Memories of Daniel Saunders, born in Hartford in 1909, uncle to Anne Paluck

Daniel G. Saunders (“Captain Dan”) as told to daughter Dianne Saunders on Christmas Eve 1987, about his trip across the U.S. in 1934 to go to a job on a ship in San Francisco, and about hobos riding the rails trying to get to California.

“We went straight across Canada. We had an old car, three of us. 1934, gee I’ve got a picture of that.”

“Who did you go with?”

“Two other guys that were sailing with me. One kid was – well, it was 1934, how old was I? 25. They were the same age. We had a job waiting for us out in San Francisco. And we went straight across Canada. Those people were marvelous to us. They treated us fine. We had breakdowns, and this and that. Of course, it was a lot different in those days, you know, half a century ago, what the hell.”

“What car did you have?”

“We had an old Oldsmobile. This friend of mine, he bought it from his father. I don’t know, something like $100. It was a lot of money. We paid our share. And that car – the radiator fell off. We come down to Chicago, the World’s Fair was there. We’re going down one of the main thoroughfares, and the right rear wheel come off. And here we are it’s like on Connecticut Boulevard on the main street, the main street. Anyway, we sold the car for $27 in San Francisco, but we missed the ship by 10 days anyway. And we were out in one of the Western states, I forget which one it was. We were going down the highway and here’s a road coming this way and it was just getting dark at night and these two young girls about 15 years old taking their father’s car from one of the ranches out there, and they went right across the road and they hit us broadside and knocked us into the ditch, stuff like that.”

“Sounds like a great vacation!”

“That was a drought year, too, one of them, the Dust Bowl. I told you about this maybe several times, I’ll never forget it. We get out there in the Western States, the wheat growing states, and you could see that the sagebrush and everything else, you know, when it rolls it gets into a ball, a big ball. And they had a drought out there for years, and all the cattle died, you know. You’re going down the road, there’s no interstate roads like there is today, and you see horses out there in the field with the legs sticking up, dead you know, see, and herds of cattle same way. All the chickens dead, and so on. Sand – the topsoil blew off the ground, and blow up against the house, and it might come up as high as the ceiling here, and all the people were leaving these states, Kansas, the Dakotas, and so on, and going out to California. Remember, this was Depression years.

The three of us came along this road and of course the radiator was boiling up. There weren’t gas stations then. Finally, here’s this farmhouse. I was driving the car, one guy was asleep in front, and we had room enough for the other guy in the back. So I stopped the car, and I walked in from the road. The farmhouse was maybe 75 yards in from the road, and I went up, and I knocked on the door. The wind was blowing, Jesus, the sand was blowing all over the place, and it was like the surface of the moon. Nothing was growing, nothing. There wasn’t a blade of grass, there wasn’t a twig, there wasn’t a bush, that’s how bad it was. This woman came to the door, the front door, maybe 50 years old. A weather beaten place. I said “how do you do? We were driving along, and our radiator is overheated. I was wondering if you could give us a gallon of water for the car.” I’m telling you, the woman - she looked at me – I’m telling you the woman looked absolutely drained physically, gray hair pulled tight on her head, and she had on a gingham something or other, and she looked at me and she says, and I’ll never forget it, she said to me exactly, she says “How many are with you in the car?” I said two of my friends and myself. She said “I’ll tell you what I’ll do. You call your two friends up here and I’ll give you each one glass of water, but not one drop for that car.” See.

“They didn’t have any water?”

“No. Everything was gone. Everything – there wasn’t a crop in the fields, there wasn’t any cattle left, there wasn’t anything left. And this went on year after year. And the topsoil all blew away because of the way they used to farm in those days. They didn’t – they call it leaving it lie fallow for a year. You have a crop this year, next year you don’t do it. Contour plowing, and so on, it’s all scientific today, all these farmers know it. But in those days they plowed it up and so on, and then when they didn’t get the rain everything blew away.”

“We just drove that car – it’s remarkable how long that car run with the steam spouting out. And we finally came to this small town, and there was a garage there, and we had to let the car sit. What was in that town? I forget. There was something like a town pump and at certain hours of the day you could get maybe a gallon of water, each one. That’s what we got. You see a car out in the road, you could buy soda, you could pour that in the radiator, any liquid. That’s how bad it was out there.

When we got to San Francisco we sold the car for $27, $9 each, that’s all the money we had. Those freight trains would be running east and west, north and south, whatever. You’d be by the railroad tracks, here come a freight train, and up on top of the freight cars, just like seagulls, or birds sittin’ on a wire, the guys sitting up on top of the cars, women too, kids, sittin’ up on top of the freight cars going west, see, they’re trying to get to Oregon or Washington or California, California especially. California at the state line they used to stop the trains and kick them all off, and then you’d see a train going east, the same thing, everybody sitting up on top of the freight trains. “

“Why’d they kick them off?”

“They didn’t want ‘em. I mean this wasn’t 5,000 people that were on the move. This was 700,000, 800,000 people. Hey, these people just walked away from the farm that the family was farming for 50-60 years, they owned the land. They just walked away from it. Thousands of places out there deserted. Train going south, you see them sittin’ up there. Hey, we had 10,000 sailors in New York City, 10,000 sailors, and there wasn’t $100 amongst the crowd. Down there on South Street at Seaman’s Institute.”