Hard Times - September 26, 2013

As published in the White River Current - Thursday September 26, 2013 So you think you have it rough, do you? You don’t even know the meaning of rough. Why, when I was a boy, I had to walk five miles to and from school, uphill both ways, barefoot, in eight inches of snow. OK, I’m exaggerating a little. It was only four inches of snow. I know most of you have already heard this story or variations of it. The point is, things are a lot different now than they were “back when I was growing up.” I was reminded of this a few weeks ago when I attended an evening performance at the Ozark Folk Center. A very talented group sang an acapella rendition of an old Stephen Foster song entitled “Hard Times Come Again No More.” The verse of the song goes like this “Let us pause in life’s pleasures and count it’s many tears While we all sup sorrow with the poor. While we seek mirth and beauty and music light and gay, there are frail forms fainting at the door.” You can imagine the mournful music that goes with these powerful lyrics. You might also check out the version sung by Nanci Griffith on YouTube. The composer of this song, Stephen Collins Foster, is known as the “father of American music.” He wrote over 200 songs. Among his best known are “Oh! Susanna”, “Camptown Races”, “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair” and “Beautiful Dreamer”. Two of his compositions have become official state songs: “My Old Kentucky Home” (State of Kentucky, 1928) and “Old Folks at Home” (Florida, 1935). Many of his compositions remain popular more than 150 years after he wrote them. Stephen died in 1864 at the age of 37. I grew up during the depression years of the ‘30s. I imagine those years were “hard times” for many families but you have to define what “hard times” and “poor” really mean. Our family consisted of my mom and dad, my grandfather and my sister and I. My dad had a regular job where he worked ten or twelve hours a day, six days a week. We lived pretty frugally but I never thought of us being poor. In today’s society, poor is determined by the federal government by the poverty level which is a combination of income, number of dependents and other things. Many people who are classified as poor today would have been thought of as rich back in the depression days. Even so, we didn’t think of it as hard times because we didn’t know any better. Our doors were never locked. We had respect for one another. I remember hobos coming to our back door asking for food. My mother always had something for them, usually a sandwich and maybe an apple. We moved a total of seven times by the time I was fifteen years old, the last house being the only one my parents owned, the others being rent houses. Seven of the fifteen years were spent at the rock house on Red Lane that I have written about in previous articles. I lived there from age five to twelve. None of the seven houses had indoor plumbing until my dad added a bathroom onto the seventh house. I was a junior in college at the time. When we lived in the rock house we were the last house on the road that had electricity. We kept the kerosene lamp handy because the lights were off a lot of the time. We were on a telephone party line with two or three other families. Our number was 29F4. That means it was number 29 and our ring was four “longs”. For me, Spring was when I changed from the long johns to more suitable under garments for the warmer weather. Summer was when I could go barefoot. The only time I wore shoes was on Sunday for church. Overalls was my usual attire. In a future article, I want to write about my playmates and the games we played. Things are much different now than they were “back then.” I won’t go so far as to say they were the good old days but we made do with what we had. I really don’t have any bad memories of those days. Yes, things are different now. The other day, a lady told me about her daughter almost going ballistic as they were driving away from their home and she remembered she had forgotten her cell phone. Of course, they had to return home and retrieve it. Contrast that to the telephones in my early years. More on this subject coming soon. Bye, bye for now.