Dear Family,

Couple of weeks back a comment wafted up from down Texas way to the effect that "Sounds like all those folks did in those days was work." Well, no, we didn't, not quite, but the Puritan ethic was pretty strong. Basic was the tenet, If you don't work, you don't eat. Consider for a minute: there was no social security, no health insurance, no Medicare, no workman's compensation or unemployment compensation, no retirement or pension plans, no welfare or workfare, no government support or aid programs of any kind. Oh, there was a county poor farm, but that was the absolutely last resort. Unless you were rich or owned profitable investments (and there weren't too many of them after the stock market crash in 1929), work provided for food and shelter and clothes and everything else, and if you were at all prudent you put some part of your earnings away for the time when you couldn't work (and if you stashed it away in a bank you may well have lost that when the banks failed). Beyond your own resources there was only the charity of family and friends. You might say that folks worked scared, only it didn't seem that way.

Working was not onerous, just a natural thing to do. Parents worked, as did siblings, and all your peers, and you wanted to be like them. For kids, one measure of growing up was the kind of jobs you did and the amount of responsibility you were given. Getting your first steady, wage-paying job was a major milestone, like getting your first pair of long pants.

I mentioned before that I was given household chores to do as far back as I can remember - laying fires in the cookstove, helping with the cleaning and the garden, running errands, and later, mowing the lawn, washing the car, shoveling snow - for which I received an allowance of five cents a week to begin with more or less regular raises. But I also did similar jobs for some of the neighbors. By chance, we were surrounded by single-women households. Our next-door neighbor on the west was Mrs. Lucy Button, a widow, who provided board and room for single ladies, mainly school teachers. In the summer, she would visit her brother and rent her house to some of the race track people who came for the summer racing season at our four nearby thoroughbred tracks. Usually it was a family surnamed Nugent whose home was in New Orleans. They were very nice people and we learned that racing folk were not the touts and sharpies of legend, but common ordinary people who chose racing as their livelihood. They always had passes to the tracks, and we were welcome to go with them to watch the early morning workouts, provided we got up at 4:00 AM. Our next-door neighbor on the east was Mrs. Emma Button (not related to Mrs. Lucy Button), also a widow, who provided room and board for single men. One of her long-time boarders was Mr. McKee, a barber who had a glass eye, but who also like to fish and sometimes took me fishing with him. Directly behind Mrs. Emma Button's house, and facing on May Court was the residence of Miss Carie Cole, a spinster lady who was "getting along in years." She was a hair dresser (we had no salons or beauty parlors, then) and plied her trade in what would normally have been her dining room. She also possessed a patented electrical contrivance about the size of a portable sewing machine that was guaranteed to cure baldness, so she had a steady trade of bald-headed men. Directly across May Court was Mrs. May Van Valkenberg, another widow, whose husband had been killed when a farm tractor tipped over on him. Next to her on the west, and thus across from our garden, lived Mrs. Emma Niece. Didn't know too much about her. She regarded everyone with suspicion and boys with complete distrust. She was not my favorite customer. She watched every move with an eagle eye and critically inspected the results. As I grew older, I mowed lawns and weeded and such for people in other parts of town, but there was always plenty of time for swimming and fishing and baseball and just "fooling around" with the other kids. The nickels and dimes and sometimes quarters I earned went into the chrome-plated coin bank purchased for the Chagrin Falls Bank, and to which they held the only key. When it was full, we took it to the bank and watched closely as the teller unlocked it, counted out the coins, posted the total in my pass book, and returned it, locked, to be filled again. When the Chagrin Falls Bank failed to reopen after President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Bank Holiday in 1933, my savings, and everyone else's were gone. There was no FCDIC or FSLIC back then. Later the bank's assets were bought by one of the Cleveland banks that survived, and eventually I received five or ten cents on the dollar.

When I was, I think, fifteen, I got my first full-time wage-paying job working for the summer at Lowe's Greenhouse & Nursery in a crew with my brother and several friends. Mr. Lowe raised flowers, outdoors in the summer and in the greenhouses in the winter. Once a week he would get up extra early, load his panel truck with pails of cut flowers, and drive into Cleveland to sell them at the wholesale market. Our work consisted of removing the depleted soil from the greenhouse beds and replacing it with well-rotted manure and fresh dirt, one basketful at a time, and weeding and cultivating the outdoor fields. Mr. Lowe introduced tuberous begonias into the U.S. He discovered them while in Belgium with the army in World War I, and after the war arranged for the importation of some tubers and for a visit by one of the Belgian growers and even lectured at Ohio State University. But tuberous begonias were pretty delicate and boys weren't allowed near them. We worked six days a week, ten hours a day from 7:00 AM to 5:30 PM with half an hour for lunch. The pay was twenty cents an hour and every Saturday evening I went home with twelve dollars cash in my pocket, no deductions for social security or taxes or any of that nonsense (and no concern for minimum wages or child labor laws, either). I kept a dollar for spending money and gave the rest to my mother. I worked there for one or two years, then got a job as a clerk in Fisher Brothers grocery store on Main Street next to Brewster & Church Co. where Dad worked.

Chagrin Falls was the shopping center for the whole area, and Saturday was the big shopping day. The stores were open from about 7:30 AM until 6:00 PM, except on Wednesday when they closed at noon and Saturday when they stayed open until 10::00 PM or later if customers were still coming in. Dad worked those hours and more. Since he was pretty much in charge of the whole store, he spent a lot of evenings, and sometimes Sunday afternoon, working on accounts or inventory or orders or even tending the furnaces when they were between custodians. Saturday was when the farm folk came to shop, and the town folk turned out to look at them. It was about the only interesting event in the whole week, short of a fire or a runaway truck on one of the hills. Most of the townspeople shopped a little bit very day, partly because they walked to the stores and carried their purchases home, and partly because they didn't have much storage, and partly because it was something to do. They had no problem extrapolating that to Saturday when there were a lot of different faces to look at. Trouble was, they ran out of shopping long before they ran out of looking and just walking around was tiring. So, they brought their cars downtown early in the day when choice parking places were available, parked them and locked them, and walked home; to return in evening, unlock their cars and sit in them to watch the passing parade. This brought confrontation with the merchants who wanted those parking places available for their farm customers who drove in on Saturday to do a whole week's worth of shopping. The problem never was resolved.

Fisher Brothers grocery, Krogers, and A & P all moved in about the same time to replace the owner-operated groceries, and all three were very much alike. Our Fisher Brother store was maybe thirty feet wide by one hundred feet deep. Flanking the front door were display windows to showcase our wares. Entering the front door, on the right was a wooden counter extending the whole length of the public area with shelves behind stacked with dry and canned goods. Entering, on the left, was first the fresh produce section manned by a produce clerk and extending about half way to the back, and beyond that was the meat counter with two butchers in attendance. Across the far end was the dairy counter, and behind that the cold storage, the manager's office, and the storeroom. Back of the grocery counter four or five of us clerks eagerly awaited your custom. When you, the customer, came in, you might glance at the produce but you presented yourself to one of the clerks at the counter, me, who was poised with order book in one hand and pencil in the other (we had to furnish our own pencils). You read your grocery list, I copied it in my order book, then tore around the store gathering the ordered items and stacking them on the counter for your inspection. When your order was assembled, I entered the cost of each item, totaled the prices, took your money, rang up the transaction, and gave you your change. Now if you were a townsperson who walked to the store, you put your purchases in your shopping bag and walked home. If, however, you drove to the store from outside the village, you probably purchased supplies for a week, and then I packed them and carried them to your car (no tips, please). We had paper grocery bags and the manager schooled us in packing them right to the top with no wasted space, but he discouraged their use ("bags cost money") in favor of using empty cardboard cartons that originally contained corn flakes or soup and would be discarded anyway. I remember one hot summer morning when a customer came in and ordered two hundred pounds of sugar, and nothing more. I completed the transaction, drafted another clerk to help, we each shouldered a hundred pound sack and followed the man to his car, except he couldn't remember where he left it. We paraded south along Main Street, then paraded back north, then we crossed and tried the other side, and with every step the sun got hotter and that sugar got heavier. Of course we found it eventually, but Smitty and I didn't think the whole episode was half as funny as that customer did. We decided he was one of the local bootleggers who had been sampling his own product. On Saturday, as I said, we worked from 7:00 AM to nominally 10:00 PM with two half-hour breaks for meals ("and get back sooner if you can"). Then we had about an hour's cleanup. We stored the fresh produce in the cold locker and scrubbed the shelves, pulled the window display and scrubbed the shelves, dusted and swept the whole store, put new display in the front windows, restocked dry goods, and covered as much as we could with dust cloths. After fifteen hours on the job, we were free to trudge our weary way home, but we didn't. Heck no, we went up to the paper mill pond and went swimming, skinny-dipping at midnight, and playing hide-and-seek under the tree roots along the shore. I worked at Fisher Brothers for a summer or two plus Saturdays during the school year, and then went to work in a Standard Oil service station on the corner of Main and Washington Streets just below our house.

Then sometimes on Wednesday afternoons or Sundays I did a spot of chauffeuring, after I got my driver's license of course. Our dentist, Dr. Donald Stem, who owned his own airplane frequently found that that airplane was somewhere other than where he wanted it, so we would drive there and I would return his car while he flew back. Despite my many hints, he never did give me a ride in that aircraft. Dr. Stem's mother-in-law, old Mrs. Austin Church, widow of one of the founders of the Brewster & Church Co., liked to go for rides about the countryside. She had a big Buick sedan but she didn't drive it herself, so I often drove for her. She was a very pleasant person, and it was she who gave me, upon my high school graduation, a ceramic elephant, which I recently passed on to certain Republican Party luminaries in the Dallas area. I also drove for a Mr. Norris, an architect, who liked to visit the older towns in northeast Ohio to study their early architecture.

Our Standard Oil service station was just a small station in a small town, but it was in an excellent location and did, as they said, "a land office business," due to the manner in which it was run. We had just two sets of gasoline pumps and two service bays, both with lifts, but six of us worked there and we all kept busy all day long. The manager, Mr. Nelson Hills, known as "Tuckeye" had firm rules and was a strict disciplinarian, but he was probably the best boss I ever had. Why? His rules were objective and sensible. He worked us hard but he worked just as hard and right alongside us doing the same things we did. And he was fair. That station made a lot of money. The first thing Mr. Hills insisted on was neatness and cleanliness. We wore uniforms, clean uniforms: gray shirt with a leather black bow tie, black pants and shoes, billed cap, and a black jacket for inclement weather - all of which we purchased from the company, and washed at home. The restrooms were the cleanest in town; inspected and tidied after every use, and mopped at least six times a day, oftener in wet weather. The service bays were cleaned after every use; tools and equipment properly stowed, spills wiped up, lifts and floors swept and mopped. Sometimes on a busy Saturday we would use a service bay twice before stopping to clean it, even with customers lined up and waiting. Outdoors, the curbs were freshly painted, the grass freshly clipped, the windows freshly washed, and at least once a summer we washed the exterior of the whole building. No one ever stepped on a spot of oil or a gob of grease on our pavement. Mr. Hills wanted two of us to attend each customer, as far as possible; one at the driver's window to greet and take his/her order, check under the hood, and clean the windshield, and one to pump in gasoline and visually inspect the tires. Our customers were predominantly local people, although we also had a surprising number of out-of-owners who regularly drove past on U.S. Route 422. We courted repeat business from all of them, learned their names and their preferences. Some of the older people wanted no one but Mr. Hills himself to service their cars, and he was happy to drop whatever he was doing and accommodate them with a smile and a cheerful word. We kept them coming back.

The second summer I worked there, the manager asked if I was willing to take over the late shift, so that the other attendants, all of whom were married, could go home to their families. From about 8:30 PM on I worked all alone with instructions to keep the station open as long as I was selling enough to cover the overhead. Usually I closed around 11:00 PM, except on Saturdays and nights when the Cleveland Indians played a night ball game at home. On the nights there was a ball game, I could count on a flurry of business as the fans from Warren and other points east made their way home. And on those nights, Mr. Hills would drive by slowly, and, if I had customers backed up and waiting, he would park his car and jump right in and help. Most nights, though, it was quiet, and about the only other person stirring was our police officer. At that time, the night officer was Frank Simmons a good friend about my brother's age, and a gregarious sort. He and I shared a common trait, neither of us could float. When the WPA built our municipal swimming pool, lots of us wanted to be lifeguards, but first we had to pass the Red Cross Life saving course which required that we be able to float. Try as we could, neither Frank nor I could float - we would follow the instructions meticulously and slowly sink to the bottom. As night officer, Frank didn't have much to do and frequently stopped in the station to chat, or parked the police car across the street by the park an sat on one of the benches. After I closed up, I would join him on the park bench and usually be invited to ride along as he drove his rounds, just for company.

My brother stayed on at Lowe's Greenhouse & Nursery for several years, and when he wasn't needed there "helped out" at the Buick garage. Then he worked at the Brewster & Stroud Co., a furniture store, as warehouseman, truck driver, and salesman, until he was drafted into the army in 1941. Mother and Grandma took care of the house; cooked and baked, washed and ironed, cleaned, "put up" fruits and vegetables in season, and in the afternoons went visiting or shopping or entertained the aunts and cousins who dropped in . And so we filled our days, but what about the evenings?

Dad, in addition to tending the store, was an active and loyal member of the local Masonic lodge and the local Kiwanis club, and faithfully attended their meetings. He was a trustee for our cemetery and, later for our Chagrin Falls Savings & Loan and both involved more evening meetings, so he wasn't home too much after supper. When he was, he might read the newspapers (we received two Cleveland papers and the local weekly) or a hunting and fishing magazine, or occasionally go down in the cellar and build a birdhouse or a feeder.

Mother and Grandma were never idle. You remember those nuts we gathered in the fall and put to dry in the upper attic? We brought them down, finished shucking them, and then they had to be cracked and the nutmeats extracted for baking and cooking and sometimes eating as is. Hickory nuts were cracked with a hinged nut cracker, but butternuts and walnuts were too large. Of these, we brought in old cast iron flatiron from the woodshed, placed them upside down on our laps, laid a nut on top and rapped it smartly with a small hammer. Mostly, though, they sewed. Mother mended and darned, and sometimes did needlework of one kind or another. Grandma worked on rag rugs and quilts. Which she made depended somewhat on the raw matrial at hand, the quantity and kind of discarded clothes and other fabric goods that had accumulated in the rag bags (actually recycled paper flour sacks). If the decision was to make a rug, pieces were cut into strips, the strips sewed together end-to-end, and the sewn strips rolled into balls, then the selected number of strips braided tightly and the braids arranged in a flat coil and sewed together. Voila! A rag rug.

A quilt was a major project but they usually made one each winter. First, came selection of a pattern, dictated somewhat by color, type, and quality of goods at hand, and this often involved trading with relatives and friends and trips to the Brewster & Church Co. to check out the remnants of yard goods available there. These were patchwork quilts and many evenings were devoted to cutting the intricate pieces, sewing them into blocks, and ultimately sewing the blocks into a panel. The quilting frame was brought down from the attic, adjusted tosize, and laid across the backs of four straight chairs in the front room. The quilting frame resembled the curtain stretcher but without those finger-pricking pins. A white sheet for backing was stretched tight and firmly basted to the frame. Then a layer of cotton batting was spread evenly for filler, and the top panel stretched and basted to the frame. The quilting pattern was marked with a taut string soaked in a mixture of flour and water. Now the aunts and cousins came with purpose and all sat and quilted as they visited, and each took pride in the neatness and evenness of her stitching. My brother and I liked to play under the frame, pretending it was a cave. Sometimes, though, our presence apparently inhibited the gossip, at least we would hear the admonition "Little pitchers have big ears." The finished quilt would be proudly displayed and much admired before finally being lovingly folded and stored, usually to serve as a future wedding gift. Those quilts also served as scrapbooks of momentoes. From time to time they would be taken out and the provenance of each piece fondly recalled: "That blue there, that's from that skirt of Gertrude's, and this yellow here, that's from my old summer shirtwaist." When Mother sold our old home and its furnishings, she kept, and always kept with her, a large wooden chest packed with the homemade quilts. But when she died, the chest and quilts were nowhere to be found. According to my brother, they disappeared very suddenly and search as we might we never found a clue to their fate.

I told earlier how we burned coal in our furnace in the winter, and we also burned cordwood harvested on the Little Farm. Some Sunday afternoons in January and February when the ground was frozen, Dad and my brother and I would load our car with crosscut saws (we had both one-man and two-man saws), axes (both cutting and splitting axes), and maybe a splitting maul, drive up to Lowe's Greenhouse & Nursery where we would leave the car, shoulder our tools and head into the woods. Dad would select a tree to cut, usually a pig nut or pig hickory as we called them. He would carefully calculate where it would fall, and then drive a stake in the ground and assure us that the tree would fall exactly on top of that stake, and quite often it did or near enough anyway. We would hang our outer jackets on branches or sticks to make a windbreak, build a little fire in front, and Dad and my brother would fell the tree. Then, with the two-man saw, they would begin cutting the trunk to lengths for burning. I had a small axe and with it would lop off limbs. Some of the smaller branches fed our fire but most were piled up to hopefully provide winter shelter for the wild things. Before dusk, we would have the tree cut, split, and stacked, and the brush cleaned up. The next summer when the ground was firm, cousin Dick Burnett would load it onto his wagon or later his truck and bring it into town. We would stack it in the coal bin, another chore for the by, me, and burn it along with the coal. Dad was expert with axes and saws, as he was in many thing, and he pounded into us the correct and safe ways to use them. Any carelessness, no matter how slight, earned a solid clop alongside my head.

Back at the beginning, I said that there were no welfare or workfare programs and this was true until the federal government instituted the WPA (Works Progress Administration), CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps), and PWA (Public Works Administration) in the 1930s. These programs were a boon to many unemployed people, and they did accomplish a lot of good things. A lot of the folks who signed on were a bit uncomforable at taking the government' money, sort of as if it was an admission that they were not able to provide for themselves. Then, too, there was concern that the federal government was going into debt to finance these programs. I chanced to be in the Buick garage one day when our Congressman George Bender happened by (he lived just outside the village) and several men voiced their concern to him. I still recall his answer; "Yes, but who do we owe it to? We owe it to ourselves, so don't worry." Mr. Bender was an able politician and was reelected regularly for years. He was of course a Republican.

So, yes, people spent a good bit of time working, but it was not only from necessity, they also took pride in their work and the optional tasks served tofill in some of the hours before bedtime. We had no television, of course, and no one jumped into their car to go shopping or to a movie. School activities and social events were few and far between. I don't remember ever seeing Dad or Mother or Grandma read a book. But we never felt that we were disadvantaged, and there were plenty of good times but I can see that that will take a bit of explaining, in another letter.

Love,

Dad

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