junkyard, dog

Today, while sitting in her wheelchair, my grandma Rose told me once again a story about her mother, whom she admires more than anyone in life even after the woman, my great grandmother Annie, has been dead for around thirty years. The story goes like this:

My grandmother's family were unaffected by the Great Depression because my great grandfather, Carl Davis, and his brothers, Joe and Phil, were in the scrap metal business, basically they operated a junkyard. And junk is always a hot commodity. Apparently. Or at least in Duluth, Minnesota in the 1930s it was. There is another story about how Carl Davis somehow distilled his own bootleg whiskey and made money off that and that's the real true reason why his four children - Rose, Ben, Florence and Shirley - never wanted for anything while growing up. But grandma didn't mention that today. Today she said that Joe Davis, the boss, wasn't paying his brother Carl enough to support the four children, so Annie took the four of them down to Joe's office dressed in their best. She collected his pay for him, so she could get the things they needed before Carl could spend any of it. At one point she told Joe that Carl wasn't receiving enough to care for the four children she'd paraded in front of his desk and so the next week Carl received a raise. Then she went on to say that her mother marched the children to a local department store and charged new shoes for all of them to Joe's account. By her account, Joe paid the bill no questions asked.

These are some sketchy details of the powerful nature of a woman who I was too young to ever really know before she died of a gall bladder attack after eating some lox jarred in oil (instead of fresh lox which is always preferable) and about whose death my grandma today lamented, "how could such a smart woman be so dumb?"

I'm not sure what a scrap metal or junkyard business was all about in Duluth in the 1930s, but I'm tempted to do some research and find out. The fragmented story is so dramatic and colorful and filled with saddle shoes and gusto that I'm bound to be curious.