A Depression Thanksgiving
I lived in a family with two sisters, a mother and a father, in northern Indiana. And at Thanksgiving, probably about 1932 to 1934, we were living in a small, basically a one-room bungalow, with an outside toilet. My dad had been in the plastering business and during the Depression the economy shut down all home building, so there was no job for him. On this particular Thanksgiving - I must have been eight or nine years old - we took gunny sacks and went out to the Chesapeake and Ohio railroad and we carried those gunny sacks along the sides of the tracks. At that time all the locomotives were steam engines powered by coal. When those engines would come blowing down with a big train, the tracks would be rough and the coal would fall off of the coal tender, fall off and roll down the side of the track.
We needed coal to heat our house, because we had a coal stove. I remember very clearly the time we went out on that Thanksgiving morning, and my dad took one side of the railroad and I took the other. And then we'd fill up the sack of coal and carry it back to the car, two of three times. Now my sack couldn't be as big as his because I couldn't carry as much, but we had enough doing that for our coal for three or four days, because the kitchen stove could heat up our little house.
Our little house had curtains drawn where my mother and father would sleep and then the kids would sleep in the middle section. Then something happened to my dad that I always thought was very lucky. He was asked if he would be a milk truck driver for the local dairy. Well that was a big step up! First of all he was getting paid $25 a week. You know that was a lot of money, and it was steady. As a result, we were able to move to a real house, and out life began to improve. Slowly, with a lot of hard work on my father's part.
So, really, what we had to find were sources of food and shelter and warmth during the Depression. Fortunately my dad was pretty lucky and resourceful, especially in getting that truck driver's job, and in knowing how to put everything to good use.
