THE LIFE & TIMES OF MY FATHER, HENRY MCDONALD (1926-2012)

Transcribed from his own audio tape recordings, circa 2003 & 2007, and entrusted to me.  (Transcription and Parenthetical notes by Dr. Royce McDonald, son of Henry McDonald)

Tape 5, Side 1

I got $33.00 a week Workman’s Comp while I was laid up with this burn. This was the poorest time we ever had while we were married. We hardly had enough to eat. But it taught me a great lesson that I never forgot. When you work and make a living in this world you put a little bit back for these times so you have a little money in the bank. And from that day forward after I went back to work, we always had a little bit of money put back. Not a lot because we never made a lot and we raised a lot of children. We had something to fall back on. If we had a financial problem or something happened, we had a few dollars to take care of it. 

We stayed in Miami ‘til the year before Royce was to start to school and the schools were what we considered bad down there in them days. They weren’t bad at all side of what they are today, but they were bad to us. My dad came down to visit us about that time. He was working for a pest control company up here and told me if I wanted to come up here I could go to work for this company. So I put my house on the market, sold it, got in my car and come to Winter Haven. 

We bought my brother’s house in Bartow, Florida and I went to work for this pest control company and worked for them for five years, and decided to go in business for myself. I took the state exams. At that time, me and my daddy and my brother, we were all working in the same place. So when I went into business, my dad and my brother in law came to work for me. This was a good move for all of us. My dad stayed with me until he retired. Something like 5 years later. My brother in law, Monroe Messer, stayed with me another 5 years or so, and he went into business for himself. 

This business was McDonald Exterminators and I run it for over 30 years, and retired from it at age 65. I say ‘I run the business’ which is a little bit wrong. My wife worked as secretary in this business from the day it was started. And she actually run it more than I did. She took care of everything in that office, and all the people in the field that we worked for. She was my right hand. I worked right along side my daddy and my brother in law, and other men I had working for me out in the field the first 20 years just as hard they worked, and my wife run this business.

I slowly quit working hard in the field and started taking care of the business of seeing customers and putting my men to work and taking care of that end of it. So the last 10 years I was on this job I had a very easy job of it. My wife worked harder every day she was in it than me, and we succeeded in it being a good business, not making an awful lot of money, but taking care of our children right, but we gave them a good home, and decent clothes and vacations and a good life. This business done it for us. We worked hard at it.

We retired from this business January 1, 1991. I sold the business to Bob Edwards, a young man that worked for me for 17 or 18 years. At the time I’m talking now, he’s had it for about 3 years and doing real well with it. We retired and bought a little house in North Carolina between 2 creeks. The house was about to fall down. We spent the last 3 years repairing it. We completely reworked the inside and outside over and made a new house out of it. It took us 3 years to do it. Every vacation we took we worked on it. We’ve enjoyed it. Now that we got it finished, we’re about tired of it. We’ll put it on the market and try to sell it in the next year.

That pretty well brings me up to date on my family genealogy, as far as I can do it. But I do want to say that I proud of my ancestors, my wife’s ancestors and all the people from the past. They were clean, honorable hard working people. None of them ever went to jail. They were never arrested for anything. They worked hard and lived honorable lives. My children are going on in their footsteps. We raised them up. They all finished high school. They all have decent jobs. They raised some good children of their own, and I’m proud of them too.

I’m going to use the rest of this tape to reminisce a little bit about the past.

When I first remember anything it was back in the 1930’s. A grown man, if he had a job, (it was the middle of the Depression) he was making a dollar a day. And a child 10 or 15 years old working in the field was making 35 to 50 cents a day. Times was really hard. You could take a little bit of money and buy a lot. You made a dollar a day, you could eat and get along. You didn’t do too well, but you made ends meet some way or another. 

We had tens of thousands of homeless people, hobos by the hundreds riding the back of trains and begging at the back doors. They had hobo jungles, pasteboard boxes and anything they could get down around the railroad tracks. They made pure cities out of them. There might be 100- 200 hobos in one pile. It got bad like that and the law would come in and tear the places apart, burn ‘em down and they’d just gather up somewhere else ‘cause they had no jobs and no money and nowhere to go. They rode the trains hunting jobs and they’d hear of a job somewhere and there would be a hundred thousand hobos heading that way. And when they got there, there was no jobs. 

My dad kept a job most of the time, but sometimes the job would run out and he’d be without work for a while. He drove a transfer truck hauling furniture. He farmed awhile, and he worked for the WPA and he made us a living. I don’t know how because it was awful hard. I can remember how hard it was for him. He would get up at daylight and hit the road and get home late at night when he was driving the truck. And make just enough to feed us, not enough to cloth us because we really didn’t have good clothes. We got back some way or another. 

Looking back at those times we didn’t have any tv’s in those days. Radios were perfected, but poor people didn’t have any of them. I heard my first radio when I was 9 years old. First thing I ever heard on the radio, a neighbor of ours had bought one, and listened to the Joe Lewis fight against Max Snelling. The first radio I ever heard and it was quite interesting. We didn’t have anything. We didn’t do anything, as far as spending money. But we had fish everywhere. You could go fishing side of the road and in the creeks by the woods and catch big messes of fish. And you had peanuts boiling.

All the people for 20 miles around would come to the peanut boiling and maybe have a wash pot or two out in the yard filled with peanuts boiling them. The grown people would be inside and have the old Victrola going, and playing records and they’d be dancing and the kids would be out in the yard playing their games and eating boiled peanuts, and telling lies and having a good time. Really, when you never had anything, you don’t miss it. We thought we was thought we was alright, and I guess we was ‘cause we didn’t know no good times, so we didn’t know anything about good times. 

But farmers that were good farmers lived fairly decent lives. They didn’t have no money, but they had a meat house with meat hanging in it. They had a corn crib and a mill where they’d grind it into grits and corn meal. So they fared pretty well. My dad was a good a farmer, but the land that he farmed on wouldn’t grow nothing so he had quite a time of it.

When we lived on a farm when I was six, seven or eight years old, J.W. would get a bridle and put it on an old mule on a Saturday when we weren’t working and we’d take off to the woods fishing maybe seven or eight miles away and fish all day and half of the night and nobody worried about us at all. Nobody hurt kids in those days. I never heard of anybody harming a child. And they knew the whole countryside for 10 or 12 miles around, the wallows and woods. 

When I was six or seven years old I went all over. So, we enjoyed life. There was water everywhere in them days so kids learned to swim as soon as they could walk. And we’d go to creeks and have a line tied to a tree and we’d swing out over creeks and we’d have the biggest kind of fun. We didn’t know anything about the things that kids do today, but we sure enjoyed life just the same.

"The Life & Times of Henry McDonald." Transcribed from Tape 5. Copyright pending

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