Our Home-Life at the End of the Depression

My family with me in Mother's arms

My earliest memories are from a time when our family lived in a little three-room shotgun house. I must have been about three at the time. There were four of us in the family.

My Dad, Jewell Bell, was in his late thirties at the time. He worked for the Reynolds and Gamble Lumber Company as Foreman of their planing mill. Besides supervising operations of the mill, he was responsible for upkeep of all the machinery in the plant. Just under six feet tall, Dad was wiry of build and had black wavy hair and black eyes. Working often in the sun, he had deeply tanned skin. I remember him wearing a chambray shirt and bib overalls and smelling of pine resin and the Prince Albert Tobacco he rolled into cigarettes.

Olive Bell, my Mom, was ten years younger than Dad and looked even younger. She had brown hair and eyes and was a little over five feet tall. Always slender, she had a pixie quality about her.  She always wore a neatly pressed housedress. Mother was what they call a "stay-at-home-mom" nowadays. Besides raising two boys, she had plenty to keep her busy. In those days before labor saving appliances, she did our laundry by hand, dried it in the sun, and pressed everything with flatirons heated on the cook stove. Mom cooked three meals a day from scratch on that wood-fired iron range, summer or winter. She had to split the wood to fit the firebox and keep the fire ablaze all day. Just keeping the house clean so close to a sawmill with its slab pit for burning excess wood was a challenge.

My older brother, Tom, was in the second or third grade at the time. He often got stuck with looking out for me when there were myriad other things that he would rather be doing. Wiry like Dad, Tom was smart and good looking. He made friends easily. A few years later, he would be very popular with the girls. I realize now later that he had to put up with a lot because of me.

Our home was located on the grounds of the lumber plant and was owned by the company. Living in the house was part of Dad's compensation. The front room of the house was my parents' bedroom as well as the parlor. The middle room was where Tom and I slept. The back room was the kitchen and dining area. I don't remember much about what furniture we had. The bedsteads were spindly iron frames with bare springs under the mattresses. Mom kept all the beds made up neatly when we weren't sleeping in them. I recall an oilcloth cover over the kitchen table but not much more.

We had a fenced yard that I remember as shady behind the house. There was a well about fifteen feet from the house. It had a wood casing and a frame supporting a pulley. The well "bucket" was a galvanized sheet metal cylinder with a flap and a trigger at the bottom. It was suspended by a rope from the pulley. We lowered the bucket under the water, then raised it up above the casing. A sloped wooden chute with a notch at the bottom ran down from the casing. We hung a water bucket from the notches. Then the well bucket was lowered against the chute, the trigger opened the flap, and the water rushed down the chute into the bucket. We always had a dipper handy to get a fresh drink of the cold well water. Farther back in the yard was the ubiquitous privy. No one in our community had indoor plumbing. Lacking electricity, we depended on kerosene lamps after dark. Our lifestyle was that of most people who didn't live in cities in those days.

Not far south of our house were the lumber company offices and company store. Employees could buy supplies at the store on credit. I suppose the prices were somewhat inflated, as was common in those last days of the Great Depression. The saw mill was directly behind the offices. Dad's planing mill lay behind the sawmill. Several acres of trams and lumber stacked to dry in the air before finishing lay to the south. A few other company houses were located on a small bluff on the other side of the South Field Road. My paternal grandparents lived in one of these. George Luther Bell, whom we called "Pappy," worked at the sawmill. My Grandma Clyde was blind from an injury as a child. Tom and I would often stay with her for a while after he got out of school, especially in the winter when we kept the fire going in her wood-burning heat stove. Pappy had a knife to split board ends. He had made it by casting a lead handle around a wide planing machine blade. We loved to use it to split cutoffs from the mills into kindling.

Even at that young age, I realized that Mom was a really good cook. Having been raised on a farm, she learned about growing and cooking food from an early age. She always planted a large garden, and we had many vegetable meals in the summer—green and butter beans, English and field peas, greens, squash, Boiled new potatoes, and fresh salads. She always cooked cornbread, sometimes twice a day. At this age, I sometimes sneaked into the kitchen and cut the crust off to eat it as a snack. That always got me in trouble with Dad, who also loved the crust. Of course, what Tom and I liked best was the desserts. Dad had a sweet tooth. He didn't care much for pies except chocolate, but he loved cakes. Mom almost always had a cake of some sort on hand. Tom especially liked those chocolate pies. In the summer when we could pick berries, blackberry cobbler was my favorite.

Me in the driveway with Dad's car

We kids didn't have many toys that I recall. I'm sure we had a cap gun or two, and I must have had little cars. I remember playing in the sandy soil of our driveway. Dad had a small garage to keep the car safe. I remember having a little tin cowboy with a lasso. It was a wind-up toy, and the lasso would spin round and round. Alas, I left it in the driveway one night, and dad ran over it the next morning. We boys always went barefoot in the summer, and our play clothes were often just a pair of short pants.

My sense is that our small nuclear family was happy in that little shotgun house. Our days alone as a family were all too few. Pappy died of a stroke during the winter. I still recall the red glowing wood stove in the little country church where we had his funeral and how cold and wet it was at his graveside. Grandma Bell moved in with us after that, completely changing the family dynamic. The company did move us into a larger house so that she could have her own room. I shall always have fond memories of our days in that tiny house.

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Warren Bell is an author of historical fiction.  He spent 29 years as a US Naval Officer, and has traveled to most of the places in the world that he writes about.  A long-time World War II-buff, his first two novels, Fall Eagle One and Hold Back the Sun are set during World War II.  His third novel, Asphalt and Blood, follows the US Navy Seabees in Vietnam.  His most recent novel, Snowflakes in July, is a Pentagon thriller about domestic terrorism.  He is currently working on a new novel, Endure The Cruel Sun, the sequel to his best-selling novel, Hold Back the Sun. For more about Warren Bell, visit his website at: wbellauthor.com or see him on twitter @wbellauthor.

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Musings About My Father

My father, Jewell Bell (25) with my mother Olive Tatum

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about my father. Perhaps it is because I am approaching the age at which Dad left us. As I look at myself and think back on him, I am struck by how much harder his life was than mine has been to this point. I realize that much of that was because he worked so hard to see that his children had better lives than he did.

Jewell Thomas Bell was born at home in Milner, Columbia County, Arkansas on September 22, 1904. His mother suffered a hard labor, and she never had another child. Being a “one young’un,” as they were called in those days, was not an experience he enjoyed.

Dad’s childhood was shaped by tragedy. When he was still an infant, his mother went blind. We learned later that the blindness was a result of a childhood head injury, which sparked a benign brain tumor.  But when he was growing up, his mother’s sisters drummed into Dad’s head that the strain of giving birth to him caused his mother to go blind. This guilt trip plagued him all his life.

My grandfather, whom we called, “Pappy’” never recovered from his wife going blind. For years, he spent every dollar he could get his hands on taking her to doctors all over the region seeking a cure. Unfortunately, the state of medicine in South Arkansas in the early Twentieth Century rendered his efforts fruitless. In the process, he ended up losing his farm and having to work as a logger in the lumber industry.  Relatives from a fairly large extended family helped care for my grandmother. After losing her sight, she had become a complete invalid.  When Pappy had to cook, their meals were usually dried beans and cornbread.

Dad was apparently an avid student. Years later, he could still conjugate Latin verbs and quote many passages of poetry. Given a decent education, he could have had a bright future. But as World War One erupted in Europe, family economics trumped such considerations. Dad grew to man-sized by the time he was in the eighth grade. Big enough to do a man’s work, Pappy pulled him out of school to work full time in the woods as a logger. He would support his parents for the rest of their lives.

Despite his circumstances, Dad managed to become something of a musician, although he couldn’t read a note of music. He played a mean honky-tonk piano and also played the fiddle in the manner of Charlie Daniels. He could hear a tune once and then play it on either instrument. This ability to play “by ear” was not passed on to his children or grandchildren, but two of my grandsons, Thomas Bell and Evan Williams, inherited it. Being a member of the band at the country dances of the era was a apparently a good way to attract girls. At close to six feet tall with black hair and a wiry build, Dad was devilishly handsome.

At some point in the late 1910s or 1920s, Dad and several other young men from Columbia County decided to go up to work the Kansas winter wheat harvest to earn extra money. Winter wheat is harvested in July, when the crops in Arkansas are still immature. Dad told me of this adventure late in his life. Piling into an old Ford pickup, they drove north on the dirt roads of that time, often camping in the woods on the way. Once in Kansas, they had no trouble getting work. The mechanized equipment the Kansas farmers employed fascinated Dad. They had huge steam-driven tractors and combine machines. Dad learned how the machines operated and how to keep them repaired. He would work with machinery for the rest of his life.

After returning to Arkansas, Dad learned to set up and operate the complicated planing machines that smoothed the good Southern Pine lumber of the region. There were no computers in those days. The sophisticated machines were set up  manually, continually making adjustments until the boards produced exactly matched the industry-issued templates. The precise quality of boards from Dad’s machines became legend in the pine lumber industry.

Dad spent the rest of his working life in the lumber industry. Still the primary support for his parents, he did not marry my mother until he was past 25. From that point on, his primary focus was on supporting his family. Times were hard in those first years of the Great Depression, but Dad always managed to find work of some sort. He told me later that he was completely out of work only one day during the Depression.

Our family was definitely what was called “working class” in those days. Some politicians called us “little people,” but that always rankled. Dad routinely worked 50 or 60 hours a week. Because he was a foreman, he didn’t get overtime pay. But we had a roof over our heads, good food on the table, and decent clothes on our backs. My brother, Tom, and I were encouraged to do well in school and to look beyond our circumstances for the future. We were both given formal music training and played in the high school band. Our parents helped as much as they could, but we also had to work for our education (I worked an average of 30 hours a week at Safeway during my high school years).

The inherent danger of working with heavy machinery finally caught up with Dad. While in his forties, his left hand was caught in a machine cylinder, and he lost the middle finger of his left hand. Besides losing the digit, that accident robbed him of his ability to play music. Then, in his early sixties, he caught the same hand in a powered roller, breaking almost all the bones. With only one working hand, he could no longer work.

In his retirement, Dad was a voracious reader. But like so many people of his generation, he became inactive in his retirement and his health slowly faded. Having smoked heavily all his adult years, he developed severe emphysema, which robbed him of breath.  I didn’t get to be with him in his last days. I was on Guam in the middle of the Pacific Ocean in October 1983 when he fell and quickly succumbed to his injuries. On the way home, I thought of what I might say at his funeral. I conjured up images of him playing piano in God’s jazz band. But Dad had asked for a simple graveside service, so there was to be no eulogy. Perhaps that’s why I’m writing this now. He was a good, hard-working man who loved his family. 

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