Editor’s note: This is another column in Bill Boyd’s new series, “The Way It Was,” about growing up in Marysville. Bill continues to work with the Union County Historical Society to obtain information for his stories. With Marysville and Union County celebrating Bicentennial anniversaries in 2019 and 2020, respectively, these articles help depict what life was like in those early years.
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I was born in 1932, in the heart of the Great Depression. Jobs were scarce, and in some places they were nonexistent.
Some of my earliest memories, when I was five or six years old, are of men who stopped at our house to ask for food. They usually stopped around lunchtime, and I don’t think my grandmother ever turned them down. She always managed to come up with a sandwich or two, or maybe a bowl of chicken soup.
These weren’t local men; they came from all parts of the country. They could find no jobs where they lived, so they hit the road looking for work. I sometimes sat on the edge of our back porch and talked with them while they ate. Some were young men, in their 20s or 30s. Others were older, with hair that was starting to turn gray. But they all had one thing in common – they wanted to find jobs.
Then something happened that changed all that – Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and we were at war. Within a short time, these men stopped coming and asking for food. I think a lot of the young ones went into the armed forces. They scaled the cliffs at Omaha Beach, and cleared the way for the flag raising on Mount Suribachi.
The older men, the ones with graying hair, found jobs in defense plants, where they produced the airplanes and tanks that our military people needed to win the war. When the war ended, these men, young and old, were absorbed into a robust economy, and our country’s future looked bright.
Now fast-forward about 75 years or so, to last spring. We have a service company that takes care of our lawn and garden. They prune our shrubs, mulch our flowerbeds and things like that. They have done that for us since we moved here 12 years ago. They do a really good job, but this year in mid-June, they still hadn’t done our pruning and cleanup. So I called the man who owns the business to see when they would be here.
He’s a really nice guy, and he apologized for being late. He explained that he just couldn’t get workers. He normally has about 15 employees, but he was currently operating with only eight. I felt sorry for him. I mean, he was trying hard to provide a service, but he just couldn’t get people to work.
He told me it started with the COVID thing, when the government required some businesses to close. That put a lot people out of work, and the government began making monthly payments to them. In some cases, the payments were more than the wages they received for working, so I can’t blame them for staying home.
He told me that when the COVID payments ended, some of his workers had become so comfortable staying home they did not want to go back to work. So they filed for unemployment. That’s why our shrubbery was so overgrown that it looked like we were living in a jungle.
Unfortunately, this situation is not limited to lawn and garden service companies. I’m not sure what all this means, but I wonder if we will ever again get our pruning done on time. I hope so, because I really don’t like living in a jungle.
Those wishing to contact Bill Boyd can e-mail him at bill@davidwboyd.com