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My mother kept a financial journal for first year of marriage! Part I [1]

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Date: 2022-07-08

A "Jayhawk Staker" like my dad had for haying

I was born just before WWII broke out on Dec. 7, 1941. My mother, who would have been 25, kept a journal for their receipts and expenses of the first full year of their marriage, 1942. A lot of my memories will be gone when I pass. I think that a lot of people would like to know what it was like in that era. I will be doing a series under my column “Lingering Impressions”. I will cover some of my memories that I recall my dad speaking of and then follow my memories for a dozen years or so. I will be including portions of the journal and also portions of other related material during this period of time so we can make some comparisons of events and prices.

I can remember my dad talking about working on the US Highway 169. As near as I am able to determine, they were paving the section south of town (Stanberry MO) during the years of1933-34. He said they were paid a dollar a day unless they had a horse. Then they were paid three dollars a day. The men that didn’t have a horse would have been using a pick and shovel to move dirt and probably a rake to level the dirt for pouring concrete. They had a large scoop which could be pulled by a horse and after scooping up a large amount of dirt. That scoop could be pulled and dumped where it was needed. Once they had the road fairly level, they had a large grader that they would pull with horses to level the ground for pouring concrete.

The stretch that my dad would have worked on had a river which would have needed a bridge. The land the road would traverse on surrounding the river would need to be raised because the river overflowed quite regularly. This would have required a lot of hauling dirt raising a beam of soil some 6 to 8 feet high. In addition, there were small hills on part of the land further down the road and a lot of the road was leveled from these hills where the dirt was dug out. This required moving a lot of dirt.

When I was a teen and used the road, it was supposed to be one of the best roads in Missouri. Like all roads built back then, it had a lip alongside different places that were supposed to direct the water from rain to an exit point. For years they were concerned that the water would run off the road along the edge and seep under the road making the soil soft. Later they found out this wasn't necessary and on existing roads they removed this lip. If, when driving, you wandered over and got on the lip, it would throw the car out of control. At this time, when someone had a wreck and it killed someone, they would put a sign up at that spot alongside the road. In the 13 mile stretch between our town and the next, there were 13 signs when I was a teen in the 50’s. I guess there came a time when there would have been so many signs across Missouri that nothing else of value would be visual.

I am trying to give some idea of what life was like before I was born and we spent our first year living in an abandoned chicken house. They had lived through the depression and the drought that caused major crop failures. My parents were 25 when they married and they still lived with their parents before then. My grandfather had health problems and my father had a twin who had a physical deformity which limited his ability to do hard work.

For that reason, he stayed at home while my father went to either North Dakota or Nebraska during harvest season to pick corn. The arrangement was that my dad would go and his brother would stay behind to help my ailing grandfather. They would share what money he made. I remember my father telling me his older brother went with him, but was fired after the first day. It so happened that they had a corn husking contest every fall at our town and my Uncle, dad’s older brother, always won as he was so fast. You would have thought that this would have sat in his stead as a hired hand, but “he left too many ears in the field”. Evidently his speed was enhanced by his choosing only those ears easy to reach leaving a large portion in the field. The owner of the corn field fired him the first day.

Transportation in those days would have been an unnecessary expense. My father would hop a freight train to go up to the harvest fields and then come back the same way. I remember him saying “We sent our money home through the mail. People would be knocked in the head for their money and it was safer that way”.

Sometime in 1941, they realized that my mother was pregnant with me. They married. The war broke out a month or so after I was born. The world would drastically change in the next 55 years they were alive. It all started for me in a chicken house. Their personal expenses for living in Jan. 1941 were $38.14.

My brother does not think the picture of the Jayhawk at the start of the article is the one that we owned. But I found it in a town near our home. Below is an ad for one.

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