Remembering two among the "poor working class"

Tom Lowe's piece on Tuesday referred to "the very poor working class," so it wasn't surprising that when my friend Bill and I took an early-morning walk the next day our conversation turned to what our fathers had done during the Depression.

    Bill said, "My dad worked for the Civilian Conservation Corp (CCC), on the Mt. Rushmore National Memorial project. He worked as a driller and, I think, a blaster. He helped shape Washington's nose (23 feet long) and likely Lincoln's forehead."
    "Wow," I said.
    "The workers would ride up to the top of the mountain and rappel to the area they were working on, drill holes in the mountain, and blast away the granite."

Bill's father could be
among those pictured

[From the Mt. Rushmore website:

Approximately 400 different people worked at Mount Rushmore during the carving process from October 1927 to October 1941. Although this work was dangerous, no lives were lost during the sculpting of the mountain.]

"Amazing, Bill, my dad was a blaster too. I don't know about during the Depression, but probably. He was the oldest of a family of eleven children—nine boys and two girls—in the Arkansas Ozarks, and he had to do all sorts of things to help keep the family alive and well, including working a mule to plow. I don't remember whether he told me he'd handled dynamite during the Depression, but I wouldn't be surprised."
    "Well," Bill said, "I'm not sure that my dad actually handled any dynamite."
    "My dad actually did, if not then, then for sure around 1953-54, when we lived for almost a year in Johnsondale, California, at a camp of the Mt. Whitney Logging Company. He referred to himself as a 'powder monkey,' although I know now that the term refers to a young man on a sailing ship responsible for carrying bags of powder to the ship's gun crews. My dad must have had experience; otherwise, how'd he get the job?"
    "Sounds like a reasonable assumption."
    "Anyway, he blew up stumps and boulders so the lumber company could build roads for its trucks. He had a very fine, long, tapered piece of oak—about eight inches long altogether—that he said he used to poke a hole for fusing the dynamite. I got the impression it was his own implement."
    "You don't happen to have it, do you?"
    "No, and I have no idea what happened to it."

"Dangerous job," Bill said.
    "Yeah, and I suppose, at the time, I didn't realize how dangerous. My oldest sister, whose family also lived in Johnsondale—my brother-in-law fell timber—must have known what our father did and how dangerous the job was. But so was felling timber."
     Bill asked, "Did your ever go blasting with your dad?"
    "No, but if he'd taken me along, I think I might have known how dangerous his work was. But I was blissfully unaware of the degree of danger involved, or of the possibility that he might not come home some evening.
    "Your mom and your sister probably kept it from you so you wouldn't worry."
    "Hmm...There's another thing I never thought of until now. One night (this was after he'd come home, had dinner, then gone out somewhere) he got back late and ran into the house with his pickup. He'd been out playing cards and had too much to drink. And he took a terrible berating from my mother, I can tell you. He had been out gambling and drinking...What I was too young to think of then, I guess, was the possibility that he might have had a very close call at work that day, which could have been why he went out and got drunk. I mean, he hadn't done that before—that I knew about anyway."
    Bill asked, "What did you and your father do together?"
    "If we ever went anywhere together that time in the logging camp, it was trout fishing. And you, Bill, do you have any memories of life with your own dad?"
    "He did tell me stories about his experience on Mt. Rushmore. Every Friday and Saturday he would go along with three of his brothers out into Keystone to the dance halls and drink and, from time to time, get into fights. He said he never looked for a fight but never backed down from one either. According to him, the Johnson clan never lost a fight."

Morris's father and mother and three older sisters
(fourth not born yet, circa 1931)