On the last Labor Day on which I will be working full time, I am thinking of the work lives of my grandparents and parents, which were heroic compared to my privileged work life. My maternal grandfather, James Madison Matt Hardin, was born in 1881. He was a barber and a lumber grader, but those skills were of little value in the Depression, when he worked at whatever job he could get. By the 1940 census he was pleased, I know, to be able to tell the census taker that he had had 44 weeks of work as a flooring grader in 1939 and 50 hours of work the week the census taker interviewed him. He had earned $1162 in 1939. He was still working, probably part time, at Wrape Stave Mill when he died in 1953. He was a member of the Carpenters and Joiners Union. My maternal grandmother, Wilma Clyde Howell Hardin, was born in 1898. She kept house, as my mother said, in the time before labor-saving devices when keeping house was a full time job. During World War II, I think, she worked at Ottenheimers or Kellwood (perhaps the same company) making military uniforms. My paternal grandfather, Iros Oscar Goss, was born in Cypress Creek near Vilonia in 1885. He finished the eighth grade. He was a farm worker until he followed an older brother to North Little Rock and worked at several jobs before getting work in the Iron Mountain Railroad shops. He was badly injured in a fall at the shops. He went out on strike in 1924. The strike was broken. He worked as the janitor at NLR Junior High (Fourth Street when I was in school) until his death in 1946. My paternal grandmother, Laura Edna Hively Goss, was born in 1892 in Iuka, which is near Calico Rock. She learned to play the piano and the organ. While she was in high school she passed the teacher licensing exam, which she told me meant you had done something. She was able to teach school some and finished one year at Galloway Womens College. In addition to teaching, she was the organist at Methodist churches pastored by her father. She lost her teaching job in North Little Rock in about 1916 after her father preached some sermons that upset the powers and for the next three years sold Bibles and other religious books in Michigan. After she and Oscar married, she taught piano lessons, did some substitute teaching, and worked as a church organist. After Oscar died, she supported herself with those jobs and by playing for services at Fort Roots. She died in 1985. Daddy, Donald William Goss, battled poor health and injuries. He had a spastic hand from birth trauma. He developed a foot infection from a splinter when he was 7. A doctor trying to debride the infected tissue in the time before penicillin cut a tendon, causing his toes to curl under. He developed osteomyelitis that resulted in a below-the-knee amputation when he was 24. And he had rheumatic fever. His ailments did not stop him from being a golf caddie and learning to play golf. With only a high school education but lots of smarts he became a bookkeeper and after completing a correspondence course in accounting, had accounting jobs and worked as the controller for a large Arkansas business until his death at 55. Mother, Vonda Rose Hardin Goss, finished Adona High School in 1940, joined her parents in Little Rock, took a business machines course at Draughon Business School, worked for a dozen years before her marriage and after my birth as an office worker, spending many happy years at Pfeifer, where she continued to work off and on for another ten years. After Daddy died in 1978, she went back to work at a state agency for six years before retiring at 62. She died four years later.The sacrifices of these folks allowed me and my sisters to get educations that led to cushy white collar jobs. And I must not forget Judy, who was a hard-working and gifted public high school teacher, really a calling and a mission.
Posted on: Mon, 01 Sep 2014 15:33:23 +0000
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