Things are looking up at Casa ERJ.
We are up to two working-vehicles.
My truck was in the shop and is now healthy.
Mrs ERJ's mini-van now has a set of new, Pirelli Scorpion All Terrain Tires. They were $20 a piece cheaper last week!
All Terrain tires are a better choice in Michigan than the generic Sumitomo all-season radials that were on it when she bought it. The Sumitomos seem to have a very hard compound that probably wore like iron but they didn't have a very aggressive tread. Mrs ERJ will take a little bit more road noise every day of the week if it keeps her out of the ditch.
Some men buy their woman a tiny, round item with a hole in the middle and a chip of sparkle on it for Christmas. I bought Mrs ERJ FOUR of them. And they are BIG!
Pictures of kids working (link)
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Pictures taken in the US between 1908 and 1924. Boys age 4 and 6.
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Four-year-old girl. Expected to shuck two-bins of oysters a day
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Delivering lunches at the mill
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Glass-works in Indiana
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Expected to pick between 20 and 25 pounds a day. Ages 5 and 6
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Hawthorn Farms tobacco shed. Girls in foreground are 8, 9 and 10
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Cotton mill
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Aged 6, 6, and 10 working in a vegetable canning factory
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Selling newspapers. Wilmington, Delaware
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41" tall. Claims to be 6 years old.
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Picking shrimp. Boy age 5.
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Picking cranberries. She started when she was six.
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Tires show concern for your bride. Rings are decorations.
ReplyDeleteChild labor an once and future reality. Still with us just a little hidden. Depressions means a lot more work for everyone in the family.
I guess I was blessed, I was in the fields at 5 but wasn’t expected to start picking until I was 6. I couldn’t wait to get my work permit so I could get paid an hourly wage instead of by the crate.
ReplyDeleteFrank Gatlin was one of my coffee drinking buddies.
DeleteHe grew up near Union City, TN in the early 1950s. He never went to school in September or October. I don't think he was functionally literate but he had other he had other qualities.
This family had to pay a monthly subscription to have the school bus deliver him to the closest school (13 miles away. When money was short, Frank did not go to school.
"I'm in high-cotton now" meant that the grueling job of picking cotton didn't include as much stoop labor.
Frank was a short, runt of a man. Perhaps due to malnutrition in his youth. In the United States. In the 1950s. That was not that long ago.
We are not as tough as them, and we should be glad. The trouble is that young people do not appreciate how life in America is better than anytime in human history. We have lost our deep faith in the Lord and the gratitude for what those poor kids built to make our lives so wonderful.
DeletePS. Recommend Exhibition Coal Mine in Beckley, WVa to get a taste of their hard lives. A debt to our ancestors we should do more to honor by living Godly lives.
My mom hoe'd and picked cotton on the family farm as a kid. She was born 1916 in rural Mississippi. Even when I was a kid ('50's-'60's) the school schedule in Mississippi allowed for kids being out for planting and harvest, so my cousins told me anyway. I was going to Catholic school in Detroit, it wasnt a "thing" there. My dad dropped out of school at 14 to go to work in Pennsylvania. the work available was in the foundries and coal mines.
ReplyDeleteGee Wally, that can't be right . All them kids are white.
ReplyDeleteOnly because I didn't include any pictures of kids who worked in coal mines. They were all black, even their lungs.
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