Greetings friend. We called my mother’s father Daddy Dell.
As a younger man, during the latter days of the Great Depression, Daddy Dell made his living driving a rolling store. A rolling store was a big covered truck with a porch on back, he used to haul and trade goods up and down the dirt roads of south Alabama.
No one had any money back then, so farmers traded their harvests for kerosene, sugar, eggs, whiskey.
On his route, Daddy Dell would often stop under a particular shade tree and share a picnic with a certain young lady named Blanche Pate. This tree was just close enough to the Pate house so as not to sound alarms, but held enough distance that a life-love could take root; one day bearing six children and twelve grandchildren.
With the exception of this brief respite, the days were long and required a certain constitution. The roads were often rutted, worn, and could beat the hell out of any man who spent 16 hours a day on them. But Dell was used to hard days, as were all men who grew up during that era in America.
Like so many in his youth, Dell dropped his formal education long before high school and set his mind to muscle for the good of his family. He lied about his age and joined the 3C’s – Civilian Conservation Corps.
At age 14, Dell was a product of the New Deal. Young men who were poor and had no prospects found direction and kinship clearing miles of forest for America’s new highways, the budding bloodlines of a nation seeking rebirth through singularity of purpose.
No different than any soldier of the day, Dell survived on government issued Spam, bathed with lye soap, and smoked rabbit weed. He sent $16 a week home to his mother, keeping $4, which he used to buy real cigarettes, whiskey, newspapers, toiletries- anything he knew he could sell in the camps and turn a profit. When he returned home, 2 years later, Dell handed his mother a money-belt loaded with over $600.
He was wearing the same belt when he stepped off the ship in New Orleans, returning home from WWII. Only this time the belt was filled with over $10K and a small bundle of cut diamonds.
Daddy Dell had been drafted as a ship’s butcher at the age of 33, when he and Blanche were raising 3 children, and another on its way. The fourth was born in his absence, but a Navy check arrived in Blanche’s box every month, un-cashed. Dell never needed it. He had his own methods of making money in the military, not unlike his days in the C’s.
The rolling store was eventually retired and replaced with a real grocery store, where Dell’s children all learned the value of work and the uncertainty of money.
Daddy Dell never blamed his emphysema on a cigarette company. He never moaned at a meal cooked in bacon fat, or blamed his tired body on too much work. He drank hard liquor as he did his books at night, and gambled occasionally in the back room with other local merchants, providing free booze while selling coca-cola backs. He never forgot to surprise Blanche with that new dress she was fawning over.
Dell died without owing anybody anything, and so many owing him plenty. In the end, his children never wanted, and his loving Blanche never dreamed of another life. It was his America, and it’s mine too.
What’s yours?
Thanks for reading.
