-----------------------------
Part Five - The Golden Rule For Conquering Worry
Chapter 19 - How My Mother And Father Conquered Worry
As I have said, I was born and brought up on a Missouri farm. Like most farmers of that
day, my parents had pretty hard scratching. My mother had been a country
schoolteacher and my father had been a farm hand working for twelve dollars a month.
Mother made not only my clothes, but also the soap with which we washed our clothes.
We rarely had any cash-except once a year when we sold our hogs. We traded our
butter and eggs at the grocery store for flour, sugar, coffee. When I was twelve years
old, I didn't have as much as fifty cents a year to spend on myself. I can still remember
the day we went to a Fourth-of-July celebration and Father gave me ten cents to spend
as I wished. I felt the wealth of the Indies was mine.
I walked a mile to attend a one-room country school. I walked when the snow was deep
and the thermometer shivered around twenty-eight degrees below zero. Until I was
fourteen, I never had any rubbers or overshoes. During the long, cold winters, my feet
were always wet and cold. As a child I never dreamed that anyone had dry, warm feet
during the winter.
My parents slaved sixteen hours a day, yet we constantly were oppressed by debts and
harassed by hard luck. One of my earliest memories is watching the flood waters of the
102 River rolling over our corn- and hayfields, destroying everything. The floods
destroyed our crops six years out of seven. Year after year, our hogs died of cholera
and we burned them. I can close my eyes now and recall the pungent odour of burning
hog flesh.
One year, the floods didn't come. We raised a bumper corn crop, bought feed cattle, and
fattened them with our corn. But the floods might just as well have drowned our corn
that year, for the price of fat cattle fell on the Chicago market; and after feeding and
fattening the cattle, we got only thirty dollars more for them than what we had paid for
them. Thirty dollars for a whole year's work!
No matter what we did, we lost money. I can still remember the mule colts that my father
bought. We fed them for three years, hired men to break them, then shipped them to
Memphis, Tennessee-and sold them for less than what we had paid for them three
years previously.
After ten years of hard, grueling work, we were not only penniless; we were heavily in
debt. Our farm was mortgaged. Try as hard as we might, we couldn't even pay the
interest on the mortgage. The bank that held the mortgage abused and insulted my
father and threatened to take his farm away from him. Father was forty-seven years old.
After more than thirty years of hard work, he had nothing but debts and humiliation. It
was more than he could take. He worried. His health broke. He had no desire for food;
in spite of the hard physical work he was doing in the field all day, he had to take
medicine to give him an appetite. He lost flesh. The doctor told my mother that he would
be dead within six months. Father was so worried that he no longer wanted to live. I
have often heard my mother say that when Father went to the barn to feed the horses
and milk the cows, and didn't come back as soon as she expected, she would go out to
the barn, fearing that she would find his body dangling from the end of a rope. One day
as he returned home from Maryville, where the banker had threatened to foreclose the
mortgage, he stopped his horses on a bridge crossing the 102 River, got off the wagon,