I showed him the same kind of bulbs in my shelves which I was selling at 15 cents. He looked at them and said, "I didn"t know you sold light bulbs. You mean you sell them for 15 cents?"
I told him, "Yes, they cost me 8 cents, and I"ve got to make a little profit on them to stay in business."
Of course, we laughed at Wes, and he laughed with us, for thinking he had found such a big bargain at Sweet.w.a.ter, and had overlooked a bigger bargain right at home.
This shop work went on for about three months. Then one day it rained and I closed up shop and went back to farming. Instead of working at a dollar a day, I cleared about $3 a day in the shop.
CHAPTER 17
WORLD WAR II WAS ON-WE WENT TO CALIFORNIA
Well, the Great Depression was not something we would want to live through again, but all in all it wasn"t so bad. We were broke, but then, so were our neighbors. We had plenty to eat and wear-and we had each other. The lean years seemed to bring us even closer together; we had to stay together, we didn"t have enough money to go our separate ways. And of course we had our children.
Dennis was ten and Anita was eight when Larry became one of the family in 1942. And then when he was six weeks old, the little tyke almost left us for good. He was one sick little baby. We took him to a chiropractor who gave him adjustments and told us to feed him goat"s milk. I drove all over the country looking for a goat that was giving milk. After finding one I kept looking for more goats that would be giving milk after the first one stopped. It took awhile, but then I found a man with a whole herd of goats. He didn"t need them because he was going to war, so we bought all twelve of them.
When we sold out a year later and went to California to get into war work, we bought goat"s milk on the way out there and for eight months after we got there. In El Paso we bought milk from a man who owned a herd of registered goats. He sold goats for as much as $80 each. The ones we had at Royston were of the $4 variety. I was glad the El Paso milk wasn"t registered; we couldn"t have afforded it.
Bill Carriker, a neighbor at Royston, said Larry was sure going to be mad when he grew up and learned that his mama had been a goat.
When our two oldest kids were little bitty kids, and we had this two-holer off down there under the shade of a mesquite tree, Ima said to me one day, "I wish you would go down there and peep and see what those kids are doing. They"ve been in there a long time. No telling what they"re doing in there."
I peeped, all right, and found them just sitting there, doing their thing and talking with each other.
As our country got deeper into World War II, the quality of kerosene went way down. It didn"t burn well enough in our Servel refrigerator to make the box cold, and it left a lot of soot on the wick. So I mixed white gasoline with the kerosene to bring the quality back up. I told my neighbors the good news but they were afraid to mix the gasoline in. So they suffered with warm refrigerators while we enjoyed cold luxury. Again I was out front, but my neighbors thought I was crazy.
We heated our Royston home with oil. It was much more convenient than wood. And although we had plenty of wood, the oil proved to be cheaper than hauling and bothering with the wood.
We had an oil heating stove that heated all four rooms of our house. It would burn used lube oil with just a little kerosene mixed with it. Some filling stations in Hamlin saved their used oil for us. We lighted our heater in the fall and didn"t shut it off until spring. I kept an expense account one winter and our entire fuel bill was $12.
By 1940 the price of cream was up and a year later it was up even more. We had a lot of cows that gave a little milk each, and we already had a cream separator. So we bought a gasoline engine to run the separator and I started milking the cows and selling cream. That paid so well that we started feeding the cows more and selling more cream. Our cream was bringing three dollars a day and we were feeding the skim milk to hogs that were gaining two dollars a day. Oh boy! The depression seemed to be over for us. But it turned out that this business had another side to it. The work was killing us.
I sat there milking by hand three hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon, and the weather was hot. By the time I had milked those twenty cows, I could almost swim in my own sweat. When I walked I could hear it squash in my shoes; and I smelled so bad I had to bathe before the tractor would let me get close to it. There was only one good thing about it; it beat maize hauling ten to one.
While I was milking one cow, Anita was feeding the next one and getting her ready to be milked, Dennis was carrying milk to the house and pouring it into the separator which was being driven by the gasoline engine, and Ima was filling in here and there and keeping house and seeing after Larry.
The kids always wanted me to milk Old Pet last. They could ride her out of the pen and up by the house as she went on her way to the field to graze. They got a free ride home and Old Pet didn"t mind. She wouldn"t pitch nor run, but just walk as though there were no kids around.
But there was one day Anita fell off Old Pet. They were riding the cow in the cow lot after a rain and the lot was boggy and messy. Dennis was in front and Anita was on behind him. The cow started under a low shed and Dennis realized that he would be dragged off it he didn"t do something. There was no way to stop the cow nor turn her, so Dennis did something all right. He grabbed hold of a joist above his head to avoid being dragged off into the filth below. Meantime, since Anita was behind Dennis, she couldn"t reach anything to hold onto, so she was forced off backward and landed in a sitting position, momentarily, until she lost her balance and fell backward in six inches of cow-lot slush.
Guess what Ima thought when Anita got to the house. She could hardly recognize her little girl, but she could tell where her little girl had been. The evidence was not all on her back. She had to roll over on her stomach to get up and out, so her front and her long hair had quite a bit of evidence on them also.
Experimenting had taught us that cows would do almost as well grazing sudan gra.s.s a couple of hours in the morning and a couple of hours in the afternoon, as they would if they grazed all day, and the grazing would last twice as long. So when the weather was dry and grazing was scarce, we would drive the cows out and close the gate after a couple of hours grazing each morning. Then we would turn them back in at four o"clock in the afternoon. But this presented a problem. We were not always home at four in the afternoon. What could we do about that? Let the alarm clock turn them in, of course. And that is what we did. I rigged it up and it worked perfectly. It opened the gate a lot better than it built the fire in the wood heater many years before.
We had no electricity on the farm until 1949. Before that time rural electricity was only a promise of better things to come. Sometimes the summer heat teamed up with the lack of a breeze to make the weather almost unbearable. But since I wasn"t very well known in Washington at that time, and since I wasn"t personally acquainted with my congressmen, I didn"t ask them for an air conditioning unit. Instead, I did what I could on my own. I took the gas engine from the cream separator and put it on an oil drum outside one window. Then I put a large fan blade on the shaft, aimed it toward a window, cranked it up and let it blow air through the window and all through the house. It was far short of air conditioning like we have today, but it was a lifesaver sometimes, and it wasn"t inflationary.
Now, all this hard work, dry weather, inconveniences, and low farm wages got us to wondering if we might be missing something. So in the fall of 1943 we toyed with the idea of getting into war work. Later the toying became a definite plan which led to the purchase of a travel trailer. In November we stored our furniture, left our farm machinery for Earl to sell, and headed for California. We knew some folks who had gone to California from Royston and they told us to come on out, the wages were fine. We called it war work, but its purpose was twofold, to help produce the weapons of war and to help the Clarence Johnsons make more money faster. But getting into war work wasn"t all that easy.
Before I could work at any job I had to get a release from farming, because farming was an essential industry in the total effort toward winning the war. I went to the Sweet.w.a.ter Employment Agency Office and they couldn"t give me a release. They sent me to the Abilene office, and Abilene didn"t have the authority to grant me a release either. They told me I would have to go to the Sweet.w.a.ter office. I told them that Sweet.w.a.ter had sent me to Abilene. Then they told me I would have to go to Dallas.
But I didn"t go to Dallas, I went home. I figured that Dallas might send me to Chicago and Chicago might send me to Washington, and I didn"t want to go to Washington. I kept hoping someone would send me to Los Angeles, because that"s where I wanted to go. But they didn"t. So we got ready and headed for California anyway. Crazy, you say? Sure, most of my friends thought so, too. But I knew what I was doing. I was backing my judgment and going out on my own again, like building a tractor, like repairing a motor bearing, like not letting Federal Offices shove me around.
Every town of any size had an Employment Agency. Every Agency had the authority to grant a permit to work. All I needed was to qualify for a permit. They called the permit an availability slip. And without the slip, no one could hire me. They didn"t want people switching from job to job. They wanted all of us to stay put and produce goods to win the war. Now, I was producing about enough on the farm to feed my family. And I figured most any of my neighbors could make the old farm produce that much while I was away. That"s one reason we headed west.
We stopped somewhere west of Hamlin and east of California and I applied for a permit. They handed me a form and I filled it out. But, since I was a farmer, they couldn"t release me and give me a work slip. So, what now, go back? Certainly not. California was west and that"s where we were going. We never could get there by turning back.
So we drove on westward and I tried another office. I filled out a form just like the one before, only this time I knew not to be a farmer. This time I was a welder, self employed. Now, actually that was no fib. Many of my friends back home would tell you I was a better welder than I was a farmer. In fact, I was better at a lot of things than I was at farming. I was a lousy farmer.
Welding rated high in war work, so I had no trouble getting the work slip this time. Now we could go on to California without looking for Employment Agencies.
At Vega Aircraft in Burbank they wanted me to build boxes. But welding paid more money, so I went to an employment agency looking for a welding job. They said they had no welding jobs open at present, I would have to wait until one opened up. I asked if I could go on out to Vega and build boxes, but they told me welding was a much higher skill and I would not be allowed to work below my highest skill. Then I asked the man, "What do I do while I am waiting, starve to death?" He didn"t know about that, but he knew I could not take the box-building job. And that"s when I told him, "That"s what you think, you just come along with me and watch me." I went out to Vega the next day and signed up and went to work.
At Royston labor was a dollar a day, out here I was making $12.35 a day. Then after a few days, Ima told me I would have to take off from work and help her get the kids started in school. I told her that if she couldn"t do that without me, we didn"t have any business in California.
After thinking it over a few days, we decided that Ima and the kids might be a lot better off back home in Texas. So, I quit my job and asked for my availability slip, but they wouldn"t give it to me. So I took my family to Texas without it. Lucky for me, I had a pocket full of gasoline ration coupons left over from farming, and I knew how to get another work slip. I was still a welder and had not been employed in war work as a welder. When I applied again for an availability slip, I didn"t have to tell a fib, I only withheld some of the truth.
I left Ima and the kiddos at Hamlin and I drove on to Orange, Texas, to work at ship building. I signed on as a welder and of course they took my availability slip. Then after that, the welding foreman told me they didn"t need welders, and I learned that I would have to work at common labor at about half the pay. I told them, "No, thanks. How do I get out of this place?" The gates were locked and I couldn"t get out to go to the office until noon. That was fine with me. I had my work badge on and I could go anywhere I wanted to. I made like a VIP and had a holiday. I figured no one would stop me, and even if they did, they couldn"t fire me because I wasn"t working. I made a two- hour tour of the shipyard, saw everything and answered to no one.
At noon I went back to the office where they had fibbed to me and asked for my availability slip, but they wouldn"t return it. I asked, "Where is the next man higher up?" They showed me his office and I told him my story. But he was not impressed and he could not return my slip either. Then I asked him who was the top man. By this time I was tired of going up step by step. He told me and I went to see him and told him the same story. It was easy to tell by now, I had it memorized word for word. I told the same story and got the same results. Finally I told him, "It looks like you fellows want my slip more than I do. Okay, you can keep it. I"m going to California and go to work at a better job." He warned me that I would get into trouble and couldn"t get a job without the slip. But I told him to just come along and watch me, I"d show him.
I drove back through Hamlin and took Ima and the kids to San Angelo. They stayed there with Ima"s folks and I went to California alone.
At the employment office in California, I told the lady I didn"t want to get into trouble, so I wanted to tell her the whole story and then ask her what I should do. She told me that wouldn"t be necessary, and added, "Texas and California are two different countries; I"ll give you another slip. We need you out here." I took the slip-my third one-and went back to work at the same job at Vega, through the same office where they kept my first slip when I quit and went back to Texas. I gave them this new slip and I guess they were happy, now they had two of my slips. Anyway, I went back to building boxes for them.
All that running around had cost me quite a bit of money. I needed to make up for some of the loss so I worked ten hours a day at my regular job, got off at five in the afternoon, ate supper at the company cafe, drove seven miles and went to work at another plant that belonged to the same company. This second job paid time-and-a-half, and I could work an hour or all night, they didn"t care which. The work was there to be done and laborers were scarce. I usually worked until ten o"clock and got to bed by eleven, so I wouldn"t lose too much sleep. However, on Sat.u.r.days I worked all night.
Then one day I got this telegram from Ima that read something like this, "Can you meet me at the Union Depot on Thursday, March 19th at 5:45?"
Well, on my way down to my other place of work I had noticed a telegraph office. So I stopped in one afternoon and sent Ima a reply. After all, she had asked a question; the least I could do was to answer it. But I didn"t see any need to send her a long message. I figured we could talk with each other after she got to California.
Now, if her telegram had said, "Meet me at a certain place at a certain time on a certain day, I could have replied, "Okay." But since she put it in the form of a question, I replied, "Yes."
I wrote her name at the top of the form, my name at the bottom, and handed it to the man behind the Counter. He looked at it, and then he read it, which didn"t take long, and turned to me and asked, "Is this all?"
I told him, "Yes, that"s enough."
And it proved to be plenty because, on that appointed day at the appointed hour and at the appointed place, here came that woman with those three kiddos, and they all looked mighty good to me.
I don"t think I ever got around to telling Ima how proud I was of her for having learned so fast. Only three short months before, she couldn"t take three kids to school a few miles away in Burbank. Now she had learned how to take those same three kids halfway across this big nation of ours.
When they returned to Burbank, Larry was just a bit over a year old and mighty spoiled. Remember, he had been sick when he was very young, and I have yet to see a sick little baby who doesn"t become spoiled. He would cry at the drop of a hat, and when it was time for him to sleep, Ima would have to rock him to sleep. He had no intention of going to sleep without being rocked. Then she would try to get him down on the bed without waking him. She failed more times than not. And after each failure the rocking had to be done all over again.
Larry also gave Ima trouble in other ways. When supper was ready, she had trouble getting him to come in and eat. And when she finally got him in, he would fuss and cry while she washed his hands and face and got his food from the stove to his plate. Then they would have another fuss-and-cry battle at bedtime. She could never get him to go to bed without crying and having to be rocked.
Then Ima went to work at Lockheed Aircraft during the summer. Her hours were from four until midnight. So it became my job to get Larry in, get him to eat, and get him to bed. Now, I had heard that, in order to train a dog, you have to know more than the dog. And I figured the same was true with training little boys. And I also figured I was smarter than most any little kid 18 months old. So the first thing I did was shift most of the responsibility to Larry. I didn"t try to get him in, I didn"t try to get him to eat, and I didn"t try to get him to go to bed. I reasoned that he would come in when he wanted to, eat when he was hungry, and sleep when he was sleepy. In short, I left him alone.
We lived in a trailer park. And when all the other kids were called in at night, Larry found no pleasure in playing alone, so he came in out of the dark. And he didn"t fuss while I put his food on his plate. I knew when he was coming in for supper. I could hear all the other kids going home, and I had his supper on his plate ready for him when he got there. When he came in through the door. I would wipe his hands and face with a wet cloth. Usually I was through with that little ch.o.r.e before he had time to cry. Then I would tell him to climb up there and eat it. That is, I told him the first day; after that he didn"t have to be told. He ate like a horse because by that late hour he was half starved.
At bedtime Anita and Dennis would go to bed in our trailer, and Larry and I would be left alone in our cabin. I knew what was coming next so I was prepared. I beat him to the punch, so there was no fussing at bedtime either. And not one time did I ever have to rock him to sleep or tell him it was time to go to bed.