A Depression Era Story

A Good Man is Hard to Find

My current WIP is out in a very rough draft form so I've paused from it and given my brain a little respite from story-telling.  With time on my hands, I pulled out my scrapbooking supplies and made progress on an album that tells the story of my grandparents, Margaret and Ellis, both deceased.

I don't even know the date they got married (I'm guessing it was around 1948) or how they met (no one thought to ask those questions until it was too late), so the story comes in spurts, supplied by information gleaned from Ancestry.com, or stories heard and remembered over the years. 

What I do know, however, I'm preserving so that the story, such as it is, can be passed down to my kids.

I tell the story of my grandma here, what little I know.

As much as I tried to rest my brain as I cut and glued and captioned and embellished, the story-teller in me came alive as I studied those old black and white photos and tried to set the scene that was just outside the scalloped white edge.

My grandma isn't here anymore for me to ask (she would have been 90 this year) but I think if there was ever a hero in her life, it was a man named Harry Campbell.  He was just the local bus driver and my grandma was one of dozens of kids he saw every day.  All of them probably poor, being rural Missouri in 1938.  All of them probably with similar stories of pain and sadness and abandonment.

One day my grandma, a young, slender 16 year old, didn't get off at her usual stop on the way home from school.  I wonder if Harry noticed right then, or if he was surprised to look up at the end of his route to see her still on his bus.  I wonder if the conversation went something like this:

"You missed your stop."
"I know.  I can't go back home."
"Why not?"
"Daddy and Flossie said I'm old enough to take care of myself.  They told me not to come home from school today."
"Got anywhere to go?"
"No."
Pause.
"You can come on home with me.  My wife'll fix you some supper."

I don't know if she cried that day or if she accepted the abuse of her biological father with rugged stoicism.  I also don't know if Harry was reluctant.  It was asking a lot to take a person in during the Great Depression.  I don't know if he did it out of a purely generous spirit, or if my grandma promised to work in return for the shelter he could provide.

I don't know if he was like a father to her, or if his childless wife was like a mother to her (her own mother died when she was 3).  I'd like to think they were but life was hard then, and sentimentality was rare.

Harry Campbell's drivers license, his bus, and his obituary, which describes him as leaving behind a daughter.

She stayed with the Campbell's that night.  Maybe they discussed the situation the next day. Or maybe they just went on without feeling the necessity to speak of it.  What was there to be said?  How could Harry turn her out now?  She stayed with the Campbells every night thereafter for ten more years.  When she graduated high school, they took her with them to California to try their hand at picking peaches.

That's where Harry died, not yet knowing how drastically he had changed the trajectory of my grandma's young life.  It makes me sad to think he died still poor, maybe thinking he failed young Margaret.

With nothing keeping them in California, his widow took my grandma back to Missouri and within a year of Harry's death, my grandma met my granddad and married.  Her difficult childhood was behind her.  By now it was post-war America and young people had no trouble finding work.  My grandparents purchased a home in Kansas City and my grandma, truly a woman ahead of her time, put herself through cosmetology school, and opened her own business, a successful beauty shop, which she operated until she retired.

Harry did not make my grandma's life perfect, but his act of sacrificial kindness set her on a course for a good life.  I wish she was still here so I could ask her if she ever wondered what her life would have been like if Harry had told her to get off the bus, if she would have been totally abandoned, or if she would have been forced to crawl back to a father who didn't want her and beg him to let her stay just a little while longer.

A good man has always been hard to find but my grandma found one on a school bus in 1938.  He would probably deny it, but he is a hero in the story of my family's life.

Are there stories of simple, every day heroes in the life of your family?  Men or women who didn't set out to change anyone's life, but through the sheer goodness of their heart, doing what, unquestionably, had to be done, changed the trajectory for someone you love?