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Show 223: It was there that our "Native Son" was born in the Angelus Hospital in 1929 and thus became our "brink of disaster" baby. That was the year the stock market crashed and moneyed men began committing suicide, but what had we to do with stocks and bonds ? We read the papers and heard the radio news with no sense of involvement. Even when businesses began failing, the store where we bought our groceries, the furniture store along the street where we passed, showed empty interiors and were soon boarded up, gave us only faint regret unless we owed them money and felt somehow responsible. Commodities became cheaper and cheaper and our money stretched. My husband had a well-paying job for the Los Angeles Railway, driving a double-deck bus along Wilshire Boulevard. He was smart and slim in their dark olive uniform, and proud to be the father of a son. We went to the beach for outings, to Graumann's Chinese to shows. He changed for a better job as receiving clerk in a luxury apartment hotel on Wilshire Boulevard, with which went a very nice apartment, the most beautiful place we had ever lived. And there, at last, the depression caught up with us, for the hotel suddenly went broke; it was bought out by another concern which installed its own employees. Within six weeks we were in a starving, jobless, no-more-funds-to pay rent situation. The children cried because their stomachs hurt, but would not eat the rice and beans to which we were finally reduced. At home in Joseph it was the same; prices dropped out of the markets. The land still yielded food, however, and when Mama and Revo learned our plight they sacrificed twenty-five needed dollars and sent for us to come |