Chapter 8
BACK IN FULTON COUNTY
1935 - 1937
Work was picking up with the worst of the depression over. There was a demand for dump trucks for road construction for the Public Works Administration (WPA). The WPA was set up by President Roosevelt to provide work for those unemployed in the depression of the 1930's. The work was of a wide variety, involving road and bridge building, as well as clean up work and many other kinds of work.
The Roosevelt Administration also had set up CCC Camps for young men who were out of work. The CCC Camps provided room and board and a small wage. The involved a wide variety of jobs also.
Don had never really cared for sawmill work, and bought a dump truck, believing he could be successful in this endeavor. It was a mistake. The truck was worse than the sawmill for breakdowns. We had all managed to get through the depression with our mills, being proud that we were able to stay off welfare. At one time, there had been seven mills in our family.
Our first move back to Fulton County was to a small community called London Mills. Don was hauling gravel for a road construction job in the area. We stored part of our furniture at Don's folks until the Fall of 1935. In the Fall, we moved just a short distance away to Fairview. This is where Bob first started school.
That winter Don and another man worked at a small coal mine, which they mined alone and used their own trucks to haul the coal. We had sold our cow, and I bought milk at 3 quarts for 25 cents. We had a large garden and I did lots of canning. My washer had been stored during this time, which meant I had to wash clothes on a scrub board. I was really happy when we finally moved the rest of our furniture, including our washer, to our home. Don used to make ice cream with the ice cream freeqer. Since our washing machine was now electric, he could not use the gasoline engine on the washing machine to run the ice cream freezer. He changed his method by jacking up the wheel on the truck and running the freezer with the truck engine running and spinning the wheel of the truck. He placed the freezer near enough to the to the truck wheel to connect to the wheel to connect to the wheel he had installed on the freezer to replace the crank that had been on it. It was Don's own invention, which took only ten to fifteen minutes to freeze the two gallon freezer of ice cream.
While we lived at Fairview, the boys grew big enough to do things. Bob had a wonderful first grade teacher. Schools did not have kindergarten. Bob had a speech difficulty, brought on by an ear infection, as he talked plain before it. We always had to get an idea of the subject Bob was talking about before we could understand him. I will admit Bob was placed in the back row for music lessons, but in the front row for drawing lessons because his pictures showed imagination. His first grade teacher taught phonics and by Christmas, anyone could understand him. It was such a pleasure to have Bob talking as good as anyone. The children all loved their teacher, but they would not be having her again, as she was married during the summer, and married teachers were not allowed to teach school then.
The following year, Bob was in second grade, and had a very poor teacher. Bob told her he did not need to learn his arithmetic, because he was going to be a truck driver like his daddy. It took don two evenings to show Bob how he used arithmetic with his truck driving. Bob went back to school willing to learn arithmetic.
Joe came to visit shortly after we had moved to Fairview. He stopped to ask some young boys if they knew where we lived. He told them it was the family that had a little boy without any hair. The boys quickly responded with, "Yes, they live right across the road from us." Joe told them that we had to cut the little boy's hair all off because he was such a fighter. Those boys never did come across the road to our house while we lived there.
I was having trouble getting Ray to eat his oatmeal. I told him, "You have to eat it if you want to be big like your dad." He answered with, "I don't want to be big like Daddy. I want to get big like the grocery store man." This man was six feet four inches tall. Ray never did get quite that tall, though he did grow to be a taller man than his dad. Our boys both took their size form the Kaler side of the family.
In the fall of 1936 Don tried to get back at the factory at Canton. They would not rehire him because he had quit his job there before. I don't know how we managed those two years at Fairfield. The local garage man at Fairfield offered Don a job. He wanted Don and his friend who worked with him in the coal mine to drive a semi for him. Don and this fellow went to Chicago to investigate the job, and found it was to haul whiskey from Chicago to Detroit. It was after the prohibition and it was not illegal, but it would have been a dangerous job. They would have had an armed guard riding with them and one in the car following. Don never told me the details of the job except that he would be gone several days at a time. I told him I did not want to raise the boys by myself in town. It was no effort to persuade him to refuse it.
Shortly after this, Joe, who lived at Smithfield, told Don that a dump truck was needed at the small coal mine where the coal was stripped, which was located near him. First thing the next morning, Don was at the mine and got the job. He worked there until spring when the mine shut down. One of don's hauling jobs had been to haul cement for a bridge across the Illinois river at Havanna. He would back out and dump his load. One night the lights went off. All he could do was stop. Sheldon always said Don could drive better backwards than he himself could forwards. Bob and Ray always thought that was their bridge as "Daddy helped build it." They always thought their dad was perfect. Lloyd asked me one time, "What will happen when they grow up and find out he is no more perfect than anyone else?" No doubt they know it now, but I see they still love and respect him just as much as when they were small children.
