Got My Head Caught In The Train Trestle
The Depression came when I was growing up, I was in the first or second grade. That was when the economy in the United States was very, very, very bad. My father was a house painter and he couldn't paint houses because nobody had any money to pay him. My mother inherited a house that was in shambles in a little town called Mineral City, Ohio, and we moved there. He never painted it; he couldn't afford any paint. It was a mess; it really was. It was a shack. But that's where we lived.
I remember one story when I was six or seven. The railroad track had a big trestle - a trestle is a bridge - that ran for about a mile and a half, it was made out of great big wood logs. And this great big steam engine train would puff down to a steel mill that was below Mineral City, a town of only about 750 people in it. So, some boys and I we were playing hide and seek, and I got down and scooted myself between the logs and the trestle. But when I did, my head was too big to pull it out. And so I hurt my head trying, and it swelled, and then I couldn't get my head out at all.
I screamed bloody murder. Boy did I scream! So my father and my cousin, who lived across the street from us, got a crow bar and pried the logs away so I could get my head out. During all this they had to keep the train from coming down the tracks, and they had to get a repairman out, and it cost my father seven dollars! I'll never forget. He never let me forget, because he didn't have any money, and the seven dollars had to be in cash. So he had to sell some of the ham and some of the beef that he'd gotten from the farmers for painting their barns. That was actually really funny, but boy, did I get a spanking. I got a good one.
