I remember the Great Depression.

Of course, I wasn’t old enough to comprehend the turmoil, and my main concern at the time consisted of unraveling all that went on in the first grade of Cedar Street School and later at Spring Street School. News of the Great Depression and its impact on our town stewed up many a heated political discussion at my home, but the grownups all stopped talking when I entered the room. My mother’s soft admonition concerning “little ears” often ended the more boisterous sessions.

Rex, our neighbor across the street, lost his foundry job and, battling the wave of unemployment, found himself working long hours at a potato seed farm. Meanwhile Marshall, at the end of the street, lost his job at one of the town’s four woolen mills and got work where he could find it. It was all over my head, but even in my early years, I probably sensed that something was very wrong.

When Franklin Delano Roosevelt became president in the midst of the savage downturn, I realized that my dad was an ardent Republican – ardent and then some! My father lived with a fixation that anything out of Washington not enacted by the Republican Party was not good for the country. The arrival of FDR and the “alphabet soup” – the WPA, CCC, and other programs identified by their acronyms – undermined efforts to get the country rolling again.

My dad walked a mail route, the same repetitive steps he’d take for 32 years, and his job was not affected by the Depression, although the then-Post Office Department did order furloughs for many employees other than delivery personnel.

I pulled my Red Flyer to the side door of the Exchange Hotel to sell the few bottles I’d found behind the Villa Banner Club. Instead of paying me two cents for each bottle, the big guy wearing a dirty apron rejected most of them and would pay me a penny apiece for the few left. He did, however, take the rejected ones, and I didn’t know I’d been had by the apron man.

I walked across the street, farther down Main Street, to Jim Kirby’s candy store, and spent my few pennies for a few bolsters. That same summer, I didn’t do much better trying to sell Ladies Home Journal magazines door to door. Even the Exchange Hotel stopped buying bottles from all but the Merrill brothers, and only then because someone took the brothers to the Pavilion on the Dover Road where the ground around the dance hall was littered with beer bottles, especially after Saturday night’s dance. The Merrills made a bundle of money after several trips to the back door of the Exchange Hotel selling a variety of bottles. Word had it that they made more than $3, but other reports pegged the profit as high as five bucks, and with each telling, the amount increased.

Our community had a bootlegger and every kid in town knew that he hid his stash in the cattails and deep grass behind an old mill dam at the lower end of town. Some of the kids living in that neighborhood found some full bottles and one of the Poulette boys told us his dad and friends drank it during a Saturday night card game. Of course, tales of other things relative to hidden booze and its use spread among kids of the town, but since there was no profit for us, the thing died before the summer ended.

During those growing-up years, the Great Depression had a different impact on my life. I sloughed through four years at Cedar Street School, then I attended Spring Street School, with more kids, bigger kids and one fearsome teacher with a fierce reputation. Kids said her long ruler was her tool of enforcement, and she knew how to use it. I don’t remember the infraction but she kept me after school and uneasy fear captured me as she pulled an ominous ruler from her desk drawer. Tight-lipped and mean-looking, she commanded me to hold out my hand. I did as she ordered, but when she raised her hand to give me the business, I yanked my hand away. It was then that I discovered she had a vicious backhand that stung like a bugger and straightened out my thinking and then some. Whatever the reason for my punishment, her well-aimed whack instantly made me a very cooperative student.

I never did it, whatever it was, again.

Another thing I remember: Many years later, long retired from teaching, the lady denied having ever given me a lesson with her backhand.