immigrants from Mexico.” And Pauline Ganz always tried to help those left unemployed by the Depression when they came to her door, often with a sandwich and a dollar bill.
    Pauline’s compassion was an expression of her living faith. Though later in life that faith would be tested severely, Christian teaching guided her through the Depression, and she assisted the less fortunate with an open heart. Her little girl, whom she favored and gave the nickname Ganzy-Bug, never forgot the small kindnesses dispensed by her devout Irish-Catholic mother.
    The baby of the family, the most independent and adventurous of the three Ganz siblings, would venture far from Arizona during her long, fruitful, and celebrated public life. The specter of a household dogged by depression—and, later, cancer—informed Joan Ganz Cooney’s own painful private life and prepared her for a string of setbacks that might have felled a lesser person.
     
    In the summers of Joan Ganz’s early elementary school years, after her father’s