Even during the worst economical downswing in modern American account , some folk still handle to make a buck — many bucks , in fact . Here are 9 people who bring in a fortune during the Great Depression .
1. Babe Ruth
TheSultan of Swatwas never unsure about conspicuous consumption . Whilebaseballplayers ' salaries were nowhere nigh as eminent in the ' 30s as they are today , Ruth was at the top of the heap . While possibly apocryphal , during remuneration negotiations , when Ruth receive out his $ 80,000 - a - year - salary ( more than $ 1 million today ) was $ 5000 more than that of President Hoover , he is reported to havesaid , " I had a in force year than he did . " He did , however , take apay cut .
2. John Dillinger
By surcharge banks , Dillingerand his compatriot managed to win around$500,000(about $ 7 million in today ’s dollars ) . They ’re not methods we ’d endorse , but the brash , charming , and brassy figure became just the type of anti - hero the bedraggle , unemployed masses be intimate . FBI agents shoot and killed him in Chicago in 1934 .
3. Michael J. Cullen
A man unfamiliar to most , yet whose modern ideas revolutionized American spirit , Cullen switch our retail landscape by create the modernsupermarket . A former executive at Kroger Grocery & Bakery Co. , Cullen strike out on his own in 1930 after high - ups reject his ideas for less centrally located , great , ego - attend grocery stores with room for automobile parking and selling century of point at or just barely above cost . Within two long time , Cullen ’s stores ( known as King Kullen Grocery ) were doingmore than$6 million in sales ( more than $ 100 million today ) .
4. James Cagney
The former music hall star rose like a roquette through Hollywood in the thirties . He went from a $ 500 - a - week contract player in 1930 to one of the film industriousness ’s top ten cash cow during 1935 . By the mid-1930s , Cagney was making$4,500 per week . ( intimately $ 60,000 in today ’s dollars ) . His ascent was so fast , he offer to do a few film forfreejust to get out of a five - year declaration with Warner Brothers .
5. Charles Darrow
find himself out of study after the collapse of ' 29 , Darrow spent a few year hone — though some would saypilfering — a little parlour secret plan that finally came to be known asMonopoly . Within a year of registering the patent , Parker Brothers was selling 20,000 units a week , and Darrow became the world ’s first millionaire game designer .
6. Howard Hughes
Sure , we mostly remember that by and by in his liveliness , legends told of Hughes have extremely farsighted fingernails , wearing Kleenex box seat hat , and storing his own urine inmayonnaise jars . But prior to that , he also had a stellar career . After the ' 29 crash , seemingly unfazed , he releasedHell ’s Angels — then themost expensive movie ever — at a monetary value of $ 3.8 million . In 1932 , at the summit of the nation ’s economic woes , the man of affairs take form the Hughes Aircraft Company . He work up the company into a major - league defense team supplier and by the time he pass away in 1976 , his fortune was estimate to be as high as $ 2.5 billion .
7. J. Paul Getty
An awful beneficiary of good timing and large business organization acumen , Getty created an oil empire out of a $ 500,000inheritancehe received in 1930 . With rock oil blood line massively blue , he snatch them up at bargain prices and created an crude empire to rival Rockefeller . Throughout the 20th 100 , he became a billionaire many times over .
8. Gene Autry
The Great Depression was Autry ’s gold era . After sign on a record deal with the forerunner of Columbia Records in 1929 , he rose from a local radioyodelerto a murder machine throughout the 1930s . Autry later appeared in over 90 moving-picture show , becoming the top westerly haulage at the box office staff . The “ Singing Cowboy , ” not contented to be just a yodeler , later create a TV and radio broadcasting empire in the Western United States and owned the California Angels .
9. Joseph Kennedy, Sr.
Kennedy , patriarch of theCamelotclan , built up a tidy sum in the 1920s with a hearty amount of speculation , peppered with insider trading andmarket use . Unlike many others of his ilk who assist make the unstable markets that bring about the financial calamities of the ' 30s — and ultimately lose their wealth — Kennedy cognize when to get out and sold most of his caudex before the 1929 crash . Out of the store grocery , Old Joe invested his money in real landed estate and liquor ( though rumors of him being involved in bootlegging are considered unlikely ) , generating flashy profits and cement his family ’s place in the highest fiscal echelon of American society .
