The depression started in 1929 on Wall Street in New York when the stock market crashed. I started a year later in a shanty in Arford West Virginia. Arford was a coal mining camp. In case you don't know where Arford is, it's across the Monongahela river from John Wye. Mr. Arford and John Wye built the camps for the miners they hired but the owners had abandoned the mines when they worked out. No one knew who owned the shanties or the land. My parents moved into one of the two room shanties when they got married and I entered this world there with the help of my grandmother. There wasn't any plumbing, the water came from a well in the middle of the camp and was carried home in buckets. There was no electricity but we were lucky, we had a Kerosene lamp. Every shanty had an out house and seventy years later I still remember winter mornings there. The shanties were single wall construction. They were built with twelve inch vertical boards with a one inch strips nailed over the cracks. No one was ever cold, everyone had a Burnside pot bellied coal stove and the coal outcropped from the hill side and was there for the taking.

When I look back it amazes me that I didn't know how terribly poor we were. There weren't any news papers or radios in Arford and I didn't know that every one didn't live like that. My father worked at the Consol 93 mine at Jordan. Jordan was a mile up the river from Arford. The mines only worked one or two day a week then and my father was paid in scrip that was minted by Consol. It could only be spent at the company store but that wasn't a problem, the store had every thing we needed. We always had enough to eat. Dry beans and salt pork were cheap at the company store. We had a garden and canned vegetables, berries and apples. My grandmother had a milk cow and chickens.

Every little girl had a rag doll and helped their mothers in the kitchen. They didn't know it but they were learning their trade. The boys' favorite game was caddy. All you needed to play was a mop handle. You sawed five inches off the handle and sharpened the ends and that was the caddy. Then you could lay the caddy on the ground and hit one of the sharpened ends with the mop handle, the caddy would jump in the air and you could hit it toward a circle drawn in the dirt. The one who could get his caddy in the circle with the least number of strokes won. When I started writing this I had the idea that I would show everyone how well off they are now and make them feel good but the more I think about it I'm not sure that is a correct hypothesis. I can remember my Grand Father saying "when the stock market crashed a lot of people lost everything and they were jumping out of windows but he didn't have anything to lose so he didn't jump". Everyone was happy then and the world has gotten a lot more complicated. Maybe we're not better off.

Ross