Hard Times

Albert Schmidt, also known as Ging, built a still out in the woods, alongside a river, that supplied Saginaw with water. This still produced

....Bought himself a fine automobile, an Auburn. Built like a Sherman tank, that car could get your kids and all the moonshine you could hide in it anywhere you wanted to go. . .And just when things were looking good for the Schmidt family, Anna decided her fortune was elsewhere. She left Albert and their boys, and was seldom heard from again. You know what they say about ''when it rains, it pours''...Albert was caught and sent back to prison. The boys went to live with their elderly grandmother Mary....

a lot of moonshine, and Albert sold it for $22.50 a gallon. He had more customers than he could satisfy, and he found himself in the same line of work of some of that day's rather coloful characters..... with equally colorful names, like Bugsy, and Capone...........

..And then life took a turn for the worse..Over the next few years of Don's young life, after his mother left them and his father went back to prison, his grandmother would die in her sleep, leaving Don and George to live with an uncle. Albert would leave prison and marry a woman who didn't like the boys. Albert would die, and eventually Don and George would live in an orphanage. George hates living with strangers, and will leave for the waterfronts of Seattle, WA, where he heard they were hiring dock workers. Don is now alone, and without any family. Does he get disheartened? Well, he gets hungry. And bitter cold. And very lonely, living with strangers, and he doesn't have enough to eat most of the time. But disheartened? Discouraged?

Probably, but Heroes are extraordinary people who live through such hardships and come out stronger. No, while living with yet another indifferent foster family, Don discovers the CCC...After being expelled from school for being late twice with no excuse, Don takes his destiny in his own hands and convinces his social worker to falsify his application to the Civilian Conservation Corps, saying he was a year older than he actually was....and he left Saginaw and planted trees all over Michigan with new pals, like Abraham Lincoln Wells and Pop Quale.

...Although actually a year younger than his CCC identification indicates, Don enlists. After a tour in Basic Training, he leaves Michigan when his new boss, the United States Navy, orders him to Pensacola, Florida. With his fate firmly held in his own hands, Don's life takes a turn for the better, while the fate of the world grows worse.....

...But planting trees was hard work, and paid nothing. It was 1940, and when one of Don's dad's old friends dropped by the town watering hole, he was wearing something that caught Don's eye - a sailor's uniform. Don had never heard of a sailor or the Navy, but he enlisted anyway...those uniforms were snazzy...