If you lived in Ohio in 1931, you had plenty to worry about. The prosperity of the 1920s had given way to a depression that was grinding down the working people in small towns like Fostoria. The stock market in New York had collapsed in the fall of 1929. Two years later, in the spring of 1931, when business was still in deep trouble, I was born on West Culbertson Street near the railroad tracks.

The tracks that cut through the town were important because Fostoria's rail connections to Toledo and Cleveland on the north and Cincinnati to the south had helped make it a small manufacturing center. For a time, it appeared that the town would become a center for automobile production. But neither the Allen nor the Seneca motor companies could compete with Ford's inexpensive Model Ts. Both of the local firms went out of business.