GUY L. SHERLOCK Hard Times (by Jim Sherlock) In October of 1929 the stock market crashed, and the country was plunged into the great depression. At the time my father (Guy), mother (Estella), and I were living comfortably in the suburban Rocky River section of west Cleveland. Dad was working at $60 a week as an accountant for the Multigraph Company. Because the firm was located in East Cleveland, he had to spend several hours each day commuting via streetcar to and from his job. At the end of the day, after the long streetcar ride, he walked across the Rocky River bridge, sometimes in bitter cold, to reach home. I recall staring out the window in the dark of winter, waiting for a glimpse of my father finally arriving home from work. One night, however, was particularly sorrowful. Dad went to his desk in the living room and emptied out his pockets. He had brought home erasers, pen nibs, and pencils - and the news that he had been laid off. The Multigraph Company had merged with the Addressograph Company, and the staff was being reduced. "Well, it doesn't come as a surprise," Mother said. "It's been happening to other people. We knew it would happen eventually." I was six years old at the time, and a member of the Rocky River Elementary School first grade, and I was just learning to read. Shortly after Dad lost his job, Mother broke the news to me. They couldn't keep up payments on our mortgage, and we would have to move. I burst into tears. I'm not sure why Dad and Mother decided to move to Holmesville. Obviously a small Ohio town would be the last place to search for a job in accountancy. I suspect the move was made out of sheer desperation. Dad's brother, John, owned and operated a filling station there, and I think Dad had been promised a job. But times were poor in Holmesville as in the rest of the country. Banks were failing. I remember the sickly expression on Uncle John's face when he heard that Roosevelt had closed all the banks, including the one that held my uncle's life savings. Fortunately the closure was only temporary. When he found his brother couldn't help him, Dad took desperate measures. We raised rabbits for food, and Dad often hunted for meat, which included frogs legs, squirrels, and groundhogs. Mother, of course, tended to a small garden for vegetables. To pick up some much needed money, Dad picked up and sold fish to the local farmers from our Pontiac. Our house was a deteriorating one-story, four-room edifice without running water or inside plumbing. That often meant a frigid dash through the snow on winter evenings to care for a call of nature. There was no shower or bathtub, and on Saturday night, I took the weekly bath in a kitchen washtub. Schooling was considerably different from that in Rocky River. I attended an old two-room elementary school directly across from Uncle John and Mamie's house, and I was called to school each morning by a school bell. Two grades occupied each of the two frigid rooms. I sat on a hard desk in the room with the first and second graders, and I still recall how, each morning, we would listen to the third and fourth graders' soulful rendition of "America, the Beautiful" next door. To me, the singing was incredibly beautiful. There was no indoor plumbing; a privy equipped with an old Montgomery Ward catalog served instead. If we wanted a drink of water, we had to go outside and laboriously pump and pump until water came up from the well. Obviously the teacher wasn't much bothered by students requesting passes for the restroom or drinking fountain. In the meantime our financial problems were intensifying, and the relations between Dad and Mother became strained. Finally Mother told him he would have to seek work elsewhere; we could not continue to depend upon John's charity. I recall she told him to get out and look - and not return until he had found a job. That morning Dad got in his car and took off for Columbus. Several days later he returned, in a considerably more cheerful mood than when he had left. He had gone to the Ohio Farm Bureau office - and, wonders of wonders, he had found work - as an insurance salesman. Dad was not what one would consider a salesman type. Although possessing a sly sense of humor, he more often than not was tense and melancholy. But oddly enough he did quite well as a Farm Bureau agent. A former farm boy, he related well to his Holmes County farmer prospects, and he ended up being promoted to sales manager of Coshocton County. That, of course, meant moving to Coshocton, and joyfully I resumed my life of suburban decadence - indoor plumbing, lots of great radio shows ("Jack Armstrong, All American Boy", "Little Orphan Annie", "Joe Penner", "Spencer Dean, Detective", etc., etc.) and a ten-cent Western movie every Saturday afternoon. The rest of the time my friends and I were racing around the neighborhood, firing cap pistols at each other, and pretending to be our very special heroes: Tom Mix, Buck Jones, Tim McCoy, etc. Unfortunately all this did not last. After two years, Dad had lost his Farm Bureau job, and again we moved. It was 1933, and the country was still in the grips of its worst depression. Why was it necessary to resettle? Thinking the matter over, I suspect a great deal of the motivation derived from the rural upbringing of my parents. Until the depression and the dust bowls of the 30's, the farm stood as a bastion of security, a cornucopia of plentiful food and a provider of rent-free shelter. So, when city life proved too threatening, their tendency was to retreat to the comforting security of the countryside. We therefore moved to Clark, a town of 125, and settled down in a house similar to the one we left in Holmesville - no indoor plumbing, no running water, no electricity, no radio, and no movie matinees. Even the fishing wasn't much of a compensation; what few fish came from Doughty Creek were mostly suckers and chubs, with an occasional carp or catfish. Dad sold Motorist Mutual Insurance instead of Farm Bureau Insurance, but he never duplicated his initial success with the latter. For a time he clerked in the local general store. Then he signed on with a neighbor to shovel sawdust. The latter was needed in the manufacture of building blocks; it was mixed with the brick clay, then burnt away in the firing process, producing a porous block. Dad traveled to nearby counties with the neighbor trucker looking for sawdust piles at the many sawmills in the area. After that, he purchased the Clark bakery and ran a combination bakery, soda fountain, and small grocery store. But a town of 125 was no place to support a bakery. I recall looking at his accounts book one evening. The total receipts for a day usually averaged about $14 - not profits, but income. On December 7, 1941, we had returned home after viewing a Katherine Hepburn- Cary Grant movie at Coshocton's Sixth Street Theatre, and I turned on our big Sears Superhetrodyne Radio. Mother, Dad, and I stood stunned as we heard about the Pearl Harbor attack. I remember trying to joke about it: "Maybe it's another Orson Welles' trick." Dad's reaction was typical; he glowered and said nothing. Soon afterwards, he drove to Cleveland and got a job with Higbee's as a sales clerk - thanks largely to the huge manpower shortage created by World War II. A few months later, feeling considerably more self-confident, he tried for a clerical job with United Milk Products, and got that job as well. The Great Depression had finally come to an end - thanks to F.D.R., the New Deal, and, of course, World War II. Our small family gave up our fruitless attempts to find security in country living and returned to the suburbs.