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...

... there's the maternal side of my family. My mother was Scotch/Irish. The whole of the men were hard rock miners or had jobs which supported the mining community in and around Angels Camp, California. Well... the whole lot other than those that were ranchers like my great-great grandfather George Alexander Ross.  The Rosses, Walshes, Osborns and Daveys (plus some additional surnames which I fail to recall) started collecting in Angels Camp, California in the mid-1800's. Angels Camp is said to be the heart of the Mother Lode of the California Gold Rush at least geographically if not financially. "They were part of the California Gold Rush? They must have all been rich, right?!"  Not a chance! The lot of them were hard rock miners or equipment operators or they worked in some support role like selling supplies or driving trucks. In fact, Angels Camp was originally Angel's Camp, named after Louis Angel who set up a 'camp' (it was a tent) to sell food, equip...

Well, that's what it was called before Wikipedia allowed someone to re-write the whole story. Currently that reference tells the tale of cattle rustlers in Johnson County. Earlier the story was about the contentious relationship between cattle and sheep ranches. I cling to that earlier version since it relates to my family story. My paternal grandfather had an interesting life- at age 16 he kidnapped his brother and sister and took them to Buffalo, Wyoming to fulfill a deathbed promise to his father; while a young man living in Buffalo he met Margaret Lothian and asked her to marry him, but she said no and married the guy who owned a ranch; he herded sheep in the midst of Wyoming cattle country, then... moved to California and enrolled in a business school. After graduating he... moved to Arizona where he worked at or ran various trading posts and general stores in the mining areas while Arizona was still a territory. While in Arizona he met and married Ida Francis Penn; Ida was a ...

When I was a a kid I idolized my paternal grandfather, John Oscar. When I came to know him, he lived on a small farm with my paternal grandmother Ida Frances in Stockton, California. He could do no wrong. But that was a little bit of fantasy that hid rather a lot of difficult behavior- he could be a pain in the butt when he put his mind to it. I called him Pa (god knows how I decided on that name! He was emphatic that he not to be called Grandpa- ' pick a name just not Grandpa! '). On reflection, he was a strident 'my way or the highway' guy who had managed trading posts and general stores in the mining areas of territorial Arizona, moved to California where he owned his own grocery, worked for Piggly Wiggly markets, and managed a few different Safeway stores. He retired from Safeway when his job went away during the depression, then supervised a US Army warehouse at Sharpe's Depot in Stockton during WW-II. From what I've been able to learn about him doing gene...