I want some coffee!

As a society existing in 2023, we probably don't give much thought to telephone service today. It's a given that we all are connected: we have cell phones and the internet and that has the feel of how it's always been. Well, as the song goes. "... it ain't necessarily so". As a child, my personal experience with communications was limited to writing letters to family and friends, seeing my parents pay bills by return post, ordering by mail from a catalog (Sears was the best), and the telephone. There was also radio communication, of course, but if you weren't in the military or weren't a ham radio operator with your own transmitter and receiver, radio was one-way communication. In early1953 the nation was moving on from World War II and even starting to anticipate the end of the war in Korea. Most homes in the US were connected through rotary dial telephones to almost any other phone in the same exchange. Connections were automatic via the wires, cabl...

No, not the great depression we seem to be having now in the early 2020's.  Today's economic depression is related to our COVID pandemic and poorly managed financial interventions at the Fed level. The title above refers instead to the depression that gripped the US in the 1930's. The one that ended with pretty much everyone in the US having a job because we were at war in Europe, Africa, Asia and in the Pacific.  Hang in there- it will take a bit of meandering to get to the story which fits the title. My maternal grandparents were Lewis Edward Ross and Violet Mae Walsh. They both were born in 1888 in Angels Camp, California. As locals there tell the story, Angels was kinda the gold mining capital of the Gold Rush. And of course that's not stricty true since gold was first discovered at Sutters Creek in 1849- a goodly distance from Angels Camp. I've also heard labels like Center of the Mother Lode and the Comstock Lode.  Angels is named for Louis Angel who sold equi...

My maternal grandfather, Lewis Edward Ross, descended from a line of Scots that came here to the US perhaps as part of the Scottish Highlands 'Clearances'. The Clearances happened starting in the latter half of the 18th century and continued for something on the order of 110 years. At one point the process included encouragement to emigrate through travel assistance called 'assisted passage'- land owners apparently would pay a family's passage to leave the Highlands. The bottom line was that farmers in Scottish Highlands were thrown off the land. Initially they were expected to find work fishing or harvesting seaweed or, as mentioned above, just go away. My relatives were committed farmers and apparently decided to 'just go away'. The timing for assisted passage would be about right as my 2nd great grandfather, George Alexander Ross, was born in Cabarrus County, North Carolina in 1810. His parents must have arrived in the USA sometime before tha...