wandering the backroads of my mind

 

In 1937 my dad was laid off from his job as a farm laborer.  He had been organizing workers at the Diamond Match company in Spokane, and his employer was pressured into firing him, forcing him to look for work outside the area.  Dad found a job in Seattle and we moved over in the middle of 1937.  Shortly after that the job went away and Dad walked the waterfront looking for labor jobs.  The Seattle waterfront was so tough in those days that the beat cops walked in three's.  Dad passed a Sea-going Foss tug boat and a fellow hollered at him, "Can you cook?"  Dad was quick to assure him that he could...which was a real stretch.  But he'd helped his mother when she worked as a cook in logging camps.  We had no telephone, and there was no way to reach my mother.  He just clambered aboard and they put out to Sea for three days before coming to port where Dad managed to get a call to our Landlord, letting mother know that he'd not had his head bashed in. 

Later, Dad worked for the WPA digging ditches to lay pipes at the Bremerton shipyard.  It was an hour ride by Ferry boat from down town Seattle to
Bremerton.  Dad used this time to take a correspondence course in radio repair.  He began a radio repair shop out of half of my bed room, working weekends and late into the evenings.  He put up a partition so the light would not keep me awake, but I always went to sleep listening to the big bands of the day and programs like Jack Benny, The Little Theater Just off Broadway, Fibber McGee and Molly, Fred Allen and many more. 

All this was before the Second World War.  When I turned six, April 13, 1935, Dad took me down to the Labor Hall.  We stopped at the Merchant's Cafe for lunch, a rare treat.  I remember reading the reader board in the cafe's window.  A serving of green peas was three cents, potatoes four cents, and a slice of meat loaf was a dime.  Seventeen cents bought you lunch, if you had seventeen cents to spare.  Coffee was not a nickel, but I don't recall if it was two or three cents.  Seattle had three daily newspapers back then, the Star, Times and PI papers.  Two cents bought you the daily, and five cents bought the Sunday paper.  Later, when I was 9 years old, in 1944, I carried the Star paper.  It cost subscribers 75 cents a month. 

When I carried the Times from 1945 to 1948, it cost folks one dollar and twenty five cents each month. 

I used my earnings to buy things like my cub scout and boy scout uniforms, and street roller skates, and a second hand bicycle for five dollars.  A second English bike cost me fifteen dollars in 1948. 

We had no indoor entertainment like TV or video games.  We rushed home from school, changed clothes and, after chores and  paper routes, ran wild in the streets, bike riding, roller skating, running, shooting hoops and sliding down the long, steep grass slope in the old golf course, on flattened cardboard boxes. 

 

Carl Jarvis

----- Original Message -----

From: Roger Loran Bailey

To: Blind Democracy Discussion List

Sent: Sunday, December 02, 2012 4:55 PM

Subject: 25, 50 and 75 years ago

http://www.themilitant.com/2012/7645/764543.html

The Militant - December 10, 2012 -- 25, 50 and 75 years ago
The Militant (logo)

Vol. 76/No. 45 December 10, 2012


25, 50 and 75 years ago

December 11, 1987

BARNSLEY, England—Three hundred Yorkshire coal miners crowded into the
West Gawber Miners Welfare social center here October 25 to protest the
British
Coal Board's announcement that it is going to close the Woolley and
Redbrook mines.

If the Coal Board goes ahead with the closings, it will cost 1,300
miners their jobs and have a devastating impact on the small communities
nearby.

Some 80,000 mining jobs have been lost through government mine closures
since the end of the 1984-85 British coal strike. Over this past year,
under pressure
from the Coal Board and faced with the threat of permanent job loss,
34,000 miners have taken buyout offers and left the industry.

But the unceasing attacks on the union have sparked resistance from the
ranks of Britain's National Union of Mineworkers. This was reflected in
the mood
of the meeting.

December 10, 1962

The Kennedy administration, having failed to get its foot into Cuba's
door through unilateral UN inspection of that island's defenses, is now
talking about
a step-by-step "solution" of the "Cuban crisis." Reports from Washington
make clear that by this is meant a process of removing more weapons from
Cuba—including
those admitted by the U.S. to be "defensive"—until the revolutionary
government is more vulnerable to attack.

Since the Cubans' tit-for-tat statement of Nov. 25, demanding inspection
of bases from which Washington is preparing aggression against them,
Kennedy has
not emphasized his inspection demand. That statement was so effective in
exposing Kennedy's position that it was suppressed in this country to an
even
greater degree than usual. It was omitted from the daily transcript of
foreign broadcasts made available by the CIA to U.S. newspapers.

December 11, 1937

The ominous sweep of the lay-off campaign is matched by the equally
disastrous sky-rocketing of the cost of living.

Laid-off workers met the onrush of the great crisis of 1929 with a wave
of militancy and struggle that will long be an inspiration for American
labor and
for the working class throughout the world. It was precisely this
vigorous determination of the disemployed wage slaves to stand up and
fight that forced
the concessions upon that system of inhumanity called capitalism,
resulting in the setting up of the federal relief and W.P.A. agencies.

Once more, and even more acutely than before, the spectre of starvation
hovers over working class households. No one will drive it off this time
except
the workers themselves, organized in fighting demonstrations, rallied to
solidarity by militant organizations.


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