HER NAME WAS EDITH

This post was prompted by this article  and I will tell what I know of her story as often as I can.

This is about a great aunt I never knew. We were doing the Memorial Day flower round when I noticed a very small grave marker near other family graves. I guess it caught my eye because her name was the same as my grandma Parks. Edith. Checking out the dates on the marker was obvious that she died way too soon. It didn't take long for mom to tell me what she knew of her story.

Edith Freeman was her married name. Mom didn't remember her family name. If she ever knew it. And isn't that a kick. Try tracing the maternal sides of your family tree and like as not you'll keep running into brick walls.

She and my not so great uncle lived in a tiny little town in the foot hills of the Oregon Cascades. The nearest town with a hospital was over an hour away over a gravel road. As mom remembers it there was one family in town with a car.

 It was during the depression. They were dirt poor. She already had three small children and I'd be surprised to find out that the oldest was already in primary school. I don't know what she used but she tried to end her pregnancy herself. The owner of that only car tried to get her to that hospital. She never made it. She bled to death.. I'll repeat that.SHE BLED TO DEATH. She died in a car on a gravel road with only the driver for company.

That's her story. What I know of it. I'm guessing that there are a lot of stories just like hers. Her name was Edith and I will keep telling her story whenever and wherever I can.

INTENDED CONSEQUENSES

Or how to use fear and prejudice to make a profit;

Ran across the term BLOCKBUSTER today under the subject of housing segregation in the Los Angeles area in the forties thru the sixties.

Realtors would target a block or part of a neighborhood buy a piece of property and then resell or rent to a minority family. Often African American. Then wait for prejudice to take its course; make offers to buy at the lowest price possible. Then turn around and resell the property minority families looking for a piece of the American Dream. At a much higher price of course.

Of course this couldn't work in neighborhoods that had restrictive covenants in the purchase contracts. But it did work often enough to make the practice very, very profitable.

Ah, good old American Free Enterprise. Gotta love it. NOT.

THE LAW OF UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES PART ONE

Sorry for the weird spacing. This started as post of FB that got too long.

Now that I have more than three brain cells firing at the same time it might be time to revive this tired,old blog. The title would be "The the Law of Unintended Consequences.

With no overseas competition corporate America exploded after WWII. Between the bottled up consumerism in the US and the need to rebuild a shattered Europe those were the Golden Years for American business. It will never come again.

Business expanded. Corporations asked their execs to move to California or Seattle or Houston or Atlanta leaving their extended families behind. The older generation said to hell with the frozen winters of Wisconsin and New York and moved to Florida. Fortunes were made in real estate and construction. The old neighborhoods withered. Those who couldn't afford to move or compete for the new jobs got left behind.

Farmers sold their fields. The first out went because they wanted to. Many of the others sold up because it became too expensive to grow potatoes as land values and taxes skyrocketed Those fields sported a new crop. Houses instead of potatoes. Just houses. No stores. None of the other businesses that crowded the streets of the Bronx or Queens. And many of those went out of business when the customers who could afford to got the heck out of Dodge.

We passed laws making it possible for minority groups to live anywhere they could afford to live. Those new subdivisions for example. Those that could got the hell out of their segregated neighborhoods. Taking the doctors, the lawyers, the business leaders; the human infrastructure needed to keep cities and neighborhoods alive.

Who was left behind? The people who couldn't afford to move because they were too old, too poor, unskilled.