Well, I hardly know how to begin on that one. Going to college was a
challenge, one that I accepted. I don't recall that I ever had any doubt
that I would do so, but finding the means to do so was somewhat
difficult. I can recall that I graduated from high school in 1926, and
though the Great Depression and collapse of the stock market didn't come
until 1929, as you know, nevertheless for the farm economy, the
depression had begun before 1929. Yet my family was quite affluent
insofar as food was concerned and produced just about everything at home
except salt, and pepper, and sugar, and that character of commodity. We
were members of the beef club in which some fourteen, sixteen families
would be together, and each one would contribute a beef at a given
period. The beef was slaughtered and then divided into fourteen or
sixteen parts, or piles, packages, depending upon how many members of
the club there were. Then someone would be blindfolded and turn his back
and somebody would walk up to a stack of beef and
say, "Whose stack is this?" Well, this fellow would say . . . we finally
caught a fellow one time. He'd say, "Whose stack is this?" "Whose stack
is this?" "Whose stack is this?" Somewhere down the line, there would be
an extra large pile, one with some extra good cuts, and he'd say, "And
whose stack is this?" [Laughter] He'd do
that twice during the calling, and it happened that this "and," this
conjunction preceded his pile and the blindfolded man. [Laughter] So, both of them almost got
lynched! [Laughter]
Anyway, in this way we had beef, and we killed our own pork, and cured
our hams. My mother furnished most of the food for the family with
chickens, and eggs, and cows. So we produced our eggs, and our milk, and
our beef, and our pork. My brother was quite good with the rifle, and
later I developed some proficiency and we added to the food for the
family with squirrels and rabbits, now and then a young groundhog and
what we call a white crest chicken hawk, which is marvelous food.
Chicken hawk is, to me, better than turkey. And then of course, my
mother canned everything, I mean everything. She was good. Her food was
excellent. She made kraut, pickles. We had an ash hopper and we burned
wood for a fuel in the stove, the cooking stove and the fireplaces. The
ashes would go into the ash hopper, and with a portion of water; lye
would come from this, and this was used to make soap. There were always
chickens and butter and eggs and most of the time some cream to sell for
the spending money of the family.
The money my father earned went to pay off the mortgage. I don't mean to
say that, I don't mean by saying that my mother was the breadwinner,
that my father was not industrious and diligent. He
was, but his money went to pay off the mortgage and later to store some
small amount of deposits in the bank, our banks, all of which were lost.
Before the crash, he had become uneasy about the soundness of banks, so
his small savings, I think which was in the order, I believe, of about
$8,000, were divided up into deposits in different banks. Either three
or five banks were near our home in different local communities. And
within a few days, all of those banks failed, and he never recovered one
dollar from his savings. So I may be hastening ahead in my answer to
your question to other things, but these, this independent reliance,
this independence of the family had a part in molding my personality and
my philosophy and my attitudes. I knew it was possible to be
self-reliant, to live an independent existence. Not entirely so; we're
all interdependent, but far more so today for most people than for me.
But to advert, I think that these experiences were common to a great
many people, most people in this area. But somehow, I was about the only
young man in my generation from Possum Hollow who went to college or who
seemed to desire to do so.