Coming back to Alabama was coming back to poverty. My dad went from a steady job to no job. Never enough money to go round. He started driving a truck for my uncle Bill. They would haul lumber from Carbon Hill to a dealer in Chicago. In stead of returning empty, dad and Bill would buy four used cars and bring them back home. The lumber trailers would handle two cars each. Surprising, there was a high demand for decent used cars. The war had caused a surplus of cars built in the nineteen thirties. These cars were now being traded off on newer models. No one was making any real money but there was enough to get by if you really buckled down. 

To kind of illustrate the money being tight consider this.
The Tittle house was on property that bordered property belonging to George Tucker. George was a farmer but not doing real well. He let the Cobb coal company come in and strip mine the land adjoining the Tittle property. It made a hell of a mess out of the land. In those days the mining company didn't have to reclaim the land so you wound up with a "moonscape" where usable land used to be. Little brother and me collected enough coal from the road leading into the strip pits to fuel a small heater that Louie and Mr. Tucker installed in the house. We would make at least one trip a day with our Radio Flyer coaster wagon into the strip pit. We'd pick up loose chunks of coal and load up the wagon. It worked out pretty good. We also cooked with the coal so the cook stove provided alot of the heat as well as cooking our food. Thankfully, the coal company had been pretty
"sloppy" when they loaded the coal. A lot of it wound up on the ground where it laid until Lowell and I picked it up. I was to learn years later that the area around Carbon Hill was one of the most coal "rich" in the country. Hundreds of tons had just simply been picked up off the ground. The biggest problem had been how to transport the coal to the market. Finally someone came up with the idea to send the coal by barge. There was river connections all the way to Mobile on the Gulf Coast. Because of the problems encountered by bringing barges back up the river, some enterprising person decided to build the barges at the source of the coal and sale the barges once they were emptied. It proved to be a good decision and a number of people became wealthy as a result. Unfortunately none of my relatives were among that number. Actually my people wouldn't arrive in this area until about 1869.

We were learning all over again.