I will never forget my fifth birthday. It was a time of great sadness. It was in 1932 when thousands had lost their homes because they could not pay their mortgages. That year alone, some 25, 000 families and more than 200,000 young people wandered through the country seeking food, shelter, and clothing. My family was such a family. We were homeless and father was jobless. Father told us that we were traveling from place to place looking for ‘the way.’ We obtained food from welfare agencies or religious missions in towns along the way. Most of our meals, when we were lucky enough to have one, consisted of soup, beans, or stew and precious little of that. My oldest brother Mikey sometimes would find food in garbage cans from behind places in the towns we traveled through. I was so young then that I never knew where the food came from, and I remember how thankful Father and Mother were that our family had anything at all. I remember that Father always said the same little prayer before we would eat, but there never seemed to be enough to go around.The day before my fifth birthday, Mother became ill. Now I know that it was because we did not have enough food. I remember she always ate last. We went to the local hospital but we were turned away because Father said the sign read ‘local residents only.’After Mother died, we moved for a while to Hooterville in Oklahoma City. I remember all those families living in rusted out car bodies. One family was living in a piano box. This wasn’t just a little section of town, Father later told me the size of Hooterville was 10 miles wide and 10 miles long. During the mid 1930's the dust bowl hit us. That was a terrible time because severe droughts and dust storms had hit parts of the midwest and Father told us that thousands of farm families were wiped out. He told us that “Corn was going for 8 cents a bushel. One county insisted on using corn to...
