Page 167 - a-columbia-county-boys-recollections-and-memories-of-columbia-county-florida-(2012)-lenvil-h-dicks

A Columbia County Boy's Recollections and Memories of Columbia County Florida (2012) Lenvil H. Dicks

GOLDE AND ERIC

Of the eight siblings in my family, Golde was the oldest, and she lived at home with mama and daddy
until she was about 20, and she married Eric Markham in January of 1928. I was born the following
th
September 10 of that same year.

I therefore had a sister that 1 did not grow up with, nor share the same house with as we were growing
up, but nevertheless I was extremely close to both Golde and Eric, and during the early days of my
childhood and boyhood, Eric and Golde did many, many nice things for me. They saw that I had new
toys to play with at Christmas, and if they went on a trip anywhere, like to Jacksonville, or perhaps to
Jacksonville Beach, or to some other nearby town in North Florida or South Georgia, they would quite
frequently take me with them. I got to see a lot of things by going places with Golde and Eric that I
would not have otherwise had the chance to see, because being born in 1928 all of my years on this earth
up until I became a teen ager were during the Great Depression. None of us country kids had the
opportunity much to go anywhere at all, but Golde and Eric sort of more or less adopted me in that
situation.

Eric bought a hardware store and opened People’s Hardware in 1940, and at that time I had just turned
12 years old. Back in those days all kinds of fireworks were legal to sell, some of which would be
considered quite dangerous today, and the lot in downtown lake City on the north side of the People’s
Hardware store was just a big grass covered vacant lot. Each time school turned out for Christmas each
year, Eric would have a tent set up by the sidewalk on that vacant lot, and tables under the tent with all
manner of fireworks, hundreds and hundreds of dollars worth of them. I would start the afternoon that
school was out for the Christmas holidays, and attend to the sale of fireworks from that tent, and Eric
paid me 10 percent of everything that I sold by way of Christmas fireworks.

Even in those hard times, and even though everybody was poor, people would still buy fireworks, and to
some extent probably to take their minds off of their other troubles. Each Christmas I would sell enough
fireworks to make Eric a good bit of money, and my 10% of the sales would amount to enough that I
could buy all of my school clothes and shoes for the rest of that school year out of what 1 made selling
fireworks. For a 12 year old boy, and for the next ensuing 5 years, I operated that fireworks stand and
really made a very respectful amount of money.

Just to put a little perspective on the value of money in those days, I can recall that on more than one
occasion, men would come by my daddy’s farm looking for work, because the unemployment rate was
sky high, and men were looking for work doing anything they could possibly find that would put a small
amount of money in their pocket. Although my dad did not have much money himself, he had some

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