In the early 1950’s my Dad went broke.
I’m not sure why, exactly. He was a coal mine owner and the price of coal dropped some, but enough to wipe him out? I guess so. We talked about that one time and he told me it got to where he couldn’t sell coal for what it cost to uncover it, much less load it and haul it anywhere.
Brother John wrote a 123-page book in the 1980’s about his life and times this is what he said about what happened to the coal business:
“In the early summer of 1952 something occurred that caused us to lose our very lucrative coal contracts with both Republic Steel and Goodyear. We continued to strip coal, thinking that it was only a matter of time until we got this business back, or found some other that would be just as good.”
“What we should have done, the day we lost those contracts, was to shut the place down. We should have sold every piece of equipment, every truck, every acre of mineral rights and then gone on a long fishing trip. The problem was that none of us liked to fish; and, in addition, hindsight is always 20/20.”
Except for his half-interest in Dixie Dew Syrup, which he hung on to somehow, Dad lost everything. He sold his 102-acre farm outside Gadsden, AL, in the summer of 1951. And by the spring of 1953 his strip mining equipment — dragline, caterpillar, endloader, trucks–were gone, sold or repossessed. He also had been forced to sell the mineral rights to what he told me was 1,000 acres of waist deep coal.
After he sold the farm we continued to live there for almost six months, paying rent, before moving to town, to a two-story apartment in East Gadsden, 1611 Litchfield Ave. It was just before Christmas, 1951. I was 9-years-old, halfway through the fourth grade.
Brother Dave and I both got paper routes, delivering The Gadsden Times, a seven-day-a-week newspaper. He had the Starnes Park Housing Project, I had Litchfield Apartments, where we lived.
The Times was an afternoon paper except for Sunday, which we delivered before breakfast. One Sunday morning, when it snowed, I put cardboard in my shoes to block the holes. I didn’t think much about it, one way or the other. Isn’t that what everybody did?
I was 10 years old, in the fifth grade, when Momma asked for my paper route money to buy food. Nobody knew that, but I couldn’t conceal the fact that I had to wear a girl’s coat to school.
On a girl’s coat, the buttons are on the wrong side.
Coming Friday: The Scar