Times like these, it's good to reach back and remember how things were. Today's upheavals, yesterday's Great Depression of the 1930s.
As I see people pick up and go now, it's easy to think of my Mom's Uncle Curt riding a motorcycle West out of Pennsylvania, having to ditch it halfway across the country, working on a rail line, joining the Merchant Marines.
It's easy also to think of Del France, my Dad's Dad, leaving the coal mining region around Staunton, Illinois, making his way to Chicago, hitchhiking, determining that wherever the next car was headed, there he'd go.
The driver that picked him up headed for Kenosha, Wisconson.
Where he got a job at Nash Motors as a test car driver (that's a 1931 model Nash car pictured above), got a room next door and met his future wife, Alexandra Drougge (my grandmother), and her Swedish-born parents.
During The Great Depression, masses of people migrated for work and survival, and my grandfather and great uncle were two such people.
When Del got word from my Dad's Uncle Dennis Wilson that Autocar (manufacturer of heavy duty trucks like the one above) was hiring, he headed to Ardmore, Pennsylvania, and that's where my Dad was born. Later movement would bring my Dad into proximity of my Mom in the little twin cities of Stroudsburg and East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. It'd all started during The Great Depression with individual decisions and simple twists of fate . . . . . Curt going one way, Del going the other.
Today's Rune: Strength. P.S. Happy 94th Birthday to my maternal grandmother, Catherine Currier!
4 comments:
I tend to think of older generations as staying put more than we do today, but yes, there have been times when a lot of traveling did happen.
Family history is my sisters bag but I do know that my fathers folks all migrated to Michigan from the east well before the civil war and stayed here and my mothers kin came from Canada a tad before the depression. (Thank you H. Ford)
Happy Birthday young woman!
Funny how things happen. Some years ago I had a sense that I was born where & when I was just so that I'd end up where & who I was at that very moment. Then Pink Floyd's "Time" came on the radio & my last brain cell just POOFED out of existence. *L*
Your last comment means so much to me. Thanks. Also, thanks to you I really want to see more Woody Allen - Vicky Cristina Barcelona indeed.
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