Pushing for Success in Life: Overcoming Poverty Can Be Done!

By Kenneth Duke and Phyllis Duke

Pushing for Success in Live describes the arduous struggles of a child who was born into a situation where his mother was drifting in and out of tentative relationships, temporary housekeeping jobs and moving to multiple places and shelters in two different states. With little to no education prior to seventh grade, he was finally taken in by an aunt and uncle and given a screened in back porch to live in while attempting to take charge of acquiring his own educational foundation and begin formulating his own future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 14, 2012
• ISBN: 9781479756711

Kenneth Duke

The author describes a variety of unique and unusual experiences in different life style settings. These episodes are ultimately woven together with an underlying guiding spiritual component used to formulate an ethical philosophy which may be used to guide parents in raising their children and also to especially alert young people as to positive as well as negative signs or the good versus evil which may ultimately guide them into making wise decisions thus freeing them to become emotionally and fi nancially successful early in life.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

Born in Los Angeles

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Early memories from three to five years of age include living with my mother in my grandfather’s new home in Inglewood, California, in 1936. I was born weighing ten pounds and six ounces on December 27, 1932, in the then new Presbyterian Hospital, which was located on Vermont Avenue, near Sunset Boulevard in the Hollywood area. My mother, who was only five feet and two inches tall, named me Kenneth Wesley Duke. And until I was seventy-nine and a half years old, I never knew anything about who my father was, except for the sketchy information about him contained in the original record of my birth certificate, which I got in my late twenties from the Hall of Records in downtown Los Angeles. I learned that my father’s name was James Duke and his occupation was that of a writer, and that was all that I ever knew about him. My mother’s name was Eleanor Louise Wall, and she was born on June 18, 1902, in North Dakota, near the city of Bismarck. Her parents, Lars and Bessie Wall, along with their children, Eleanor, Lawrence, and Marlow, moved to Los Angeles in 1912 where they contemplated purchasing a property, which was a peach orchard at the corner of Hollywood and Vine. Instead, they purchased a lot and built their own two-story house with a basement on about the 4,100th block of Clayton Avenue, near Tallmadge Street, between Hollywood and downtown Los Angeles.

My grandfather also built a six-chair barbershop at the corner of Fountain Avenue and Sunset Boulevard, near his new home in Clayton Avenue. This occupation kept him very busy and also provided a sizeable income to support his family. Years later, his health caused him to sell his home and his barbershop and move in with his youngest son, Marlow, and his wife, Vera, in 1938.

During my mother’s years at Hollywood High School, she was friends with and began dating a man whose name was Howard Leatherman; however, her parents disallowed her to marry Howard and demanded that she cancel any plans to marry him as she had been secretly planning. The reason that was given to her was that she was Presbyterian and he was of the Catholic religion, and it was considered unconscionable to have an interfaith marriage during that era. Additionally, my mother spent about three years after graduation in a child care position in San Francisco. Possibly, that position was intended to take her mind off the prospect of marriage to Howard. Soon Mother was required to care for her own mother for several years until her mother passed away in 1928. My mother was also a church pianist, playing the piano every Sunday for many years at a small church, which was located on Griffith Park Boulevard.

The decision to cancel marriage plans with Howard resulted in an unfulfilled love relationship and led my mother onto a path that led to a series of several failed relationships in a variety of locations. This was the constantly-moving environment early in my life. This caused us to be living in many different places while my mother drifted from relationship to relationship and from poverty to utter poverty, only slightly interrupted by a series of menial temporary jobs such as doing laundry, cleaning, making beds in hotels, caring for elderly gentlemen, living in with and caring for young children, cooking in a mining camp, etc.

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My grandfather Lars Wall purchased a house in 1935 in Inglewood, California, and we moved in with him while I was very young—only about three or four years old.

One of my earliest recollections is when I climbed to the top of a swing set in the backyard, where I slipped and fell about six feet, making me think that I had broken my leg. I had to be taken to the hospital, where the doctor used a fluoroscope to try to look through my leg in order to determine if the bone was broken. X-rays had not been invented yet, but the doctor decided that the bone wasn’t broken even though it hurt so much that I was sure it must be broken. Additionally, I contracted whooping cough during this period of my life and found myself seriously ill, coughing all the time and wondering when I would be well enough to play outside again.

CHAPTER 2

Moving from Apartment to

Apartment in Los Angeles

My mother became quite ill when I was five, and I had to learn to cook carrots and soup on the stove for her. Later, my grandfather Lars also got sick. We were living in Inglewood with him in order to help him for two or three years. Somehow my grandfather was unable to pay the property taxes on his house, and it had to be sold, which required that we would have to move. I was five or six and had just started school. It seemed that we had to move every two to three months over a period of many years. We moved so many times that I cannot even remember where many of the different rooms, apartments, duplexes, or houses were located. One of the places where we moved into was a one-bedroom apartment in a fourplex. My grandfather moved in with my Aunt Vera and Uncle Marlow Wall, along with Aunt Vera’s father, Walter McGowan. They all lived together at 1707 Tallmadge in Los Angeles. I still remember being evicted from one of our apartments because we didn’t have enough money to pay the rent.

By the time I was eight years old, we had moved into a house on Pico Boulevard. While there, I made a skateboard and attached a small wooden box on to it with nails. I used to ride the skateboard up and down the sidewalk in front of our house every day. At the school on Pico Boulevard, we played a game with milk bottle tops or caps. Milk, which was delivered to people’s homes, was sealed in glass bottles, and these had cardboard bottle caps or bottle tops as we called them. All the boys kept cardboard milk bottle tops in their pockets. The object of the game was to throw the bottle top onto someone else’s bottle top in order to win it, and so on until we acquired as many bottle tops as we could. The person winning the most bottle tops would become the winner of the game. We played this game during our recess.

Pico Boulevard had the newest streetcars in the city of Los Angeles at that time. My mother and I traveled frequently in the new streetcars, and those were our only mode of transportation. I found it fun to ride the streetcars everywhere we went.

CHAPTER 3

Family Upheavals

Later we moved again along with a friend of my mother’s whose name was Jim Edwards into an apartment near Third Street and Vermont Avenue. This was an apartment building with about twelve units that had long inside hallways. Jim Edwards was a very big man who was at least six feet and two or three inches tall. My mother was about five feet and two inches tall, so they made quite an unusual pair walking together down the street.

The Baby Ruth, Butterfingers, 3 Musketeers, and Abba-Zaba candy bars were made at the Candy Bar Factory, which was located about half a block from our apartment. Free candy was always passed out to all the kids in the neighborhood every Friday. All the kids were excited and always looked forward to receiving free candy. While we lived at this apartment, my sister, Evelyn, was born on June 18, 1939. She was born in the large new Los Angeles County General Hospital, which was just a few miles east of the downtown city of Los Angeles.

It was during this period that my mother went to the Los Angeles County General Hospital, and she brought home my new baby sister whom she named Evelyn. The baby’s father was Jim Edwards, and although my mother never married, she always desired to have a normal family, and try as she might, she never reached that goal.

CHAPTER 4

Nine Months in Nevada

Jim Edwards traveled by bus to Goldfield, Nevada (about an hour’s travel south of Tonopah), where he took a job in a gold and silver mining camp. He sent a Western Union telegram to us and asked my Uncle Marlow to drive us to Goldfield, where we ended up living for the next nine months. Our house was very small, and it had one large wood burning stove that had a five-gallon cast iron tank attached to it. We had to pour water into the top of this tank in