Priceless Memories - Bob Barker [42]
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After Texas, our family moved back to Springfield in 1928, again to be with my grandmother, and my father had a good job there. He had been appointed electrical inspector for the city of Springfield, and he went out to buy a new car because there would be a lot of driving in his work. He never worked a day as inspector. He was supposed to start on a Monday, and he became ill on the prior Friday. He was never well again. He died thirteen weeks later. The crushed hip had never healed properly, and ultimately it had rubbed up against his spine. As best as the medical profession could tell in those days, that is what killed him.
My father died at home. I remember that I was sitting on my grandmother’s lap. She was reading me the funnies from the newspaper. My mother came out of the bedroom and over to me, and she said, “Billy, Daddy has gone up to live with Jesus.” I was only six years old, but I understood he had died. The manner in which my mother chose to tell me was beautiful. There was no crying, no hysterics, even though she herself had suffered this terrible loss. I was too young to realize it at the time, but with her gentleness and tenderness and by painting the picture that way for me, my mother had made the loss of my father more bearable for me.
Never in the ensuing weeks did my mother ever cry in front of me. I am sure she cried alone, but she never cried in front of me, never lamented her fate. She just said to me that she and I were going to be partners, and this was going to work. It was 1929—the Depression had arrived and she was a young widow with a six-year-old son.
My mother raised me on her own from the time I was six years old until I was thirteen, through the Great Depression and during the dust bowl in South Dakota. Those are very formative years. She would later remarry, but there was a long stretch of years when aside from some extended family, it was just her and me. Our bond, which was already strong, became even stronger.
Although I was just a child at the time, I immediately recognized author Timothy Egan’s eloquent descriptions of the dust bowl when I read his book The Worst Hard Time (Houghton Mifflin, 2006):
Earlier, the land had been overturned in a great speculative frenzy to make money in an unsustainable wheat market. After a big run-up, prices crashed. The rains disappeared—not just for a season but for years on end. With no sod to hold the earth in place, the soil calcified and started to blow. Dust clouds boiled up, ten thousand feet or more in the sky; and rolled like moving mountains—a force of their own. When the dust fell, it penetrated everything: hair, nose, throat, kitchen, bedroom, well. A scoop shovel was needed just to clean the house in the morning. The eeriest thing was the darkness. People tied themselves to ropes before going to a barn just a few hundred feet away; like a walk in space, tethered to the life support center. Chickens roosted in midafternoon.
Mother and I experienced the misery of the dust bowl because after my father died, my mother turned to what she knew—teaching. She looked for a teaching job around Springfield and other nearby communities, but times were hard then and jobs were scarce. I can still remember the time she came home from an interview, and she said the superintendent of the school told her that she was qualified and that he had been impressed with her résumé. Then he told her that he had to give the job to a man because the man had a family to support.
And my mother said, “I am a woman and I, too, have a family to support.”
No luck.
After that she wrote to my father’s older brother, who lived in Mission, South Dakota, and told him the situation. He got her a job teaching at Mission High School, and that’s why we moved to South Dakota. She