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Letter: 2

Arnold Eugene Howard

      I WAS born July 30, 1917, the youngest of eight children. I was the only one born in a hospital and have the bill for mother and baby, thirteen days, $35.65, to prove it.

      I grew up in a little town, a village of about 500 people , including pets, where everyone knew everyone. The characters (of which I was probably one) made interesting conversation — not malicious or belittling, just humorous.

      My father was a blacksmith and with his brother owned a hardware and farm implement store where I learned a lot about life in that circle around the pot bellied stove in the middle of the store.

      Times were hard when I was growing up and there were few ways of earning money, so cash was a real luxury. When I was quite young I started spending summers on a brother-in- law's ranch. He put me on a horse-drawn mowing machine the first work day and from then on all summer I mowed and raked hay and alfalfa. I learned about monotony from sunup to sundown. The first years I was given $15.00 at the end of the summer — later on I got fifty cents a day if the crops didn't fail.

      The summer I graduated from high school in 1935 1 went to Washington with a friend, riding the rails to my mother's horror, where we picked pears, prunes and apples. We were paid by the box and I came home with $100.00. Pa disapproved terribly of "beating your way," but having some money felt good.

      The folks had put the older kids through college and were much distressed that they just couldn't help the youngest ones. But the depression was a bleak, hard time when people scrounged for money to pay the taxes to keep their property. The farmers needed machinery and repairs but couldn't pay for it when the crops failed in those dust bowl years.

      So, I worked for another brother-in-law doing janitorial work, firing two steam boilers for two office-apartment buildings. I saved some money and in 1938 went to a business college to study accounting and typing and shorthand.

      When I got out of school I finally got a job in Los Angeles for $18.00 a week as a stenographer for a credit manager. I had wanted an accounting job and an employment agency gave me a test for "Senior Full Charge Accountant" which they thought I passed remarkably but there were no jobs in accounting. Later I worked for Douglas Aircraft Company, and after World War II started, I was given deferments from the military. In 1943 I enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps. I wanted to be a pilot and a great hero. Academically I was at the top but I was washed out after soloing — no doubt saving my life, as the first Zero Pilot would probably have shot me down. I served overseas in the Philippines and made it home when the war ended.

      After the war I worked as credit manager for Consolidated Western Steel Division of U.S. Steel. But this job was dissolved by the recession when the Japanese and Germans priced us out of the market.

      I then went into my own business as an insurance agent for 31 years and retired at the tender age of 77.

      I married in 1941 and raised two children and a granddaughter along the way.

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