were poor and Mr. A never went to school. "I can sign my name,"
Mr. A says. "Not very good, but I can sign my name."
In addition
to his work in the "smithy," Mr. A's father did a little tobacco
and corn farming. There were three children, but one, a girl, died
as an infant. By the time Mr. A was a teenager, the blacksmith was
becoming obsolete. "I never became a blacksmith because even back
then the business was sort of fading away." Instead he got a job in
the sawmill. Mr. A does not remember what it paid, but it cannot
have been much since he quit it to take a job at the R. J. Reynolds
Tobacco Company, in Richmond, at 30 cents an hour.
The As,
father and son, had a total of three cars between them in their two
lifetimes. The father bought the first, a used Tartan, some time in
the twenties. He then bought a used Model T. The Model T lasted, in
one form or another, for the rest of his life—he drove it
until it could be driven no longer and then he converted it to a
gasoline-driven power saw.
Mr. A married
in his midtwenties. His wife, Mable, who had finished high school,
found a job cleaning in the Richmond public schools. The young
couple had a three-room house which they rented for $5 a month; it
had no electricity, no plumbing, and a wood stove. Since they were
both working in Richmond and living in nearby Catersville, they had
to have a car. They bought a 1928 Chevrolet in 1933 and kept it for
almost a decade.
The
Depression years passed in grim routine; a daughter was born and
they continued to live in the primitive three-room house until
World War II. Mr. A could not read the newspapers but he heard
about the war and some of its consequences on the radio. There were
regular and—for people who'd reached maturity during the
Depression—exciting reports about the booming defense
industries. Mr. A heard they were paying big money. He went north
to Baltimore, taking his wife and daughter with him but leaving the
decrepit Chevrolet behind.
He got a job
paying "more than $40 a week" in a plant making poison gas. Mr. A
never understood the process; "I never asked no questions. All I
know was that I unloaded sacks that were full of beans dyed dark
red. That's all I know. It was hard work but it paid good." In
Baltimore he didn't need a car. "I could get around pretty good on
the bus."
He did want a
house of his own, and with that in view he and his wife began
saving every extra dollar. Mrs. A got a job in a clothing factory
making uniforms, and their two jobs provided an enormous income
relative to their past earnings. When the war ended, the jobs ended
too, but they had money in the bank and Baltimore was clearly a
better place to be than Catersville. "We didn't even think of going
back. I didn't have no people down there any more and the work was
better up here." Mrs. A returned to her first occupation, cleaning
public schools. Mr. A got a job as a carpenter's helper. "I had to
join the union and that meant they had to pay right good." In 1951
they made the down payment on the Dixon Avenue house.