‘Patch’ kid recalls growing up during Great Depression
Dear Editor, My father, James Donald Stevenson, died three weeks ago of a massive coronary attack at the age of 76. He was born and raised in the Phillips area, a mining “patch” just outside of Uniontown, although he spent his entire adult life in Texas. During the last year of his life, he wrote a family memoir about what it was like to grow up in the patch during the Great Depression. I helped him edit the work, which I assumed was intended only for family.
While going through his desk, I found several copies of a letter to the editor of the Herald-Standard which he intended to send you as excerpts of this larger work for possible publication in your newspaper.
I have cut and pasted sections from his manuscript that may prove of interest to your local readers. I am doing this to honor the wishes of my father. He wrote from the heart, in an earnest, unassuming style with a touch of humor.
Sara A. StevensonThis is a story about a kid from the patch and his family, but only about the early days.
Ours was a childhood with very few advantages; however, my brothers, sisters, and I were blessed in not knowing how disadvantaged we were.
When we started out in life, there was no place to go but up. We were rat poor, but knowing nothing else, we grew in wisdom and grace, despite our circumstances.
It was no big deal not to have money because no one had money during the Depression. We made our own fun playing old games, making up new ones, exploring, trying to get out of chores, succeeding at times and failing at others.
This story takes place in a small coal-mining hamlet called the patch. The official name was Phillips Works, which provided company housing in the form of about 80 duplexes with no indoor plumbing. The story begins in the early part of the Great Depression when the demand for coal was minimal, and the mines worked only one or two days a week.
Union organizers were more a nuisance than an aid in these early years. Almost all the patches were owned by the H.C. Frick Coke Company. There were about 25 patches in the soft coalfields of southwestern Pennsylvania, and ours was one.
The patch had no sanitary sewer system. Sewage was disposed of by running into concrete ditches, which were open, and eventually emptied into the sulfur creek. When we were growing up, communicable diseases were a constant threat: typhoid fever, scarlet fever, whooping cough, diphtheria, polio and spinal meningitis.
If any of these diseases showed up in a family, the house was quarantined with a sign tacked on the front door. If you got wind of it before, you got the hell out and stayed over at our Aunt Kit’s place, where you were relatively safe. Then you could keep going to school and wouldn’t be a prisoner stuck in the house with a sick sibling.
If you had one of the big three, diphtheria, spinal meningitis or pneumonia, you were, as we kids would say, a goner, and people tiptoed around your house. I remember when Little Petey Hess died of diphtheria. His folks took every possession from his room and burned it. These were the days before penicillin.
Money should be a short topic, since from the early days of the Patch Kids, it was practically non-existent. During the ’30s we lived at a subsistence level. And absolutely nothing was thrown out if it could be recycled for a younger kid. An allowance was out of the question, and a penny, if acquired, was a happy occasion for a trip to Proctrasky’s store for a gumball. But we got a great break: my big brother Jack got a paper route, which assured him of spending money. Later, the route got passed down to me and then to my younger brother, Leo.
The Daily News Standard provided a minimal allowance for the Stevenson boys during their formative years. It wasn’t all that easy. We were not allowed to throw the paper but were required to put it behind the screen door on the front porch, and we had to deliver to the people living on the outskirts of the patch.
In winter, this was particularly trying when it was snowing, cold, or raining, but it had to be done or you would be fired. If Jack had a problem, then I had to take over, or if I couldn’t, the task fell to Leo. On nice, sunshiny days it was a breeze, but in inclement weather we complained mightily. If we didn’t get the job done, the circulation manager had a line of other kids who wanted the route; so we just had to suck in our guts and do it. Some customers had dogs that were extremely hostile to paperboys. If you weren’t careful, they would make a sandwich of your leg. We managed our paper route carefully. With Pop working only one to two days a week the income was vital.
We had another way of saving money for the family. When the war started in Europe, Phillips mine started up again, but not to full capacity; maybe two or three days a week. Mr. White, my best friend Billy’s dad, got a job operating the cage hoist, and a man named Andy Cain, who owned a dump truck, got a contract on an as-needed basis to haul away the waste products of the mine, which were lumps of slate mixed with coal.
When word came to us that Andy was dumping, Jack, Leo and I went with about a dozen other kids to separate the coal from this waste. We stood in the middle of the dumping area with our buckets and tried to catch the big lumps of coal for our piles. After finding the big lumps, we searched for the smaller ones, filled our buckets, and went to the bottom of the dump to empty our buckets on our Stevenson pile. We carefully guarded our family’s pile, putting a ring of large lumps around it and announcing to everyone that this pile belonged to the Stevenson kids, and we were prepared to guard it with our lives. I can’t think of an instance when our pile was raided.
One of the pickers stood on top of the dump and hollered out when Andy had left the storage bin at the tipple and was on his run to the dump about a quarter mile away. If we were lucky, we could retrieve a quarter to a half ton of good, usable coal. Then Pop would get Ernie Russie to haul the coal back to our house. Pop negotiated a deal with him for a dollar if we loaded and unloaded the coal we’d picked. Pop was real proud of his boys and promised to buy us each a Palm Beach suit for our work, but of course this suit never materialized. I could not have cared less since I didn’t even know what a Palm Beach suit was. Our coal picking saved the family coal money during those times, and as Mom used to say, “Every little bit helps.”
There was no garbage pickup service in the patch, so we took our garbage out back and dumped it in the fields behind the house.
The biggest household waste was ashes from the stove and furnace. The garbage was carted off when and if Mr. Birskey, the superintendent of the patch, felt like having it done. No one messed with the patches. If we needed something done, we had to do it ourselves. Billy White and I scoured the neighborhood seeking scrap metal. About every two weeks the cry would go out, “Junk man coming.” We waited patiently in the alley with our pile of scrap for the junk man. There was no negotiating with him, and I never got more than 40 cents, regardless of the size of my pile, but it was candy money and most appreciated.
Speaking of candy money, another story reminds me of the value of money. When Leo was about five years old, he pooled his resources with Doc Botti and came up with the sum of 3 cents. When they decided to buy some bubble gum or jawbreakers from John Procratsky’s little store, Leo volunteered to go and get the candy.
The store was back from the edge of Route 51, which had a blind curve at the rise of the hill. Leo was walking across the highway when he was hit by a car. Leo went down. Although many people witnessed the accident, only one man, Stanley Wisnienki, came over to help him. The driver of the car that hit Leo drove him to the hospital in Uniontown. The doctor X-rayed Leo, patched him up and the driver brought him home.
I was playing in Shander’s woods when I got the news. I ran home and met several people on the way. Some told me Leo was dead while others said he was in the hospital.
Naturally, I bawled all the way home. Once there, Mom dried my tears and told me Leo was OK.
I often wondered why those people had seemed delighted to pass on the bad news about my brother. They were either malicious or mean-spirited, and I wondered, what had I done to them that they should be so happy to bring me horrible news?
I finally concluded they were so miserable at the time, they liked to pass their misery on. I felt certain they knew Leo was OK, but their lies taught me to beware of these kinds of folks.
The experience just reinforced what Marshall Dillon’s sidekick said: “Mr. Dillon, folks will be folks, but don’t trust them.”
It also made me question the value of money. Three cents. I wouldn’t stop to pick it up today.