The stock market had crashed. Many people had lost their jobs. To an employee of the railroad seniority was a very important thing. My dad had been hired by the Louisville & Nashville Railroad three days after his friend Duffy, and one day before Lawson. Duffy’s job was eliminated, so guess what. Duffy kicked Dad from his job. But Lawson was still around, and the kick moved on from Dad to Lawson. At first jobs were available within a small area, but as the process repeated, available jobs moved closer to the main line of the railroad.

I had started third grade when the local job market became exhausted and my dad found a job across the mountain in Harlan, Kentucky. Despite my mother’s protests my family decided to move to this job. After all, my dad had had enough of farming rocky hillsides as he was growing up, and other jobs were scarce. But what to do with a third-grade kid was the question. Putting him in a strange new school in the middle of a term seemed most unwise. So my care and feeding were entrusted to my grand parents; and the family left me there.

Grandpa’s house was a rustic structure made of yellow poplar logs about 15 inches in diameter notched to fit at the corners of the house. The logs were hewn to give the walls a more or less flat look, both inside and out. The main part of the house was about twenty-five to thirty feet square with a full front porch. At the center of one wall of the house was a large log-burning fireplace for heating the room, and sometimes for cooking. Beds occupied three corners of the room, while the fourth corner was reserved for the stair steps to the loft. A dining room and kitchen had been added to the back side of the house. The added rooms were of rough cut lumber. A wood-burning stove served for cooking, and heating the two rooms.

Grandpa’s house was located on a corner, at a crossroad of the pike and a gravel road. His yard was fenced in for a good reason. Evidently some people in the nearby village owned cows but no pasture. Their cows would wander up the pike, grazing alongside. I can remember Grandpa running out and driving half dozen of the critters back down the road toward East Stone Gap. Behind the fences grew rambling roses, lilacs and apple trees, and in summer a variety of flowers such as columbine and bleeding hearts. There was little room for grass . Across the gravel road by Grandpa’s pasture was a grassy hillside where his horse and two or three cows grazed. On the hilltop was an apple orchard, a great place to hunt morel mushroom in spring. And WOW were they good after Grandma cooked them!

Grandpa’s barn sat down the gravel road a short distance from his house. Every night one of my uncles would bring the livestock to the barn where the cows were milked. They stayed there until after the morning milking, and then back to the pasture they went.

Before the depression had set in, two new houses were built across the pike by two of Mama’s cousins. Behind them was bottomland used for growing grass for hay. Farther on was the Southern Railroad track. There were two or three passenger trains locally called shortdogs, and a great number, it seemed, of freight trains hauling coal from the mines.