THE HANDS CHAPTER 7 LOWELL HAND HAND FAMILY MANUSCRIPTS

REMINISCING
___

CHAPTER 7

COLLEGE - NEW YORK - MASSACHUSETTS
AND BACK HOME

I agreed to work without pay one trip on week ends during the school year and three trips a week in the summer when the produce business booms. Dad agreed to see me through college after I graduated from High School in 1931. Then came the stock market crash ad the great depression of 1930 through 1937. In 1931 there were no other jobs available so I decided to start college and Dad bought me a "28 Chevrolet Coupe for $250.00 and paid my first year's tuition of $350.00. Cal-Tech would loan me money after that if my grades stayed above average. So I continued to work for Dad in the summer of 1932 at a mine in Inyokern in which he had a 1/3 interest. I borrowed the money for the second year at college. Then I stayed out of school through 1933 because I got a job with Mother's Cookie Co. in Glendale and later a better job from my previous Sunday School teacher Vard Wallace. He paid me 50 cents per hour to run machine tools. We made drafting machines which he invented. I was able to pay off my loan and considered giving up on getting an engineering degree.

My first experience with machine tools came about from hanging around Mt. Black's blacksmith shop in Lancaster. I was about 10 years old. Mr. Black was our neighbor and seemed to like me and I played with his grandson when he came to visit. A pump repair man occupied space in the front end of the blacksmith shop and I often watched him run his rather large lathe. One day he was making some long cuts on a sell casing and wanted to know if i thought i could watch his lathe while he went to get some cigarettes. So he watched me stop the carriage at the end of a cut, wind the carriage back and start another cut, then he took off. After that he let me run the lathe quite often.

In Burbank the Junior High School had a small lathe and drill press in the manual training shop so I got more experience and after that Mr. Polhemus who lived across the alley from us, paid me piece work to help him make "Water-Boy" float valves to control water in chicken pens. So things led to Vard Wallace and finally to doing machine work for the Cal-Tech physics department.

Then I met Ruth Cutler a new school teacher in Burbank who played the piano for church and was in our young peoples group. her father taught wood shop at Marysville High School and drove the school bus from Loma Rica each day. Ruth and I went steady for four years while I was in college and encouraged me to go back to school. So I borrowed more money for the Junior and Senior years and graduated in June 1936. Then we were married at Lake Tahoe where her folks had a summer cabin and I moved into Ruth's apartment in Burbank.

Unfortunately there were just no engineering jobs to be had, although I worked at the Burbank Power and Light Dept. for the summer. Then Dr. Du Mond at Cal-Tech got me an appointment to teach Electrical Measurements laboratory which paid my $500.00 tuition for a graduate year. I also continued to work on Dr. Du Mond's X-Ray tube for 50 cents per hour. It was another grueling year with lots of midnight oil but I got an M.S. degree in June 1937.

In the depression years Dad, like many others, had a bad time. He lost his manager's job at Continental and Safeway decided to take over their own produce supply. Everyone was cutting back and a third of the population was out of work. Prices dropped to the absolute minimum. Gasoline was 10 cents per gallon. A tire for my car was $4.50. Sometimes I ate at the "Squeeze Inn" in Lancaster, two hamburger patties on an open face bun with pink beans ladled over the top, 35 cents.

In 1914 someone had given me $1.00 for my birthday and Mom started an account in my name at the Security Bank in Los Angeles. Over the years she encouraged me to add to it and I never drew anything out. But on Sept. 21, 1932 I drew out the whole account of $48.27 and gave it to Mom to buy food. At today's prices that would be about $750.00. I still have the little bank book and have been a Security Bank depositor for a long time. The recent merger with Bank of America is rather sad since I never knew them to make a mistake in my balance in all those years.

Dad sold his interest in the Inyokern mine for $250.00 and moved to Burbank in 1932. His only job was as the time-keeper for the Burbank W.PA.)Work Projects Administration). It was started by Pres. Roosevelt to give a little income to destitute Americans.

The pastor of the First Baptist Church in Burbank knew a Mr. and Mrs. Getchel whose son Roy had started selling eggs during the depression. Roy gradually built up a business, buying eggs from poultry-men, candling and packing the eggs and selling them to various markets. Pastor Northrup sent Dad out to see the Getchels at the Dundee Egg Farms plant. He wound up with a job and rented a small house from Mr. Getchel, Sr. Bert had moved to San Diego to run a candy store for Welche's and was only home week ends. Norris (age 7) slept on the living room sofa. The rest of us squeezed into the two bedrooms. (Brother #2) had an after school job at Penney's and continued there after starting at Pasadena J.C. in 1935. He and Tom Lapsley rode with me to school each day to help buy gasoline. So with various jobs our family squeezed through the depression years.

In 1937 the General electric company offered me a job. I worked six months in the Los angeles office and then Ruth and I sold our '28 and '31 Chevrolets and moved to Schenectady, NY., starting there Jan. 1, 1938. We arrived in the snow and tramped around all day until we found an apartment for $51.00 per month, a slight increase from the $35.00 we had been paying in Burbank. G.E. paid me $24.64 one week for 32 hours and $30.80 the next week for 40 hours and Ruth signed up for substitute teaching and got called from time to time. We couldn't afford a car and it's rather miserable at 10 degrees below zero walking to work in the windy Mohawk River valley. But by summer we had become friends of George and Gail Ross. They liked to go on picnics and took us to see beautiful "up-state" New York and New England. The only trouble was my hay-fever from rag weed.

In September 1938 Henry Warren, president of Telecron Clock, a G.E. ssubsidiary came to Schenectady looking for someone to run his recently acquired Lombard Governor Corp. in Ashland, Mass. He offered $40.00 per week so I took the job and moved to Framingham, Mass., four miles from Ashland. Lombard made repair parts for their 1000 horsepower diesel engines and hydraulic water wheel governors. They also had a contract to fabricate and assemble Fenwal Thermo-Switches but were about to lose that work because of their excessive costs. So I designed many special tools on weekends and we made the tools during the week. Soon the cost of switchparts dropped to 1/3 of the previous price.

New England is really beautiful in the summer. I had a '36 Plymouth and we really took in the sights and often went to church in Boston, 25 miles from Framingham. Then in the fall when the leaves turn to red and gold the countryside is so beautiful that tourists come from everywhere, and they don't have rag-week in New England. But they do have snow and ice. Sometimes it is beautiful too but mostly it's miserable and a hazard both walking and driving. Also Lombard was an old belt drive shop and I just couldn't think in terms of the long haul to get it modernized, so we decided to head back home. The Second World War was surely coming and they would need airplanes, so I wrote to Lockheed Burbank and got a telegram right back. I gave Mr. Warren a two week notice, left the Fenwal production in a well chosen trainee's care, who later became production foreman, and was back in California July 1, 1940. Lockheed had a good retirement plan and I stayed with them until Jan. 31, 1971.

As I look back over 80 years there are many good things to remember and many difficult things but not anything utterly bad. I don't know anything about a Dad that came home drunk. We didn't always have enough of this world's goods but my folks were always kind and sacrificing. They put more responsibility on me at a very early age than I can hardly believe myself, but I never let them down and I grew up quickly. We were all brought up in the way of the Lord and none have departed from it.

Probably life's trying times made me overly conservative. I always thought of what my business law and economics professor said the last day: "Gentlemen the utility of your first dollar is much greater than the second dollar, so don't decide to gamble." Horace Gilbert was our representative for the European recovery plan after World War II. He taught from Schlicter's book on economics, a socialist viewpoint, but Dr. Gilbert was a strong proponent of the Free Enterprise system.

I believe young people today could profit from a greater inclination to save something for a rainy day and for investment. A thousand dollars blown for pleasure at age 20 costs $32,000.00 by age 70 at typical investment rates. People say the kids can't afford a home nowadays, yet the cost of most weddings would have made a home a reality for the majority.

Inflation appears to put money into our front pocket but in reality it takes the same percentage away from everything you have stashed away in you back pocket. Bread was 5 cents per loaf when my mother was young and stamps were 2 cents when we lived in Lancaster instead of 29 cents. On the other hand money isn't everything and making lots of money is a false quest for happiness. We lose interest in what we possess after we have obtained it. The challenge and satisfaction is in achieving our goals and using any surplus for helping others. the apostle Paul noted: "You will be enriched in everything for your liberality which produces (in others) thankfulness to God." And Jesus said: "A man's life does not consist of the abundance of things which he possesses." And "What shall it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his own soul for what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?"

True the citizens of this world will not accept these things but when I was 12 years old i received Christ as my personal Savior. I thought I made that decision on my own under the preaching of the evangelist Harry Anderson. I found out later that Jesus also said, "You didn't choose Me but I have chosen you," and "we all must be taught by God, everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to Me---and no one can come to Me until it has been granted him from the Father." Paul emphasized the same thought in romans 8:29, 30: "For whom (God) foreknew---He also called---and these He also justified."

Mom and Dad were praying I wouldn't be one who received the seed (God's word) on rocky ground and immediately received it with joy only to fall away when affliction and persecution came. I still have the Bible they gave me when I started college where Dad wrote on the flyleaf: John 8:12: "I am the light of the world, he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness but shall have the light of life."

Higher education sheds much light on many things but does not give the light of life, without which this life becomes useless and finally failure when old age comes and the end nears and there is no hope for a greater life to come. I consider myself a pilgrim only and a stranger on the earth because I am looking for that city whose builder and maker is God.

Uncle Lowell
Feb. 15, 1993

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