Chapter 8

WASHINGTON AVENUE

 

The first evening in our new NEST, after the "three-mile wedding trip", we had our first company. My friend Peter Rutt, who had served as my Best Man, and Ada's niece Ruth Horst, who had been Bride's Maid, came to visit us. (My sister Mabel and Ada's youngest brother Lloyd had been the other attendants.)

 

Washington Ave., Ephrata

Just before we were married the depression had deepened to the extent that there was no more building and many people were unemployed. I had a new wife and an apartment for which I was paying ten dollars a month for rent. I began looking for work. Eventually I found a job at the Eby Shoe Co., two blocks west of our home. The pay scale was twenty cents an hour to start. They had just cut all wages and rates by ten percent, so I was starting for eighteen cents, net, per hour. I had been getting three times that much at the trade.

 

I was to spend the next four years in the shoe factory lasting pre-welt children's shoes. Later on at piecework I earned somewhat more and toward the end I could have made good money except that we often had no shoes to last.

 

I can find no record of when we left that apartment, but I think we were there just under a year.