TRIBUTE TO BUCK Page 5 of 11
In a letter dated June 20,1930, from Vineland my grandfather pleaded with my Dad to �come down as I am in trouble. They came out yesterday and took away my car.� Unable to help his son, old Henry, the care-free farmer who had abandoned his team for adventure, was dead by that November. My grandfather, William, died the next February. How frustrating it must have been for my Dad to be unable to help either of them when he was needed most. But his young growing family needed him too.
Dad always liked Jews. Until his last days he repeated the following incident as one reason. His bank had closed and $600 - - all their savings was unavailable and foreclosure on the flats was imminent. In desperation, and uncharacteristically, he confided his frustrations to a friend, Mr. Feischman, who immediately offered to help. Dad drove him to the bank. He somehow was admitted and returned shortly out a side door with the cash. With the banks closed and so many out of work, a helpless public wanted reassurance and action. And got both!
Our parents were confirmed Democrats and one would have thought F.D.R. invented the twin concepts of Hope and Happy Times or at least he knew the road to travel to get there. Just mentioning Hoover�s name would start Dad.
The Depression hit my folks late. With five children, they got caught in the squeeze, couldn�t make the mortgage payment and lost the apartment building that finally had been left them. In 1939, my family, like Steinbeck�s Joad family in The Grapes of Wrath, became dispossessed vagabonds, and uprooted victims of the relentless laws of supply and demand; controlled by faceless, powerful forces in a nightmare world of bank runs, foreclosures, day work only, and hang-me-downs, and hungry kids; always hungry kids. There were �haves� and �have nots� and at that point, my family knew which they were. Because I was the baby, I always had enough - - though someone did without. I know who that was.
Steinbeck told us the land fell into fewer hands. But he also realfirms the power of potential of unity; �two men are not as lonely and perplexed as one� and Ma Joad says �� they ain�t gonna wipe us out. Why we�re the people, we go on.� That�s the same way our mother held our family together. A bond was there � stronger than economics and stronger that death. �It�s blood.� Buck would say. �Yes Dear, �Mother wold respond, through she knew the cement was Christian love � more than anything else.
As a family, 1939 was our hardest year. We struggled � merely to survive. We were not alone! The typical family in 1940 was poor. In 1940 half of all families in America earned less than $5,000. we were poor � but clean. And Like the Missouri French two hundred years before us, we were rich in the joy of each other. We settled in a small rural Missouri town close to where Dad was born.
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