In many ways, home life was self-sufficient during the tough times of the Great Depression. Dad was a jack-of-all-trades. Somewhere he obtained an iron shoemaker stand with different size iron shoe forms to fit on the top, and the shoe to be repaired slid onto the shoe mold. In those days, heels and soles of shoes were tacked on, not sewn.

The stand had a base so it could stand alone on cellar floor, about two feet high, so dad could sit comfortably in front of it while working. Left and right soles, and pairs of heels could be purchased at the hardware store. The old soles or heels were pulled off and he would go to his stockpile to find the new one that would be slightly oversized for the shoe. They were made in several sizes, and the excess could be cut off after they were fastened to the shoe with small tacks. (The picture at right is one of Dad's iron shoes.)

When he was ready, he would put some tacks in the front of his mouth, and take them out one at a time to fasten the sole or heel. This was much more efficient than having to constantly reach into a nail apron, and the small tacks were easier to grasp when they were wet. After secured, he cut off the excess close to the shoe size with a leather cutting knife.

He then finished up by sanding the outside smooth and applying a coat of black shoe polish. When finished, they looked as good as new ones! Just like Henry Ford's early Model Ts, all shoes were black back then.

No shoe repair job for young boys was complete without adding metal cleats on the heels, where most of the wear occurred. Sometimes, he would also put cleats on the toes. All this metal could make a racket when dragging your heels while walking on concrete. Kids in school liked to click on the tile or ceramic floors in the halls when no teacher was in sight.

Haircuts cost 25 cents so Dad also learned to be a barber. With comb and scissors, and hand clipper (not electric), he kept us looking trim. We took turns sitting on a chair in the basement while he whacked away. It must have been a learning experience for him, but he soon developed a skill.

He never used a bowl as one sees in cartoons! He cut my hair for all those years until I went into the army at 18, where I had my first haircut by someone other than Dad.

When I look back, I'm always amazed at how versatile and talented my Dad was. He was a plumber, threading his own galvanized pipe for water lines, and later when copper tubing became fashionable, he worked with that. He would tackle electrical jobs, running new lines. But he wasn't much into painting, yard work, gardening or raising the chickens, and left that to Mom and the boys.

Doctors still made house calls throughout the 1930s, but they also cost money, so they were only called in emergencies. For sore throats, Mom would march us to the basement, find the iodine on the medicine shelf, dip a swab in it, and "paint our tonsils." Horrible tasting stuff, but it seemed to work.

I knew Mom would never harm us, but looking at the skull and crossbones label on the iodine bottle always made me a little apprehensive. Iodine was the universal cure-all for all cuts and bites. Doctors were expensive so you put on the iodine!

In our side yard, Dad had built a chicken coop and fenced in an area for them peck around in. Each of us had chores to do, and being the youngest, I ended up with the worst one - cleaning out the chicken coop once a week. It was a foul-smelling and fowl-smelling, nasty job, especially on a hot, muggy summer day. With a hoe, I would scrape out the droppings and old straw into a bushel, and haul them to a pile in the garden area.

Mom would always raise Leghorns because they were the best egglayers. She would order about 50 of them by Sears catalog through the mail. At that time, there was no rural delivery and we lived in town just beyond the limits of the walking mail carriers.

We had a box at the main post office in town, about a 15-20 minute walk away. When we knew it was about the time for the chicks to arrive, we would check our post office box daily until there was that little red card that said, "Take this to the window for your package."

The post office windows and boxes were on the second floor, and as you walked up the stairs, you knew the chick delivery season was at its peak by the hungry cry of hundreds of chicks - Chirp! Chirp! Chirp! When we carried the box home, Mom would put them in the basement in a small, temporarily enclosed area and give them chicken mash and water. When they were a little larger, she would move them out to the coop.

The local feed store was also on Chess Street, about a block away from the post office, so while we were walking home from school, we could check for mail and also pick up any chicken feed we needed. Usually we only bought the chicken scratch and laying mash in small quantities, never by 25lb bags. My recollection is that we always asked for a money amount, like, please give me 50 cents worth of chicken scratch or laying mash.

Chicken was often in our diet because it was the cheapest meat available, and even cheaper when you raised your own. There was chicken soup, fried chicken, roasted chicken, boiled chicken, fricasseed chicken, chicken with noodles, chicken with dumplings and left-over chicken! To this day, chicken is hardly my favorite meat.

It's ironic that so many depression era folks ate more chicken than beef because of the savings, and we now know that this leaner meat is better for one's health. Frozen chicken hadn't yet been develop so all chicken, whether home or farm grown, was fresh.

The Leghorn chickens were prolific egg layers, some laying over 200 eggs per year. Mom had an eye for the egg producers, and the "slackers" were the first ones into the pot! Eggs back then didn't have the negative reputation they do today, and they were the backbone of about every breakfast.

When someone in the family was sick with a cold or flu (or about any ailment), Mom's first step was to make chicken soup. She was a strong believer in its curative powers. She was probably right. The hundreds of cold tablets, powders and syrup you can find on any drugstore shelf don't seem to work any better.

I made up a story long ago about Mom's belief in chicken soup as medicine that still brings a tickle to my funny bone. I've even told it to her long ago, and her response was something like, "Oh, go on!" Here's the story:

Once Mom was down to her last two chickens when one got sick.

She killed the other one, made chicken soup, and fed it to the sick chicken.

The summer was the time to make beer and root beer. The Prohibition Amendment had been passed in 1920, but making home-brew beer was legal. All it took was a gallon can of malt liquor and water. They were mixed, poured into quart bottles and capped, then set out in the warm sun to ferment for several hours. After cooling, it was ready to drink. Prohibition was a complete failure, with boot-legging of liquor common, and was repealed in 1933.

We also made root beer from a root beer extract and water, again filling and capping bottles and letting them sun awhile. I still have the old capping machine and a large bag of metal caps used to seal the bottles.

The fall, when farmers were selling their hogs, was the time to make mild Italian sausage. Mom would go to the slaughter house at First Street in Monongahela to pick out and purchase the right proportion of pork and beef, plus the animal casing for stuffing. We would grind up all the meat and Mom would then mix it and season it in a large aluminum bowl. (Picture is of actual grinder used.)

The meat grinder would be set up on the edge of one of the open-sided cellar steps so it was handy for the handle-turner and the one holding the casing to be stuffed. With a different grinder fixture, we boys would feed the mixed sausage into the grinder and turn the handle, Mom held the casing as it was being filled, and Dad supervised, usually telling us what we were doing wrong!

Then it would be cut into about 12" lengths, the ends tied and bent together in a horseshoe shape, and hung to dry on nails driven into the sides of the ceiling joists. While it was drying, a delicious aroma hit one when going down to the cellar, stirring up one's stomach juices.