The New Deal and New Wars

About 1935, the Callahan family moved from Shoup to Boise where there was a high school for Eleanor and the new Works Projects Administration or WPA creating jobs that improved the city’s infrastructure.

Ross and Lois went to the mining camp of Atlanta deep in the Sawtooth mountains.

Harvey Huffaker, one of the CCC boys in Shoup followed close behind the Callahan family. He found work with the WPA in Mountain Home, determined to marry Eleanor.

Later that spring Earl and Lorne began getting into trouble in Boise, and Ed and Nora decided a change of scene might help. The boys were put on a small mail plane and sent to live with Ross and Lois in Atlanta.

Harvey and Eleanor were living in Mountain Home when their first child was a born by cesarean. As soon as Ed and Nora knew that Eleanor was on the mend and able to take care of the baby on her own, they headed to Atlanta to rejoin their boys. The mines were producing well, but once again they found themselves snowed in through winter and most of spring.

By 1937 the newspapers carried uneasy reports from across the oceans — Japan’s brutal war in China, Hitler tightening his grip on Europe, and rumors of terrible violence against civilians. Ed had lived long enough to remember how the last great war had drawn America in. The headlines must have carried a familiar and troubling echo.

Lois would remember those years as a mixture of hardship, humor, and upheaval.

Atlanta - Montana - California

By Lois Callahan Aaron Martell

My folks didn’t fight very often, but I’ll never forget one breakfast I witnessed while we were living in Atlanta.

It was a late one—maybe Dad had been working the night shift. I stopped by on my way to shop and could tell they had been having an ill-timed spat.

They greeted me normally, but as Mom lifted pancakes from the griddle she decided to have the last word. She flopped the pancakes down hard into Dad’s syrupy plate with a splash.

Daddy looked up quizzically, picked up a pancake, and tossed it.

It landed perfectly on the side of Mom’s face.

She stood motionless for a moment—and then they both burst out laughing.

Another time Buddy, Merna, and I stopped by the house, Dad had finished his coffee and left one of those little skinny cigars smoldering in a tray. Buddy had recently become fascinated with matches and cigarettes, which had us all worried. But Dad didn't smoke and I wondered what he was up to.

Dad handed the cigar to my little guy and said, “Have a smoke, Buddy.”

Buddy took a puff and his eyes watered, but he tried another before Dad took it back. So much for trying that tactic.

Dad asked, “Are you going round and round, Buddy?”

Buddy looked straight at him and said, “No. Me, me, me ain’t—but you is.”

Buddy stammered until he was nearly school age. I didn’t like people drawing attention to it.

One day when someone called him a stutterer, Buddy corrected them proudly. “Me, me, me don’t stutter—me, me, we-peats.”

Eleanor and Harvey moved from Mountain Home to Butte, Montana and it wasn’t long before the rest of us moved to Philipsburg.

Eleanor was expecting her second child. The doctor assured her that she could deliver without having surgery. Mom wasn’t convinced and when Eleanor went into labor, she and Dad drove to Butte.

After a second day and night, Mom pleaded with the doctor to no avail. After fifty hours of labor, Dad threatned the doctor, but it was too late. Eleanor’s uterus ruptured.

She survived, but the baby did not.

Earl Darrel Huffaker was buried on a bitter winter day in February of 1937. Eleanor remained in critical condition for many weeks.

Later that year, Ross, Harvey and Eleanor and I moved to Grass Valley, California.

Harvey wasn’t a miner and couldn’t find work in Grass Valley, so they returned to Butte, where their son Edward Glen Huffaker was born on March 21, 1938.

They purchased an old miner’s shack in Butte. Eleanor rebuilt it herself—laying a matched floor, building cupboards, and sewing curtains for every window.

Ross and I managed well for a time in Grass Valley. We even bought a small house on “easy terms.”

I loved that little house. I had flower gardens and a yard of my own. But Ross soon got into another one of his “jams” and sold the place for five hundred dollars.

We ended up in a dingy little apartment crawling with roaches. At night I kept the lights on and checked the children’s pillows for bugs.

One night I went to the shared bathroom down the hall. In daylight it looked clean enough with its floral linoleum floor, but when I flipped on the light the “floor posies”—hundreds of them scattered.

There isn’t much exaggeration in that.

One morning after a sleepless night Ross came home and I told him plainly, “Rent paid or not—we are leaving.”

We moved into a small house behind an apartment building.

Within two weeks it caught fire and burned to the ground. Ross told me he’d hidden the money we had made from the sale of the house in the closet.

We had not a stitch of clothing aside from what we were wearing, or a dime to our name. We did have another baby on the way.

Granddad Williams died June 20, 1938 following an appendectomy.

Mom, Dad and the boys joined us in California, living just a few miles away in Nevada City.

My Teen Years

By Earl Edward Callahan

I liked living and going to school in Nevada City, but with so many grown men and women holding dear to any job they could find, there wasn’t any work for a teenager. I decided I was going back to Philipsburg to work the haying season so I could buy school clothes.

Mom said, “Absolutely not.”

So I went to work for our landlady doing landscaping. I made about twenty-five cents a day. When I had saved four dollars I approached Mom again.

“Earl, four dollars wouldn’t even buy you a bus ticket.”

“I’m planning to jump the trains.”

That evening I overheard my parents talking about it.

Mom said, “Under no circumstances is Earl running off to Philipsburg!”

Dad said, “He’s got to knock the velvet off his horns sooner or later. He’s going whether we give permission or not. We might as well help him.”

Before Montana’s wheat harvest was on, Dad drove me to Colfax where I caught a freight train.

I nearly froze to death until I realized I had climbed on top of a refrigeration car. At the first opportunity, I found an empty car and crawled inside.

At Sparks the door opened and I heard shouting.

“Stop! There’s someone in there!”

They were about to dump a ton of ice into the car.

After that, I rode on top of the train all night in the desert cold wearing only a T-shirt and a light jacket.

I made it to Philipsburg and worked the haying season as planned. At summer’s end I mailed my parents the money I earned and started home with $3.50 in my pocket.

One night a man in a railcar made an advance on me while I slept. I pulled my knife and fought him off, then jumped from the train just before it crossed a steel bridge over a river.

After that near escape, a group of loggers fed me, helped restore a little faith in humanity and I hitched the rest of the way back to Nevada City.

Ed, Nora and the boys were only in Nevada City for about another year.

Mining companies had begun requiring lung X-rays and Ed couldn’t pass one. Years in damp, dusty mines had taken their toll and he had silicosis. Unable to work in California, they returned to Montana. Soon Lois and Ross would follow.