Daddy had his dreams in the mid-1920’s of making the little house in Virginia a place of his own liking. He had a wife and two little kids to occupy the house. Before I was old enough to start school I noticed things such as grape vines and fruit trees he planted around the place. I remember the trays in the cellar where he had various kinds of seeds sprouting. He finished the attic to make a third bedroom. There was no hint that he had any notion of moving.

While I was in second grade I heard adults talk about a crash in the stock market. Of course this meant nothing to me, a second grade child. Hearing that people jumped out of tall buildings meant to me that they must be crazy. What did mean something to me was that Daddy came home one day and announced that he had lost his job. That started a string of events that caused our family to start all over in Kentucky. By that time the Great Depression was in full swing, and aided by Roosevelt’s New Deal would last for another ten years until it was traded for another world war.

The depression changed the lifestyle of most folks. Many people lost jobs and frequently a man on his way to seek a job somewhere showed up at our door looking to work for food. Even at my young age I heard about people selling pencils, apples and lots of other small stuff on the street to earn a little money. “Brother can you spare a dime,” a common request even made it into song. The government saw to it that pigs were killed on farms that raised too many and lowered the price of pork. Plowing under crops was done for a similar reason. People where I lived thought such things completely stupid. To add insult to injury great dust storms darkened the sky during drought in the west.

But it was not all bad. It was the heyday of big bands. They played music that had real notes arranged to make melodies that people sang, unlike the pitiful stuff that passes for music today.

Talkies replaced the old silent moving pictures. Movies that made the viewer feel good were the style of the time. Nearly all had a happy ending. Evidently that was the kind that sold well to a depressed public weary of waiting for hard times to end.

Nearly all I can remember of my growing up years happened during the depression when Daddy changed jobs often and my schooling was interrupted in third grade. It seemed that I spent my whole growing up time in school. My favorite part of school was summer vacation. I felt that I had nothing to say about my life when in school. In summer, quite the other way, at least some of the time I could choose the things I did. It was when I got into high school that I began to see the point of school. They finally offered things I liked: science, and mathematics other than arithmetic. And there were other things like singing and football. I think I was glad to be growing up so that I could make my own decisions, and yet I’d miss doing boyish things, Boy Scouts, wading and swimming in the river, climbing the mountainside.

Although Daddy changed jobs often, he was never unemployed, thus he had a steady paycheck, which while not high, kept us on a steady course. We survived the depression learning to use what we had sparingly. Even so, Daddy bought me a bicycle and saw to it that I went to college. My bicycle wasn’t as fancy as my friend Jimmy’s but it ran just as fast.

If I could speak to the child I would simply encourage him to learn to love to read. The child never learned to read well, so he was a slow reader and reading always took too long. He needed practice reading some really interesting short stories. 

Overall I remember my childhood as satisfactory, but not outstanding. I was never abused but always loved by my parents. What more could I ask?