Been There, Done That

By Robert Romick

This is a story of my several experiences, some good and some not so good. They include my pre-Depression years, which brought so many physical needs and so much humiliation during all those 1930s years. I review here my relationship with my parents and every member of our thirteen-people family crowded into five rooms with no central heat or central air-conditioning. As a youth, I survived the Great Depression and active service in the army in a combat zone. I guess that I am truly a member of the greatest generation. After a runaway wild time of youth, there came a big moral and spiritual turnaround that brought my life meaning and direction. Serving churches as a pastor, I recount many crazy and happy experiences that taught me many lessons that I never learned in seminary. Along the way, Alice and I were married and had two sons and one daughter. It was all so weird and beautiful.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 20, 2017
• ISBN: 9781524598839

Robert Romick

Robert James Romick was born in the small city of Martins Ferry, Ohio, a town of approximately 7,500 people, which is located along the Ohio River, 60 miles from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Born on December 5th, 1925, he is now 91 years old. He is now a retired American Baptist pastor. He has been married almost 60 years to his sweetheart and wife, Alice. They met while both were working their way serving meals to other students at Northern Baptist Theological Seminary. “Pastor Bob” received his Th. B. degree, and Alice received her B. R. E. degree from there. He also received his Master’s degree from New York Theological Seminary. He has served as pastor of churches in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, West Virginia and Ohio. He and wife, Alice now are members of and regularly attend the Agape Baptist Church, an African American church in Wheeling, West Virginia.

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THE EARLY YEARS

The year was 1925. Calvin Coolidge was president. A sandwich and a cup of coffee were priced at fifty cents; a Porterhouse steak costs twenty cents a pound. You could buy a new Model-T Ford for three hundred dollars, and gas for that Ford was less than twenty cents a gallon. The average price for a house was twenty-five hundred dollars, and the average paycheck per year was about twenty-five hundred dollars. Washington was defeated by Pittsburgh in the baseball World Series, and Notre Dame won over Stanford in football’s Rose Bowl. Several famous people and I, Robert James Romick, were born in that year of 1925, and we all added to the population of the United States of America, which numbered 115,829,000 people of all shapes, sizes, colors, races, and creeds. My birth date was December 5. My mother told me that it was very cold that day. I took her word for it. She also told me that my grandfather Crooks, her dad, used to wheel me up and down the walks of our hometown, an Ohio River–side town of Martins Ferry, Ohio. I was also told that he population of that town, at that time, was about fifteen thousand people, but don’t hold me to that.

Fast forward to when I was six years old. The Great Depression had been upon us for over a year and gaining momentum. My dad had been laid off for good from the Laughlin tin mill, which closed its doors and never reopened them. It had been a large and very busy mill up to that time. One of the happenings that I remember from way back then was the day that my brother, Raymond, took me to a grocery store for a loaf of bread. While we were there, we saw a boy steal an apple. So Raymond rushed to the clerk and ratted on the kid. That’s the day that I discovered, to my childish dismay, that Raymond was a rat-fink. And as we were leaving the grocery store, I said to him, with some anger in my tone, You shouldn’t have told on that kid. He was probably hungry. Raymond, the fink, snapped back at me, Aw, shut up! To this day, I think that he was feeling guilty about what he had done, but he wasn’t about to let his little snotty brother put him down.

I also remember that the winter of 1931 was cold and snowy, like all the winters back in the thirties. We had one sled in our family, and we had to take turns using it. Our house was located on South Third Street, a brick street that that went down to another street called Hanover Street. The traffic on Hanover Street was really thick, so that when one of us sledded down South Third to Hanover, in the snow, we had to make sure that another of us would be down on Hanover checking traffic and giving us the all clear to come on down.

Hanover Street was kind of like a dividing line between South Third Street and North Third Street in more ways than one. When summer came, war would often break out between the South Thirders and the North Thirders. Both sides were heavily armed with broomsticks, long poles, and anything else that could be used as weapons in fierce battle. On one particular Friday (Friday, for one reason or another, seemed to be our favorite day to fight it out) the North Thirders were really bearing down on us. That day they had about ten more warriors than we had, and it seemed inevitable that victory was in their grasp. But this was not to be. My grandmother, who was in her late sixties (in those days grandmas looked like grandmas) saw what was happening and rushed off our front porch, grabbed my pole from my hand, and entered the fray with fierce determination, whacking away at those North Thirders who dared invade her realm. They all retreated in disorder and fled to safety back to the North from whence they came. Grandma saved the day!

Our Saturdays, for the most part, were spent at one of the two movie houses in town, The Fenray, where the first-rate movies were shown, and the Elzane, where all the westerns were shown. Naturally we always went to the Elzane. And we never went for just one showing; we stayed all afternoon. We even took our lunches and ate while we watched the whole program at least three times (back then you were allowed to do that.) The program included what we called the big picture, a cartoon, a comedy, usually The Three Stooges, the news, and a chapter of a serial (my favorite was Underseas Kingdom featuring Ray Crash Corrigan, with the White Robes against the Black Robes.) It was our escape from the outside world, our escape from the Great Depression. I remember one Saturday before Thanksgiving, my grandmother gave my brother, Bill, and me each a dime to go to the Elzane, hoping that one of us would get the lucky number on our movie ticket that would win the live turkey that they were giving away, a turkey that our family could sit down to on Thanksgiving Day. Neither of us won the turkey. But one of our buddies who was sitting beside us did win. He went up to the platform, took that gobble-gobble turkey, and sat back down in his seat. From then on, we really didn’t get too much from the movies that day.

DAD AND MOM

My dad was an alcoholic. When he wasn’t working, most of the time he was at a beer joint, but he never missed work, when he had a job. He was never really a dad to us; he was always just a coming and going person. I can’t remember his ever taking any of us anywhere: to an outing, a ball game, or a movie. He was a man who didn’t show any real affection of any kind, not even to my mother. We never heard words from him like, I love you, How was your day at school? I’m proud of you. He never even disciplined any of us. It wasn’t that he was against discipline; he just couldn’t have cared less. He seemed only to tolerate us. This might sound like I carry deep and bitter resentment in my poor and neglected soul. It isn’t. I learned a long time ago that carrying a grudge does more harm to the grudger than the grudgee. I forgave my dad long ago; I just want the reader to know what kind of background that I had, and this was part of it. Many nights my dad would come home, after someone would take his arm and help him up to our front porch. The he would sit there on the porch and yell out, Pearl! Pearl! Pearl was my mother’s name, and she would get up out of bed and go downstairs and open the door and let him in. We kids got used to this. In the dead of winter, we could hear him get up every night and pee in his pee bucket, which he kept in his bedroom, the same bedroom where my mother and four or five of us kids were sleeping, or trying to sleep. There was no heat upstairs, and some nights it was so cold that the pee in the pee bucket froze solid. Memories, memories.

My mom was different, to say the least. She had to put up with so much. Not only did she have my dad to contend with; she had to contend with nine very active kids; an unmarried aunt, who could get pretty mean at times; a grandmother (she was my dad’s mother), whom I loved very dearly, and sometimes various relatives who dropped in on us unexpectedly and stayed for a week or two, and where they slept, I’ll never know. My mother had the family washload to take care of, and this was done scrubbing each garment on a washboard (later we managed to buy an Apex washer.) Now, if you don’t know what a washboard is, just go to an antique store, and they will show you what one looks like. My mother also did the ironing, the cooking, sweeping with a broom, the dishwashing, and anything else that needed done. My grandmother willingly helped with the household chores, but my mother took care of most