I was born in a log cabin in a rural area near Monticello, Kentucky on May 9, 1919.

We lived on an eighty-five acre farm and we had a big garden. I remember hoeing weeds when I was five or six years old. My mother canned at least one hundred quarts of fruits and vegetables each year for the winter.

Most of the land around our house was hilly and we had a lot of apple trees. We ate apples almost every day. In the fall, we picked the apples and put them in the apple barn. We then covered the apples with straw, so that the apples would keep longer.

We also had about two dozen Sugar Maple trees. In the fall when the sap was running, my dad would drill a hole and insert a drain pipe in each tree and then he would hang a bucket on each pipe. We emptied the buckets every day until the sap stopped running. My parents would boil the sap to make maple sugar. They sold some of the maple sugar to the grocery store in town and we kept the rest for ourselves.

After the spring planting, my dad would go to West Virginia to work in the oil fields for part of the year. We raised a lot of corn and after it was picked and dried, we took some of it to the mill and had it ground into cornmeal. We had to feed a cow, a couple of horses and also a pig, which my dad and uncle butchered in the fall. We kept the meat from the pig in the smokehouse for the winter.

Our log cabin had a fireplace with a big kettle hanging over the fire. It also had a kitchen with a stove. My older brother, Wendell, and I slept in the loft, which had a ladder for us to get up and down. Sometimes when it snowed, we would wake up with snow on our blankets if the wind was right.

There were a lot of snakes in the area where we lived. There were black snakes, green snakes, rattlesnakes and copperheads to name a few. One day when I was picking blackberries, there was a black snake in the bush that I was picking from, so I just moved to a different bush. Once, a rattlesnake got into the house at night when we were in bed and our parents told us not to get up. My dad shot the snake after daylight.

We had a spring about 100 yards from our house, which is where we got all of our water. My dad built a shed around the spring and inserted a steel pipe where the water came out of the side of the mountain. When we needed water, we just put a bucket under the spout until it was full and then carried it into the house.

When I was about four years old, my dad took me on horseback to the county fair in Monticello. That’s where I first saw an automobile. Most people still had horses and wagons. We had a horse-drawn carriage that we used when the whole family went anywhere.

I was always climbing trees, even when I was only five or six years old. I was up in a tree when I was about that age, and I was out on a limb that was ten or twelve feet above the ground when I fell and I was knocked unconscious. My older brother went in the house and told our mother that I was dead and I can only imagine how she reacted.

When I was six years old, I started to school. It was a rural school which was three miles from where we lived. The first day, my dad took me on horseback and registered me. From then on, I walked to school with my older brother and some of my neighbors. The school had about thirty students and all eight grades were in the same room.

My dad died from influenza at the age of 41 in June of 1926, when I was seven years old. My mother, who was 30 at the time, was left with 5 children between the ages of eight and one; Wendell, myself, Mary, Woodrow, and Thelma.

In the summer of 1926, my aunt and uncle came down to talk my mom into moving to Illinois. We moved in April 1927, and we lived with different relatives in rural areas near Springfield. My sister, Mary, and I lived for a time at a neighbors' house who had no children of their own because there was not enough room at one relative’s house. That first year, I went to four different schools. My brother and I had to repeat a year in school because we only attended school for six months out of the year in Kentucky, where we started in July and went until the end of the year.

When I attended school in Cantrall, the teacher skipped me past second grade and I was in the same grade as my older brother. We graduated from eighth grade at the same time.

After about a year in Illinois, my mother got a job working in the nursery at an orphans’ home in Springfield. The whole family lived together at the orphans’ home until October of 1928, when my mother got remarried to Henry Harbour, and we changed schools again. I went to the public schools in Springfield from then on.

My mom had four more children over the next eight years; Henry, Betty, Robert and Gladys. My stepfather, Henry, worked in a machine shop, but late in 1936 he was unable to work after he injured his leg on the job. Early in the fall of 1938, my stepfather’s leg got gangrene and it had to be removed. A few months later, in November of 1938, my stepfather died. My mother was widowed again at age 42, this time with nine children.

When I was growing up, we didn’t have radio or television. The kids in the neighborhood would participate in all kinds of sports. Baseball was the most popular sport and a game was going on most of the time during the summer. Early in the spring, marbles was a popular sport for the boys and the girls liked to jump rope.

In the early 1930’s, the dam was built and Lake Springfield was full in about two years. Shortly after that, they built the beach house and it was a popular place to go swimming.

In the late 1920’s and early 1930’s, I went to several silent movies. When the talking movies came in the 1930’s, they began showing the old silent movies at several parks for free. During the depression, most people didn’t have the money to go to the talking movies; therefore, there was always a big turnout for the silent movies.

In the 1930’s and 1940’s, there were thirteen movie theaters in Springfield and ten of them were downtown. On a Saturday afternoon during the 1930’s, kids under twelve could go to the Southtown theater for three cents. I remember paying five cents to go to a theater downtown on a Sunday afternoon.

I got a paper route when I was in high school and then when I was in my third year of high school, I had to quit school and go to work full-time to help support the family when my stepfather could no longer work.

I went to work as a messenger delivering telegrams on a bicycle for Western Union. Most people didn’t have telephones back in the 1930’s, so they had about a dozen messengers in Springfield. I put in my application late in 1936. About the second week in January of 1937, when it was about 15 degrees below zero, a messenger stopped by our house and told me to report the next day. I found out that there was an opening because two messengers had quit the day before on account of the cold weather.

I worked at the Western Union for about three and a half years. The city was divided into zones. I got three cents for a couple of blocks and twenty cents to the city limits. The west limit was Pasfield Park, east was Bergen Park, north was Sangamon Avenue and south was Lynn Street, a two lane dirt road which is now Stevenson Drive. I made an average of $1.00 to $1.50 a day. In 1938, the minimum wage went into effect and my wage went up to twenty-five cents an hour, so I got a raise to $2.00 a day.

After the war, I stopped by the Western Union office and they told me that I had the record for the most money earned in a week prior to the minimum wage. I figure that I averaged about thirty to forty miles a day on my bicycle while working. We lived over three miles from downtown, so that was an additional six miles. After supper, I would ride another five or ten miles going on dates or to ball games.

Also in 1938, I got my first car. It was a 1930 Chevrolet with a rumble seat. I paid $40 for it with $10 down and a couple of dollars a week until it was paid off. We didn’t have a drivers’ license back then. They started that after World War II.

In May 1939, a movie about Abraham Lincoln was premiering in Springfield and a bunch of us Western Union messengers were out in front of the office when a motorcade passed by. I especially remember Caesar Romero and Binnie Barnes, as they made a point of recognizing the messengers.

In 1938 and 1939, I spent about a year working at the State Capitol. The Western Union had an office in the Rotunda on the first floor. When the legislature was in session, I sat through the meetings with a reporter from Chicago. Every so often, I carried press copy down to the Western Union office and it was sent to his paper in Chicago.

David C Adkins