Not to bore you to tears, maybe I can reflect on some memories of the "good old days", starting with the big "D" or the depression years of the '30s when I was growing up in Dallas, Texas.

My Dad had a job at the U. S. Post Office and managed to keep the family in clothes and food as well as a roof over our heads. It was a fair size family what with me and my older brother, James, and older sister, Ermagene. Also my younger sisters Mary and Martha. Erm's twin sister, Arbragene, had died at age six and is buried in Deport, Texas. Click HERE to see the family.

When I was seven years old, Roosevelt became president and started work on bringing us out of the depression. I didn't know anything about the economics of the time but did know that money wasn't thrown about recklessly. If I wanted money, I earned it by doing all kinds of odd "kid" type jobs like delivering circulars door to door, carrying a paper route or working at the Ma and Pa grocery store down the street. If I made any good money, which wasn't very often, I turned it over to my parents to help with the bills.

This one time during the summer a few of us kids got a job delivering circulars for a new start-up soda pop company who had a bottling plant nearby in a large garage. They had these circulars made up advertising the new drink. I appoached this one house with my circulars and there was a woman sitting on the porch. When she saw what it said, she thought it was for some kind of alchoholic beverage and ran me off the porch. I guess "7-up" did sound kind of strange for a soda pop. At the end of the day we would be picked up by an employee of the plant and carried back to the garage where we were given all the ice cold 7-ups we could drink. Most important, we were given 25ç for the days work. That would get us into the movie on Saturday where we would see a double feature western, a cartoon and a Flash Gordon serial. We had enough left out of the quarter for popcorn, cold drink during the movie and an ice cream after the show at the corner drug store.

Then came the paper route. I never made a dime throwing papers because I couldn't collect all that was due me. Back then, we had to pay for the papers and do our own collection from the customers. I remember one time it got so bad that my dad went around with me to help collect the money. It was during the depression and folks just didn't have the money to pay.

My next job in the business world was working for the ma and pa grocery store. I was old enough then to drive and I delivered groceries to customers who would phone their orders in. The owners' son was my age and we would sneak out cigars from the tobacco shelf and smoke them during our deliveries. For some reason, they didn't make me sick and I still enjoy a good cigar to this day.

Those were the kind of jobs I had while going to school. It wasn't all work when I was a kid. We had our sand-lot baseball games and vacant lot football games. Someone always had a hoop and a basketball. We graduated from the sand-lot to a real baseball field and chose up teams to play each other. I remember the last game I played, my parents had come to watch the game. The opposing team had a no-hitter going for them. It was two outs and the last inning. I was the next batter. Strike one. Strike two. And the last pitch was fat, right over the plate, but I froze and looked it into the catcher's mitt-- strike three-game over and the pitcher had his no-hitter. I will always remember what my dad said on the way home, "Why didn't you swing at it?"

Nothing exciting happened during my school years. I loved to play basketball but was too short to make the team. I liked football also but too small to play. Baseball was great too, but who would let someone play who "looked" the ball into the catcher's mitt? So it was off to my first job after graduating from W. H. Adamson High School in Oak Cliff.

My first real "social security number needed" type job was delivering telegrams for Western Union in 1942. That didn't last long. I delivered a telegram to the Neuhoff Meat Packing plant and as I was leaving, I asked the guard at the gate if they were hiring. He said check with that man walking across the parking lot. He is one of the owners. I rolled my bike up to Johnnie Neuhoff and asked him if he was hiring and he said "Sure kid, go into the office and tell them to give you a job." I worked my tail off there, carrying big sides of beef and working in 40° temperature. I also rode shotgun in their delivery trucks to Houston and helped drive and unload the truck. Needless to say, I didn't stay there long either. I next went to work for the Katy Railroad in Downtown Dallas in their main office.