Category Archives: childhood

14 The El Rey Theater

Posted on August 10, 2019 by Don Haynes

The El Rey Theater took on a timeless quality.  It had always been there.  It would go endlessly on, before the war began and after it would end. I spent either Saturday or Sunday there–sometimes both!  With luck it became … Continue reading →

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13 Chickens

Posted on March 8, 2019 by Don Haynes

For various reasons, chickens became extraordinarily important.  Not long after we moved in that spring, Dad and Mom bought two dozen baby chicks. They put a large cardboard box on the floor of the little shed attached to the house. … Continue reading →

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12 The Calf That Peed

Posted on January 15, 2019 by Don Haynes

Dad soon realized a way to expand our rationing coupons for gas and tires and such.  He found and bought a Buick as a second car.  I think it was a Buick.  It was old and tired and rusted.   … Continue reading →

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11 Alcatraz

Posted on November 26, 2018 by Don Haynes

Over time a complicated family economy came into being.  It didn’t really “develop.”  More than anything it simply seemed to happen.  It began with the chickens.  As soon as they were big enough, we began to eat the roosters.  We … Continue reading →

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08 Rationing

Posted on September 30, 2018 by Don Haynes

As a child I accepted the world as “given.”  It is the way it was because that’s the way it was.  That’s how I related to the world in which I found myself.  I was on the “home front.”  I … Continue reading →

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05 Pearl Harbor

Posted on August 3, 2018 by Don Haynes

December 7, 1941.  Sunday morning  The morning that fear came into my world. Mom and Dad are still at the breakfast table with Bill, my only brother, who had been born the autumn before.  I have gone out into the back … Continue reading →

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01 Milking the Cow

Posted on June 22, 2018 by Don Haynes

In the years before World War II, Mom and Dad were migrant workers.  Summers they worked in the lettuce sheds in Salinas, Mom trimming and Dad packing.  In winter they’d go to Arizona, somewhere near Yuma I think, to work … Continue reading →

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