Bobby Evans Mercer

My earliest childhood memories begin at the age of 5. I lived in Bruceton Mills, West Virginia with my one and three year old brothers, my mother and father. I recall a summertime in which I went to Bible School, in the same two-room school where the older children of the hamlet were schooled in the winter. I couldn't wait to go to school so I really enjoyed this experience, even though I knew this class was not real schooling. We listened to Bible stories and were allowed to draw with real crayons, which I had never done before. We sang religious songs; I recall learning “Jesus Loves Me.” The class ran from 9 to 11 A.M for two weeks. Other recollections: playing at my grandparents' house which was large and old, had a porch running around two sides, low enough that one could jump to the ground. At a corner where two sides met there was a porch swing on which I spent hours playing. One could go sideways, pretending to be a train, back and forth as high as one dared. A perfect p...

My father was born in a small West Virginia town called Clifton in 1893. His grandfather had come to this country from Eban, Wales. They had left the Welsh mining country and looked for a similar area here - which was West Virginia. My father's father, John D. Evans, had several brothers and sisters. I only remember Uncle David and Aunt Florence; the others, I suppose, had died by this time. When still a small boy John D. injured his knee with an axe and thereafter had a stiff knee which forced him to walk on the toe of that foot. As he was thus crippled he was allowed to go to school until the eight grade, because his family figured he would not be able to do hard work like other boys in the family. Therefore he was apprenticed to a miller at an early age. My memory of my grandfather is good: he was about 5'8" tall, thin, had beautiful white hair. He had a white mustache that often had streaks of yellow in it, stained from spitting the tobacco he chewed. He had bright blu...

On January 6, 1920, I was born at the Akron City Hospital. Aunt Brownie, who never (had any children, was given the honor of naming me - Barbara Ann after the heroine of a book she had read. We lived with them until I was six months old.  John lost his job in the postwar recession but got another as a fireman on the Baltimore and Ohio railroad. The line's terminal was at Brownsville, PA so the family moved there. It was a small, dirty town situated mostly on hills on either side of the Monongahela River. John worked hard, stoking coal into the furnaces aboard the big trains, to make steam and run the steam engines. His shifts were 12 hours long. He was laid off when I was 1-1/2 years old.  My parents had no place to go so they went to live with his folks in Bruceton Mills. John D. had moved here in 1915 from Hazelton because it was a larger hamlet with more business. Next door to my grandparents there was a garage owned by Ted Dye, a mechanic married to my dad's stepsister, Ma...

I can remember when we got our first radio, a big old table model brand named a Fada. We were the first in the neighborhood to have a radio so we had lots of company to listen in. The adults listened to it in the evening, but we kids didn't use it much until we were in high school. I recall listening to the spooky "Inner Sanctum" one night when I was babysitting. I almost died of fright and never listened to it again. As the oldest I had to take care of my brothers a lot. I would take Jimmy with me wherever I went. In the evenings it was my job to get him ready for bed. I would wash him from the bathroom sink (we only took baths once a week). He would always have scratches and broken skin on his knees and would cry when I washed them. I used psychology though, telling him to close his eyes and guess which leg I was washing. When he said the left, and it had the scrape, I told him that I was washing his good leg, and vice versa. He seldom cried after that ruse but I did wa...

When I was about twelve my father lost his job - the depression was on. We lost our home and were able to move to a small house rent-free in exchange for work by my Dad. Many homes were being repossessed as people lost their jobs and an income. Dad would go out and paint and paper the houses so they could be placed on the market and sold again. He took me along to paste the wallpaper. On the days he wouldn't be working he would go job hunting - a useless search. He had to put cardboard in his shoes at night to plug up the holes in his soles. Uncle Herm had also lost his job so my Mom and Aunt Nell would bake bread, rolls and cakes, then Dad and Uncle Herm would go door-to-door trying to sell the baked goods. One day my Dad gave a spice cake in exchange for a woman's dog. We children were delighted, called the dog "Spicie." The women were furious. Finally, people didn't have money to buy baked goods so Aunt Nell and Uncle Herm went back to W. Va.  They still had th...

The summer I was 13 or 14, my cousin Evelyn also came to visit at Aunt Nell's, staying three or four weeks. She was two years older than me, a year older than Honey. She was the daughter of my father's brother, George. He died during the flu epidemic of 1918 when Evelyn was still a baby. Her brother, Harold, was two years older. They lived in Cleveland with their mother, Aunt Ruth and her husband(s), one at a time, but she had several spouses as I recall. Evelyn had a half-sister, Betty, and a half-brother, Denny (eventually Betty married my brother, Dick).  When Evelyn arrived we all decided to visit some relatives we had not met before. Aunt Florence and Uncle Josua Fike lived out in the country some 20 miles away. Evelyn knew them; their son, Clarence, a few years older, was a classmate of hers. They were cutting hay when we arrived and said we could help them. I helped rake the hay left in the field after the big hay bundles were picked up and placed in wagons. Honey and Ev...