Today, 37 percent of men age thirty have never lived away from home

[lumberjack_jeff]

54. Enough to stand your hair on end.

Born in 1927, right? By 1940 he was a veteran of "riding the rails". I always thought that this was a euphemism for riding in boxcars. Apparently not. The boxcars of the day had rails suspended underneath them for maintenance purposes. You rode on these rails, because you did not want to be trapped in the boxcars because "the Pinkerton cops" would catch and beat the shit out of you.

He enlisted in 1944 (age 17), but prior to that time he'd worked construction (he could carry a 100# sack of cement on each shoulder up a ladder), was a roustabout at the circus (kangaroos are mean, and more valuable to the circus than the kid forced to defend himself with the feed bucket), coal mining (coal miners had a table for cleaning up their own dead in lieu of an undertaker. Uncle Manuel woke up on that table twice) fended for himself (if you must hunt Arkansas wild boars, apparently a .22 is a suboptimal weapon), lived with hobos (the first time he ever feared for his life was when the hobos gave him a dime and sent him to buy a loaf of bread. The dime got lost through a hole in his pocket on the way to the store), and at a pepsi bottling plant.

"That which doesn't kill you makes you stronger", I guess.