HARD TIMES

Hard times come and go and people do survive and go on. I guess I should add that is if they’re lucky to have a family like mine. My father always joked that I arrived just in time for him to celebrate the opening of the fall hunting season, so I was a good omen. That was October 8, 1929. Three weeks later came the crash but my father said the recession was the price paid for his new son. Of course he remains in my memory as a hero.

My parents had been residing in Florida since 1925 where my father worked as a construction foreman. His crews always won bonus money due to their hard work for which he set the example. In spite of losing his right arm at the age of 14 in a stupid gun accident, he could handle a wheelbarrow (with the aid of a rope sling sewn by my mother), wield a pick or shovel, drive a bulldozer and lay a fine line of masonry. He did all this and challenged his men with the statement, ‘If I can do this, then you can do it as well,’ and his crew worked all the harder to prove him right. But now, in late October, the project plunged into bankruptcy. End of job.

We drove ‘home’ to West Virginia in a cloth-topped coupe, arriving just in time to celebrate Thanksgiving with my great-uncle Arthur on the Phillips farm at Isner Creek, just outside of Elkins. We left the day after to drive to Kansas where my father had the promise of foreman on a new construction by the same company for whom he had worked for years in Florida. Just a day short of our destination, a sudden, early blizzard blocked all roads but we were fortunate in finding a ‘cabin’ as roadside motels were then called. My mother said we had some canned goods, the remainder of a loaf of bread and little else. Oh, and she was wearing open-toed, heeled slippers. dressed, as were we all, in summer clothes. We were hardly prepared to be trapped in a blizzard.

There was a small pot-bellied stove in the little two room cabin and my father sat up for two nights to keep the fire going. He napped some during the day while my mother tended to my brother and I and watched the stove. Nothing was moving and my father waded through the snow to fetch wood for the fire. Things did look bleak for us. On the third day the roads were open and we journeyed on into Kansas City and located the building site. My father had spent most of his remaining money on gas, my mother nursed me and she and my older brother dined on jelly bread. When we got to the construction site it was early evening but all work had stopped for the day and the only person there was a night watchman. Fortunately for us, he had worked with my father in Florida. This kind gentleman directed us to his apartment were his wife provided a hot meal and baths for all and we slept sprawled about on the floor and sofa of their living room.

The next day my father was given an advance on his salary and we found a furnished apartment and settled in. As my mother said, Kansas was a whole new world after Florida with much to be explored and enjoyed. She always remembered that it was a wonderful Christmas that year. We received, as usual, gifts from her mother and aunts, we had a place to live, my father had a good job again and we were all well. There was much to be thankful for. Of course what we didn’t know was that this construction would stop in bankruptcy as well the following March and we would be stranded in Kansas. But that is another story.