The enemy that united America in the early 1930s was the continuing collapse of the national economy: unemployment, extreme poverty, hopelessness. All across the nation young men were drifting from their family homes, hitting the road to somewhere, looking for something better. And it created a culture in the country of a willingness to give support to those migrant rovers whenever possible. Like providing a meal or shelter from a storm. My mother, Eunice Landers, never turned away a hungry drifter.
Like Wiley Omohundro. In his early 20s, Wiley was a lanky, tall kid from Michigan who came to our door one day and asked mother if she could spare some food. Wiley might have been a bit slow but he had a friendly, smiling face and he, of course, immediately won over my mother. She prepared Wiley a big fried chicken sandwich on home baked bread with a large glass of milk and while Wiley put that away she listened to his backstory. Wiley hung around, doing odd jobs and eating for a few months (mother named him Wiley O'Imhungryo). He split wood. He cleaned irrigation ditches. He went swimming in the Applegate river.
He helped mother can peaches where she taught him to not squeeze the fruit to get it into the jars. He told her about helping his father move chickens from one chicken house to another one night and how his father told him to hold these three chickens by their legs and not let them go and how he got confused and just let them go and how his father yelled at him. That was Wiley.
One day Wiley hit the road, never to be heard from again. The clouds of war were gathering so Riley probably had a military future, hopefully in the commissary.
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