Heaven knows, they needed a sense of humor, plus courage, compassion and ingenuity:
One of the old ‘bos I got to know very well was Arvel “Sunshine” Pearson who began work as a waterboy on an Arkansas strip mine at age 9 — Arvel was sixteen and about to get a job underground when the Depression hit. The next ten years, he bummed his way around the country, never without a sense of humor amid the hardest of times.
One of the stories Sunshine loved to tell happened on a summer day in a small town in Kansas. In his own words:
“I saw a lady sitting in a rocking chair on her porch, fanning herself with a newspaper and trying to keep cool. The train I was riding stopped a short distance away. I hopped off and walked over and asked if I could do a chore for a meal.
‘Son, you can chop me some wood,’ she said. She pointed to a rain barrel that stood out in her yard, ‘When you’ve cut it, throw it in the barrel.’
That lady’s ax was awful dull. I was out there working and sweating, wiping and chopping for 20 minutes and I had about five or six sticks.
I saw the lady was in her kitchen fixing me a meal. When she wasn’t looking, I grabbed the barrel and turned it upside down. I took the sticks and laid them crosswise over it.
The lady came outside. ‘That’s enough, son,’ she said. ‘Come and eat.’
When I took my last mouthful, I said, ‘Lady, I think I hear the train whistle, I’d better be going.’ I jumped off her porch and ran down the tracks. I guess she was frowning on the next hobo that came along.”
Of course, the lessons learned when you have to shift for yourself, are enduring.
To quote “Sunshine:”
“In those days if we got a pound of bologna, we thought we were doing great. When I go to the store today, I pass the bologna and move over to the T-bone steaks. People see me driving a Cadillac and ask, ‘If you were on the road that long, how did you accumulate this?’
“The road taught me that if I made a dollar, I had to save some of it. I used to have a ledger where I put down everything to see how I was progressing. During the 60s and 70s I was saving an average of $5,000 a year.
“That doesn’t sound much today but over the years it mounts up. When you get to where you don’t owe anybody a dime, that’s the best feeling you’ll ever have, if you live to be a hundred years old.”
Arvel lived to be 91, still able to drive himself cross-country only a few years before he passed away.
My folks worked for a well-to-do farmer for quite a while. Dad was allowed to build a tiny log cabin and dig a well on his property. The middle brother was born there in 1933.A neighbor and his wife built a shelter by sinking posts, cladding them with rough lumber and filling the void with sawdust for insulation then stretching a canvas roof. Dad said it was cozy during Nebraska winters. He was a rabbit hunter and a dead shot and traded rabbit meat to my folks for milk. One day the feds came and took him away. Turns out he was a prohibition-era bootlegger or moonshiner in Ohio and escaped from a train on his way to prison. He was undone after years of freedom when the T-men found him through his subscription to Capper’s Weekly magazine.