by James Hickman
Schiff Sovereign
My grandfather was born on April 19, 1915 in a dirty, one-room shack in the town of Bonham, Texas. Given the era, they had no electricity and no running water. And the family considered themselves fortunate that both mother and baby survived childbirth.
Pretty much everyone in the area was a farm laborer; they worked long, hard days in the unforgiving Texas heat trying to beckon life from ungenerous soil. But it was a living– one that my grandfather joined at an early age.
He was 14 years old– considered a “man” by the standards of his time– when the Great Depression struck.
Few people, including my grandfather, would have understood that the worst economic crisis in American history was a manmade virus cooked up in the laboratory of political incompetence. All he knew was that banks in his home town failed… and many of his neighbors lost their life savings overnight.