Hand-Me-Downs

Wren Richards

Description

Riviting story how a Nebraska family survived during the depression raising six children to become productive citizens. It reveals how so many turned to addictions, but education and the human survival instinct protected the Morehouse family

It is the early thirties and Clinton and Mader Morehouse are doing their best to raise their six children during one of the harshest times in America. Clinton, once a playboy and accomplished musician, has left his dreams behind to farm the dry land. Mader, a skilled seamstress, has always relied on her endless energy to help create a path for their future. But as the dust constantly swirls around their tiny town of Burton, Nebraska, the hope they once held for their lives is beginning to dwindle. As farmers try to survive without crops to harvest and water to revive the plants, Clinton and Mader must rely on their creativity and education to ease the hardships that are causing many to perish. As they do their best to overcome malnutrition, death, black blizzards, and the loss of beloved trees needed for fuel, the perpetual winds rage on, seemingly laughing at those who are able to stand against its bluster. But what no one knows is that the Morehouse family is embracing a secret weapon that may just hold the key to their survival. In this riveting historical novel, a Nebraska farm couple must find a way to endure the Dust Bowl and Great Depression and raise their six children to become productive citizens.

Sujets

• Historical
• Fiction
• New Deal

Informations

• Publié par: Archway Publishing
• Date de parution: 12 mai 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781665743556
• Langue: English

Extrait

HAND-ME-DOWNS





WREN RICHARDS







Copyright © 2023 Wren Richards.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.



Archway Publishing
1663 Liberty Drive
Bloomington, IN 47403
www.archwaypublishing.com
844-669-3957

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

ISBN: 978-1-6657-4356-3 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-6657-4354-9 (hc)
ISBN: 978-1-6657-4355-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023908184



Archway Publishing rev. date: 05/04/2023



CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Foreword
Prologue

Chapter 1 1933
Chapter 2 1917
Chapter 3 1919
Chapter 4 1919
Chapter 5 1919
Chapter 6 1929
Chapter 7 1922
Chapter 8 1922–1928
Chapter 9 1926–1929
Chapter 10 1930–1933
Chapter 11 1933–1934
Chapter 12 1934
Chapter 13 1934
Chapter 14 1934
Chapter 15 1934
Chapter 16 1934
Chapter 17 1934
Chapter 18 Spring 1935
Chapter 19 Spring 1935
Chapter 20 Summer 1936
Chapter 21 Fall 1936
Chapter 22 1937
Chapter 23 1938
Chapter 24 1941
Chapter 25 1941
Chapter 26 1941
Chapter 27 1943
Chapter 28 1943

Epilogue
Also By The Author
Author’s Note



In honor of parents who lived through the 1930s Depression.



ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
It is with much love that I thank my two sisters, Sharon and Teresa, who remembered bits and pieces of our mother’s growing up during the Depression years. It is from their fond thoughts that the artistic, stalwart, overachiever character of George was first to be born. Thanks to my fun-loving cousins Cindius, Carol, and Carmen, who furnished many laughs, giggles, and secrets from memories about their mother from which I created the character of soft-spoken, benevolent, but fun-loving Bette. It is with regret that my diligent research failed to locate the cousins from which the character of Crawf was created, but if cousins Peggy, Hazel, David, and Leah read this book, I would be grateful for a reconnection. Robbin, I cherish your friendly family connection, the many phone conversations, and the many miles you traveled to visit with me. I have loved the time we shared that inspired the stubborn, talented, and mischievous character of Sally. I am grateful to all of these cousins who understood the strong grip of our great-grandparents, the influence of our grandparents, the hardships endured by our parents, and how ancestral DNA and attitudes innately have been handed down.
To Galveston, Texas, book clubs, and Wyoming friends, thank you for continuing to read my books and remaining friends.



FOREWORD
My imagination flew into a cacophony of visual delights. So much of Wren’s work is like a frame-by-frame visual exhibition of words. I hope she keeps writing as I have become a “fan” of her work.
Liz Gardener, a well-known artist from Tobago, Trinidad, whose work was presented to Bill Clinton at the White House



PROLOGUE
The Herculean 1930’s wind revenged humanity for dishonoring nature’s rule for proper balance. The powerful gale punished the opulence of the 1920s and spat starvation. It withheld rain, sucked lakes and rivers dry, billowed top soil into oblivion, encouraged suicide, tortured orphans, and taunted and laughed at those who were able to stand against its bluster.



CHAPTER 1
1933
Inside the church for the displaced and the unwanted sat the congregation of the bedraggled. It was dark inside the church with no electricity. The sand piles against the windows blocked out morning light. The church piano had been sold last year to pay for a family’s food supply, and the lack of music replicated the blustering wind-gale outside with a similar sermon inside. A black split-tailed jacket covered the tall, shockingly-thin pastor like a tuxedo draped over a mannequin in the store front window of a New York store from better times.
Pastor Morehouse couldn’t sing a squawk, and no existing choir lent to the gathering’s acapella hymns. The congregation’s attempt at music was dismal. No one felt like signing. They muttered the words without tune or cadence. The joyless pastor gave no comfort to the seated, downtrodden, and dependent crowd, which fed his superiority and self-righteousness. George Albert Morehouse—a self-proclaimed minister—was wealthier than the Nebraska Keya Paha County (pronounced kip-a-ha) resident farmers and shear croppers who huddled in the pews. The church protected them from the wind-blown sand pummeling the clapboard exterior church walls like a sandblaster peeling paint.
Reverend George Albert Morehouse was considered to be epicurean by Depression standards and savored the finer things of life during his sixty-four years of life experiences. He was highly educated by both formal academics and self-developed as an avid reader of current events. His orated Sunday disquisitions were based on Dale Carnegie platitudes—not biblical quotes. The senatorial essay was elaborate, elegant, and completely over the heads of the poverty stricken, uneducated congregation. They didn’t understand one word they heard, but they were out of the painful wind and wanted the Sunday closing reward.
GA Morehouse’s sharp, piercing brown eyes were magnified behind thick, wire-rimmed lenses, which surveyed his assembly. He selected to focus on the faces of his granddaughters, George Alberta and the younger, redheaded Bette Jane. Both of the Morehouse sisters refused to meet his gaze.
George Alberta lowered her grit-caked eyelashes to the splintered, dirt-filled cracks of the gray, warped-plank flooring. Her eyes focused on the holes in the bottom of her younger sisters and brothers shoes as they slumped in the pew directly in front of her. Fourteen-year-old George was the eldest of the Morehouse siblings, and she stubbornly focused her eyes on Crawford and Patricia’s gray socks that poked from their shoe soles. Her five-year-old brother, Larry, had no socks at all. His bare skin lay open like dried-up lakes on sun-scorched earth. Her own nearly new shoes were buck wingtip oxfords, sturdy—bequeathed from her Aunt Zona Morehouse. George Alberta obstinately refused to engage in eye contact with her grandfather as he preached from the pulpit.
Eleven-year-old Bette Jane defiantly kept her red frizzy head turned toward her parents. She gazed at them as they were seated at the opposite end of the pew from where she and George crowded next to her dad’s older sister, Aunt Zona Morehouse Mead, who held George’s one-year-old baby sister, Sally. Grandma Cora Crawford Morehouse, devoted wife for forty-five years to the pastor of stentorian tones, idolized him. Cora sat scrunched into the pew between her two grown married children, Clinton and Zona. She was smugly proud of Clinton’s six well-behaved children.
Bette Jane peered at her dashing father as he held her mother, Lilian May’s, hand. Clinton Cecile Morehouse was a magnificent specimen of a man. He stood six foot four; was big boned and sturdy; and had a handsome, angular-featured face. He had an abundance of black, shiny hair, which draped above his alert blackish-brown eyes. His physique projected sexuality, and his six children gave proof to his bedroom proclivity. His good looks turned the heads of everyone who caught sight of him. And Clinton manipulated and honed that fact to his advantage.
His wife and mother of the six children was Lillian May Sprague Morehouse. Her stature was defined by the 1930s feminine physical figure. She was as feminine as her husband was masculine. May’s description, by truer words, was more than petite—she was tiny. All of the Morehouse children sitting in the pew in front of her were bigger than she was. The exception was five-year-old Larry. The Morehouse children replicated the dark, thick hair and blackish-brown eyes of their father, except for Bette Jane, who had the kinky-curly red hair and 7 Up bottle-green eyes of her elfin mother. The hungry, restless Morehouse children sighed and rolled their eyes when they spied the collection basket circulating through the pews.
The conclusion of the church service was signified by the tattered wicker collection basket, which was passed through the crowd to reward its contents to one of the churchgoers in attendance. The congregation would endure GA Morehouse’s aureate sermon—even though they did not understand the ornamental, elaborate speech—in hopes of being the lucky ticket holder for the collection basket for that Sunday’s drawing.
Pastor GA Morehouse, being a shrewd businessman, placed eight dollars in the basket, which assured a full assembly each Sunday. The basket now had a few other coins—amounting to twenty cents. Its contents also included a small book of matches, hairpins, safe