My parents were raising two boys (my older brothers) during the depression, and besides the horror stories of poverty, I will always be amazed that they maintained their sense of humor. My dad was a farmhand and moved from job to job. They were better off than some. Dad had a team of horses, a wagon and a cow. And chickens. When they moved, they threw their few sticks of furniture in the wagon and tied the cow behind it. Dad tied the chickens’ feet together with binder twine and tossed them in the wagon. “We moved so many times one year that every time I hitched up the team, those chickens would lay down and cross their legs.”
Heaven knows, they needed a sense of humor, plus courage, compassion and ingenuity:
One of the old ‘bos I got to know very well was Arvel “Sunshine” Pearson who began work as a waterboy on an Arkansas strip mine at age 9 — Arvel was sixteen and about to get a job underground when the Depression hit. The next ten years, he bummed his way around the country, never without a sense of humor amid the hardest of times.
One of the stories Sunshine loved to tell happened on a summer day in a small town in Kansas. In his own words:
“I saw a lady sitting in a rocking chair on her porch, fanning herself with a newspaper and trying to keep cool. The train I was riding stopped a short distance away. I hopped off and walked over and asked if I could do a chore for a meal.
‘Son, you can chop me some wood,’ she said. She pointed to a rain barrel that stood out in her yard, ‘When you’ve cut it, throw it in the barrel.’
That lady’s ax was awful dull. I was out there working and sweating, wiping and chopping for 20 minutes and I had about five or six sticks.
I saw the lady was in her kitchen fixing me a meal. When she wasn’t looking, I grabbed the barrel and turned it upside down. I took the sticks and laid them crosswise over it.
The lady came outside. ‘That’s enough, son,’ she said. ‘Come and eat.’
When I took my last mouthful, I said, ‘Lady, I think I hear the train whistle, I’d better be going.’ I jumped off her porch and ran down the tracks. I guess she was frowning on the next hobo that came along.”
Of course, the lessons learned when you have to shift for yourself, are enduring.
To quote “Sunshine:”
“In those days if we got a pound of bologna, we thought we were doing great. When I go to the store today, I pass the bologna and move over to the T-bone steaks. People see me driving a Cadillac and ask, ‘If you were on the road that long, how did you accumulate this?’
“The road taught me that if I made a dollar, I had to save some of it. I used to have a ledger where I put down everything to see how I was progressing. During the 60s and 70s I was saving an average of $5,000 a year.
“That doesn’t sound much today but over the years it mounts up. When you get to where you don’t owe anybody a dime, that’s the best feeling you’ll ever have, if you live to be a hundred years old.”
Arvel lived to be 91, still able to drive himself cross-country only a few years before he passed away.
LOLOLOL - and the pigs were honking the horn...
My Dad used to tell us stories, I could sit and listen for hours. He was an infant when it all started.