THIS painting has been with me almost since my birth. It bears a date, 1933, a year after I was born, and it hung in my childhood home as our family’s most conspicuous gesture toward the visual arts – our sole purchased, painted canvas. I seem to remember that my mother paid $35 for it, but where she bought it, and how she found the money for it at that low point of our family fortunes (my father had no job and was scrambling to acquire a schoolteacher’s credentials, my grandfather had lost most of his investments in the Crash), are details that, if I ever knew them, have vanished, with so much of the oral lore whose sources are now silent. $35 in the Depression was several weeks’ wages; my mother as a saleswoman in the drapery department of Pomeroy’s Department Store in Reading, Pennsylvania, was paid $14 a week. She took the trolley car to work, three miles and twenty minutes from our town of Shillington, until, one morning, I ran down Philadelphia Avenue crying after her, and she quit the job. So much for being a working mother in the 1930s. for more click here
