50 Plus: Frugality kept family business going

Editor’s Note: This story is one of four in our latest 50 Plus series, highlighting people 50 years of age or older. This set’s theme is people remembering the Great Depression.

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The days of the Great Depression brought a surge in the number of hobos — homeless, jobless boys and men who stowed away on freight trains to travel from town to town.

If they were hitching a ride through Lynchburg at night, many of them hopped the trains and walked less than a mile to the Craighill subdivision, a new neighborhood near the corner of Fort and Memorial Avenues.

They were looking for food.

Some of them came and knocked on Bobby Taylor’s door.

“The Depression was brought home to us by the people coming to the door and asking for food,” said Taylor, who was six years old when the stock market crashed in 1929.

He said his family kept extra food on hand, much of it grown in their backyard garden, to be able to help those who came to the door.

Taylor grew up in a home near Fort Early.

At the time it was a young and well-off neighborhood that wasn’t dragged down much by the Depression.

Taylor’s father helped run a lumber mill. Nearby neighbors included a doctor, a grocer and a hosiery mill owner, he said.

His parents had six children — four boys and two girls.

They all shared one bathroom, although a maid who lived with them had a separate bathroom downstairs.

The family had one car, a 1928 Packard automobile that fit about five people in the back seat. They often took Sunday afternoon drives together.

Taylor, 86 and now living in the Westminster Canterbury retirement community, said he never felt poor.

“The thing I remembered about it was, I wanted a bicycle,” Taylor said.

His three older brothers had bikes, but by the time he was old enough to ride, money was short.

So he got a newspaper route and opened a savings account at the Lynchburg Trust and Savings Bank until he could buy his own.

“I knew it was a tight situation, but if we worked hard enough for it, we could get it,” Taylor said.

Taylor and other kids in the neighborhood had to make their own entertainment. They used to play “steal the flag” and other games. He and his siblings worked in the family garden.

The garden “was almost like a farm inside the city,” and it was a way of making ends meet.

They raised corn and other staple crops. Taylor remembers selling quart-size jars of strawberries in his neighborhood.

His father’s lumber business wasn’t hit too hard, Taylor said.

Other businesses were hit harder and some people Taylor knew were unemployed.

A local grocer helped those families by giving them credit at his store.

“They all managed to survive somehow,” Taylor said. “People worked together through the Depression.”

While people in Taylor’s neighborhood were taking care of each other, many of them opposed attempts by the government to take care of them.

When New Deal programs began rolling out, some critics, including Taylor’s father, thought the government was turning toward socialism, he said.

“I think there were a lot of people in Lynchburg who thought that the government was getting too involved in things we ought to be doing for ourselves, and the economy was going down the drain because of all the financing,” he said.

Taylor said he has similar thoughts about current attempts to rescue the economy by the government spending money.

“I don’t see where … spending all this money is going to bring us out of it,” he said. “Hard work and being frugal would go as far a way as any.”

Taylor said what really brought the nation out of the Great Depression was World War II, although it came with its own hardships.

His father’s lumber business, which later was transformed into the building supply firm Taylor Brothers, couldn’t sell to anyone but the military.

It provided lumber for ammunition crates.

When the war ended, there was a lot of pent-up demand for housing, which helped lift the nation’s economy.

Taylor said it was hard to find a new car in the U.S. at the time.

However, “my wife and I went to Cuba on our honeymoon,” he said, “and they had new automobiles in Cuba.”