Memories from Hugh Cox, Trustee for Community Colleges, Dir. of the Valley Railroad Company and former Pres. of Raymond Engineering as told to A.Zyko

I was born in 1928 and lived 4 miles from the center of East Haven Connecticut in a place called Foxon, which had a population of about 200 people. My parents got electricity about 1928. We heated our house with a wood/coal stove. My cousin in North Branford didn’t get electricity until after World War II. In 1936, we got a refrigerator. Before that, I remember my father picking up ice and bringing it home on the bumper of his car for our ice box.

Foxon had its own school, a building with 4 rooms, 8 grades, 3 teachers and one custodian. First, second and third grades were in one room and I could listen to three grades being taught. When I graduated from 8th grade, there were 7 or 8 graduates, only 2 boys because many young men had to find work. I remember being in school when the Hindenburg flew overhead but I wasn’t allowed to go out and see it. I was active in Boy Scouts and 4-H. I helped fight forest fires by carrying an Indian tank weighing 40-50 pounds on my back holding 5-6 gallons of water with a hose and nozzle that allowed you to squirt water on the fire. I was paid 25 cents an hour for this work.

I worked summers on a truck farm and once on a chicken farm. I got paid 1 cent a basket for picking strawberries. The best job of my life was clerking at the general store because I got to do everything from stocking shelves, waiting on customers, pumping gas, assembling the penny candy case, to dealing with shipments. My pay was 25 cents and hour and had gone up to 50 cents an hour by 1946 when I went to college at UConn.

I especially remember 1934 because it was a year of blizzards in Connecticut. There were 12-15 families on our street, which was about a quarter of a mile long. The men shoveled the snow to clear the streets. People were self-reliant and didn’t depend on the government. Volunteers built a community house where we had meetings, barn dances, and talent shows. Everyone had gardens. We had 10 acres and kept a pig and a cow.

When I was about 12, my mother got me to start a newspaper, the Foxon Review which we sold for 1 penny. My mother typed the paper and ran it off on a hectograph. It had local news only but people loved it.

Books were very important to my family and we went once a week by car to the library in the center of East Haven. My father always had a car. He would buy used cars for less than a hundred dollars. The first few cars he got were from the town dump. The cars that were still able to run that were left at the dump, were sold by the man who ran the dump. My father got his first new car in 1940.

My father was a pattern maker and had his own business, New Haven Pattern and Model. Pattern makers would start by making a wooden pattern, then a sand casting and then pour metal into it. The object would be to make a part that required the least amount of machining. During the depression, he was either working at his business or looking for more business. War work came along in the late 30s.

My wife’s family was well off during the depression. The men in the family worked for the railroad and had steady jobs. They would travel free on the railway to Florida on vacation. My wife had a dressmaker. My cousin’s family had a farm and took in wards of the state. They had two pairs of brothers that they took care of and the small income from this helped them hold onto their farm.

I had very little in the way of money or possessions but I got the start I needed and lived a good life. I was the first in my father’s family to go to college. The depression did not hurt me but did a lot to shape my life. It gave me a belief in saving money and a conservative outlook. I am probably better off for not having had so much.

I do remember hearing about the WPA and the CCC during the depression but not about the Federal Writer’s Project. In the Great Depression and in the current recession, if you have a job, you are fortunate.