by Howard W. White
Among my very best friends are Dick and Edith and their family. Retired now with a handsome income from real estate investments, they live in the tiny town of Mitchellville, New York, Dick's home town.
In 1939, like most of us in the days of the Great Depression, they were a desperately poor young couple. Dick scrounged out a living by cutting up old cars with an ax and sledge hammer and hauling the iron to the junk yard. He averaged about $15.00 - $20.00 a week to support five children.
The defense work was escalating rapidly in '39, and Dick got a call from the shipyards on the West Coast. They borrowed $100.00 from Dick's father, bought a real nice '31 Plymouth for $28.00, a 50 lb bag of potatoes for 50 cents, a round Perfection Oil Stove for 75 cents, and a gallon of kerosene for 8 cents. They loaded the five kids in, and away they went.
When the kids got hungry, they stopped, pulled out the stove, set the frying pan on, and fried a big pan of 'taters.
There was never any stop in Dick. He drove night and day, arriving in Portland, Oregon, 94 hours from the 5 a.m. they left home. Dick slept two hours in the car and went to work at 6 a.m. in the shipyard.
They had $33.00 left with which they rented an apartment and lived there two weeks before he received his first weeks' pay - $48.00 for 70 hours work.
Edith then squandered 60 cents for a phone call home to tell of the great bonanza they had been blessed with.
Another family I name among my very best friends was that of 'Popeye' of Dundee, NY. Popeye always said they lived 10 years on a ten dollar bill.
In January 1930, he was laid off at the Pen Yan Boat Company where he had worked 14 years. Boston bluefish were selling at that time for $5.00 a hundred pound barrel on the fish piers in Boston. The freight was $2.00 a barrel. Popeye sent $10.00 to Boston for 2 barrels. They arrived in Pen Yan 3 days later, where Popeye paid the freight of $4.00 with a good, used bicycle for the agent's granddaughter.
Being the proud owner of a '28 Model A Ford, Popeye was in the fish business for 10 years, until he went to work on defense construction. He peddled fish door to door over two counties, selling them for lake trout.
In 1938, he stopped at the home of Dave Crandall, a cop in Corning, NY. Dave was a longtime lake fisherman, and he said to Popeye, "Heck, them ain't no darned lake trout. Them's darned ole Boston Blues".
Popeye says, "They ain't? Well, I'll be darned; that darned liar I bought them from said they was lake trout." That's all the difficulty Popeye ever had in 10 years of peddling fish. They raised 6 children during that time, all strong and healthy, on fish head soup and cabbage, 'taters, and pancakes and salt pork.
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