The Ford Family Stories
The Ford Family Stories
Episode 1 Robert Barton Jr.- Sparrows Point, "The Company Town", Mom and Pop Ford, World War 2, and more
In our first episode, Bob Barton talks about his early childhood in Sparrows Point, "The Company Town" prior to moving to Dundalk after World War 2, his grand parents Mom and Pop Ford, his parents, aunts, and uncles, and what people did for fun in and around the town of Sparrows Point.
Hello, and welcome to the Ford family stories podcast. This is cousin Mike Barton. The purpose of this podcast is to keep an oral history of all of our stories of growing up as members of the Ford family and all of our fond memories to share with each other and future generations. I encourage everyone in the family who is interested in participating to please do so. I have all the equipment necessary to record you, either in person or remotely. If you would like to do this, please contact me at(443) 600-0446. We're Barton mike@yahoo.com. I hope you enjoy listening to these trips down memory lane and as many people as possible come forward with fond stories to share. In this episode, my father, Robert Barton jr. Discusses his early childhood living in Sparrow's point, a company town prior to moving to Dundalk during the world war II era stories about his grandparents, mom and pop forward, and his parents, aunts and uncles, Bethlehem steel, what it was like living in a company town and what people did for fun and so much more enjoy. I was born in Sparrow's 0.4 days after de de de de was the day that the in world war two, where the American troops landed on Norman day. It was a tremendous military exercise. There's never been anything like it in the history of the world or sense because the amount of ships involved stretched from England all the way across to France and Norman day. And the ships were in a steady line for almost a day, but that landing took place. The war had started in Japan in December, 1941. And this was January in 1944. So the war had already been going for about two and a half years. There was another year to go after the invasion. The allied forces captured Germany eventually, and that took about a year and another three months before the Japanese surrendered. So that is where I was born. And I was born in Sparrow's point because my father was in the Navy and my mother was living with her mother and father and Aspera is point my aunts and uncles, my mother's, uh, brothers and sisters were aunt Helen, the oldest Helen Ghana, and then came to William Ford, bill Ford and uncle bill was about the land heavy hadn't already landed in, uh, on detail.
Speaker 2:Uh, he was about the land be involved in the invasion. My father was in the Navy and he patrolled across the North Atlantic from the United States to England and oven down the United States coast. And he would get on different ships, usually a destroyer or a destroyers escort. And he would board the ship either in Norfolk or in Massachusetts or in New York city. He was a machinist mate. He had learned as an apprentice at Bethlehem steel to be a machinist. And that's what he did on board. The ship, as you don't need machinists to operate the ship, they make the parts for the boiler and so forth and so on. So during combat, he didn't have any duties otherwise and making the ship run. So he was an other machinists and some others operated the guns. So that's what he had done. And he had been in the Navy for, uh, roughly a year. Uh, at that point, after my uncle bill came, my mother, she was the middle child. And then after her was uncle rip, he wasn't old enough to be in the service, or he was just about getting in the service. He ended up being in the Navy and he was in the South China sea after the war was over and they needed patrols in the South China sea, I guess they still need them in the South China sea. And the youngest is my, uh, was Elizabeth, my aunt lib. And, uh, I ended up calling her Beeb because I couldn't save lib. So my aunt babe was 16 when I was born and she ended up being my godmother and she married my uncle Bob Dirks, and he became my God father a few years later. Now it's interesting. My aunt Helen, uh, married guy Minden and she and uncle guy had, I think it's eight children. When, uh, later on when my mother taught me to say my prayers, uh, she would have me bless, uh, ask God to bless everybody in the family. So I had the name, everybody in our family, and it wasn't long. Then I could spout
Speaker 1:Off very quickly the names of people to be blessed and for their family, I would bless God, bless, uh, aunt Helen and uncle guy and Jimmy, Billy patchy, Bobby, Johnny, Libby, Gary, and Connie, and Matt. I can still say that very quickly. The way I did when I was saying my prayers when I was six years old or whenever it was Jimmy and Billy passed away, Pat recently passed away. Bobby, John Libby are still alive and Connie, the youngest has passed away recently. Uh, next came my uncle bill. He, his son, Tom, and some of his family recently took a trip to France and visited all of the world war two places. Uncle bill served in the army there and he had three children, Tom, Mary Kay, Debbie. My mother was next and I had a younger brother, Tim. He passed away. There were two of us, uncle rip was younger than my mother. And he had a, his name was Robert and Robert had Robert jr. And then Sue and then Mark, and then Jill of the four of them. And they have, they lead the family and grandchildren now they're they populate about half of Texas. And then finally the youngest, my aunt lib, my godmother. She is retired in Florida and went up the road is her daughter Sherry. And in North Carolina is her brother Robert or Robbie Dirks. So that is the lineup. And I mentioned all of the children because one thing I forget when it occurred to me, but my Gran mother and I, we, everybody called my grandmother and grandfather, mom, and pop mom and pop lost a child. I believe it was the first child before the other five. And as it turned out and Helen also lost a child, I believe it was the first and also aunt Fran, who is uncle Bill's wife, lost the child at Missy uncle rips wife lost the child and aunt Livy lost the child. The first child, my mother almost lost the first child. She had a, a birth where afterbirth was born first and clogged everything up. And that was very serious and I was born, but I made it, uh, I was premature under five pounds and put in an incubator. And my God mother, uh, aunt Libby is famous for her words, which were in my baby book when she saw me first. And she said, Oh my God, he looks like a furrow. Uh, because I was so long and skinny and I didn't have a fingernails or toenails or eyebrows or that sort of thing, but I could have very well not made it also. It does sort of set the time to the extent that childbirth and leaving, losing a Childer, wasn't quite as rare as it is, uh, now. And certainly it happened in that our family. So my experience in living in as far as point was two years from the time I was zero to two years old. Then when my father got back and got settled from the service and we moved to Dundalk almost every Saturday, I would come down and visit my grandmother and grandfather, either my cell phone, the blue bus, or with my mother. And we would visit on Saturdays because my father had a second job. And he worked on Saturdays. Working a second job was not at all unusual in those days because the, I was born in the forties. The depression was a during the entire thirties, it began at the end of the twenties and ended at the beginning of the forties in 1941, when a war was declared against the United States country needed, uh, soldiers. And there was a monumental draft and everyone else was needed to work in the factories to produce the armaments and so forth. So the depression was over, but that long, 10 years left an impression on everybody. And the points that later came to dwell in my heart over and over and over was how much my life was effected by my parents' lives and the lives of my aunts and uncles and every adult in terms of living through the depression first and then world war two immediately after that, that was a long, 15 years and a hard one. And I said, generalize. I would say that the man that came through that particular area, they, uh, that particular time, they were very hard men. And many of the women were very religious women in my experience. And I would expect it is largely the experience of most of my cousins is that we were affected in still or every day because of the depression and because of the war. Now during the depression, a lot of people were out of work for a long time. And there were certainly soup lawns, people selling apples and so forth, but the problems were spread out. So that even though like my grandfather, his family, a male family were in the service afterwards. But during the depression, he was not making the money that he would have because there were so many people out of war. And he also had a part time job. He was an electrical supervisor and he had a job as a private electrician and the evenings. My father, when their family grew up during the depression, they lived on a farm. They rented a farm and the boys had to go through and Whoa, all of the crops by hand, every day before they could go swimming in general, the depression caused people to recognize the value of money and everything else. For example, we all cleaned our plates and I cleaned my plate every time until I was in my forties. And I was at educational meeting and they had, uh, you've heard the expression, rubber chickens. This was a rubber check in. And I looked at it and I said, why do I have to eat this? And it was because I had to clean my plate every single time when I was younger. So it was in my forties. I finally stopped. I was stopped by a rubber chicken, uh, no longer ate that, but I did pick up weight when my kids were younger because I used to clean my plate. Every their plight when they didn't finish that. And being parsed Sonoma is with money, was a trait that I kept as well as world war two. I always raised tomatoes and I had a garden myself. So it just was handed down to me without my really even thinking about it. And there were also hardships during world war two. There were shortages of all kinds of products, for example, rubber, for tires and gasoline, they had ration cards for gasoline, and you could only get sufficient cars to go rationing cards to get so many gallons per week or per month when my father would come be in home port and yeah, Norfolk, that was a big occasion because he was otherwise out, uh, on the ocean all the time. And so my uncles were get together and everybody would save up their ration cards and my uncle rip, it would take my mother down to Norfolk to visit my father, uh, using the ration cards and whatever they get down there and to get back, as far as the war is concerned, I never knew much about world war two until after it was over. But after world war two came Korea and my godfather, Bob darks, my uncle Bob was in Korea. He was a member of the army engineers, which was tough duty in Korea because they were landings ocean landings. And there was a lot of fighting in the cold mountains. And the engineers had to do all the construction of bridges and clearing the beaches for landings and so forth. When my uncle Bob was in Korea, he was sending me presence. When he got to Japan. One time, he sent me a jacket that had dragons on it and long yellow sleeves, which I had for years and years. I got a pair of rubber shoes, which were Korean shoes. And I took those in for show and tell day, uh, after Korea, there was the Lind air laughs rare Berlin then was shut off by the Russians and they had to get supplies into it by air 24 hours a day for months and months, Harry Truman executed that. And after the Lynn airlift, the cold war or started, and there was the Cuban missile crisis when the Russians missiles 90 miles from our shore and Cuba and with the nuclear warheads and that the East coast of the United States, then after that game, Vietnam, and then, uh, the middle East and you know, where, uh, uh, where we are now during the cold war. When I was in a first, second and third grades, we used to have drills for safety in case we were attacked by bombs. And we would all crawl under our desks for the duck and cover drills. And that went on through elementary school, right on up to high school where we would go out and stand in the hallways and cover our heads and next to our lockers, so that the effect of the depression and the effect of the war continued through, uh, on some of us for our entire lives. Now Sparrow's point was a company town. And I remember there was a popular song by Tennessee, Ernie Ford. I owe my soul to the company store because in coal mines, it was very common to find a mine and to build up some residential homes around the mines for the workers. And then the workers would come in and there would be a company store. And this, they were known as company town and Tennessee Ernie Ford's song was I owe my soul to the company sewer because everybody would get tabs. And then you were stuck with working in the mines until you could pay your, uh, your tab off, which never happened. Bethlehem steel was a little bit different. The area that the Bethlehem steel company bought, which was in about 1916 or 1918, I forget when they bought it, there was a steel company before that, but they bought a huge amount of land, which was the Sparrow's point peninsula. And on the peninsula, they had a ship building plant in addition to the deal plant and the company town was built with residences. So there were a whole group of man who lived right next to the steel company and to the shipyards, so they could walk to work. And they were always there in case of an emergency. And this continued after I left sparrows point were come down on Saturdays to, to visit, uh, because my grandfather who worked Saturdays, cause he was a supervisor, he would come in from work, sit on the front porch. And sometimes he would hear whistles and the whistles indicated a fire someplace or some type of an emergency. And he knew a lot of the codes or he would run to the telephone table and pull out his book and get the code. And he would say, Oh, and he would go jump in his car because if a fire was in his area, otherwise he would say that was such and such. And he didn't have to go, but they had that workforce there. And it was on streets named with letters. There was a B street, C street was the extension of North point Boulevard, which came down from the, the city through, uh, Dundalk and into Barrows point. Then there was D street E street F street G was missing. Cause it was a field there. Then H street where my grandparents lived and then the next street and the streets over where the, the black population town was strictly segregated. The black people had their own separate schools, their own, uh, churches. And they kept pretty much to themselves, but there was never ever any problems. And that's because everybody living there, uh, had the landlord of Bethlehem steel company. And if they gave anybody at a trouble, uh, they lost a house. So everybody was very well behaved and things went very smoothly. My mother, I remember living on H street, the next street over was the black section and right across the street through the yards over there, there was a black church and she used to go over and listen to the, the black choir and the people singing. She would sit outside underneath of a window when the weather was nice and she could hear everything that was going on. When I grew up the, where G street was, there was a big field and everybody used to play and that, and there were plenty of black kids running around. Uh, they would steal things from the, uh, gardens as a re wood tomatoes or whatever. There were gardens in that field, but everybody got along just fine because they were under the threat of being thrown off of a Sparrow's point. If they didn't obey all of the rules, the center of the house was had a big convection furnace in it. When the Coles actually it was Coke, uh, that was put in there. It was furnished by Bethlehem steel and they would get red hot, and the great would get red hot. And that's what would heat the house, the cold weather. So everybody walked around that great. Otherwise they would get their, their feet burned, but it was a cheap source of heating the house that came with it with the Bethlehem steel company. What turned out to be funny in a odd way was that when people came to work there, uh, in the early times in the teens, they came to the shift yard, which was opening up and doing very good business. So they hired an awful lot of people from all over to come to the ship yard. And my grandfather did as well as a couple of my grandmother's brothers and lots of other people. And then the seal side, as they called it, started doing a lot of business and they were hiring like crazy and they were paying better salaries. And the shipyard was because the skills required were more sophisticated. And what happened was they forbid anybody in the ship yard from leaving the ship yard and going over to get a job with the steel side. So what did everybody do? Well, my grandfather and his brothers in law changed their name and they went over to the steel side and got a job with the seal confidence. And that's when my grandfather changed his name from Herbert author Ford to William F. Ford. And the other two brothers also changed their name. And when they passed away and had a States and had to the U, they didn't go to a court and get their name changed. They just started using a different name. So when they passed away, it caused problems getting all of their papers in order because they had had different names when they were younger. And this of course was before social security so that everybody was trying to get the best jobs, especially during the depression. And that's why our grandfather changed
Speaker 2:His name to William F four. It's interesting as to where all of the workers came, came from, many of them came from Appalachia, right? And the South might say hillbillies and rednecks. But aside from that, that's where an awful lot of people came in from. And being from the South. My grandfather, Papa Ford was born in a small town in Western Virginia, not West Virginia, but Western Virginia. The name of the town was Craigsville and Craigsville was up on a Ridge up in the Hills behind Stanton, Virginia, which is in a Valley. And it was a very prosperous town in those days with couple of colleges and so forth. But it was what he called was a, a wide spot in the road. And I visited one time. And that's what it was. It was a wide spot in the road and the railroad went through it and it may have stopped there, but that was about it. It was a railroad stop in Craigsville. It was South. If you're looking for it, find Buffalo gap and Buffalo gap is the intersection of the road up the Hill from, I sat in on down to, to Craigsville, that's where my grandfather lived until he moved to find a job. He stayed there, he got a fifth grade education. I got a job driving away.[inaudible] and when he got older off, he moved to hope. Well, Virginia Hopewell, Virginia was where the DuPont chemical plant was. And it's a hope Wells South of Richmond, down near Petersburg, Virginia, and the plant, there was a very attractive place, attracting people from all over. Some of the people that it attracted. My grandfather worked there as a policeman. I believe he was with the railroad police, but it was a private police force. And lo and behold, who was one of his fellow policeman, but a fellow by the name of Clifford Barton. And I knew him as happy. He was my grandfather, my father's father, and he and my mother's father work in Hopewell at the DuPont plant as private policemen. And my grandfather moved with my grandmother, Mary and Pollard was her maiden name. She was from Waycross, Georgia. They were the rednecks who moved up to find work in the DuPont plant. Then they both work, move to spares poems. And lo and behold, my mother and father were in the same high school class and ended up getting married and having their family. So it's a small world. Uh, just recently in the last couple of years, I found out that along the same lines, my Pappy, uh, who is my father's father, his wife, his name was Marion Pollard. And she came from Waycross, Georgia, where her family had moved and they were born where, but Western Virginia, just a few miles North of Craigsville. And they also, there were, uh, several who, uh, moved for a time to, uh, hope. Well, the work at the DuPont plant. So all my relatives were working down in Virginia before the ended up coming to Dundalk and to Sparrow's point to work up here in the steel mills. Now, getting back to whenever you want, and finally got to sparrows point to the company town, uh, you might think living in a company town is kind of dreary and there wouldn't be very much to do that. You get a bunch of kids growing up and there is lots to do. Now. It was dreary in many ways. First of all, every day red dust would blow out of the smoke stacks and go all over Sparrow's point. And I had been down there on Saturday when my grandmother, mom Ford had the wash out and all of a sudden somebody would holler and all of the ladies would be running out to beat the red dust, to get the washer down. And everybody had to help, uh, getting the clothes fans out off the lawn and the clothes into baskets for the red dust and the red dust of course, landed on everything. Uh, everybody's car, uh, wears red and they had to be worst on weekends. And that was one of my job after we lost, uh, Jimmy, I inherited his job of washing my grandfather's car on Saturday. Cause it had to be done every week to get the red dust off of it. So you had the red dust over off of C street. You could see the railroad cars that were giants that carried the molten steel from one part of the steel plant to the other, and they would pour it and did these huge heavy ladle cars. And you could sit there and watch him pour it with the sparks flying. And that, that was, uh, an occasion that went off light in view of the main street. But, uh, in addition, the Bethlehem steel well company went out of its way to provide a good things for people. Bull's quality of life. If the air was dirty and the water was polluted to a certain extent. And when they dumped the slag into the water and it steamed up like crazy in the middle of the night with red clouds, there was, there's also the fact that the steel company provided Penwood park, which was a baseball field and I've played on Penwood park. And that baseball diamond was every bit as smooth as Memorial stadium. They also built a lion MCA in Dundalk for people to go[inaudible] and there was a gymnasium and ping pong and all sorts of things. There was also a company store where my mother and her sister could go and buy things just by reciting the number of pop Ford's credit card. This was before the card and walking out with it. And my mother remembered that number until the day she died, I believe, and living, he was younger. She also had access to the doors, 30 ELLs. Everybody had part time, right jobs on Sparrow's point and sometime or another either summer or whatever, both my uncle rep and my uncle bill and my mother, all three of them, at least those three, uh, worked in the main office and an office job. And my mother also worked selling tickets at the movies. So if you, uh, yeah, you treated my mother. Well, you could get in to see a free movie. These were the perk. And by the way, my aunt live and my mother had a friend who was the telephone operator. Who'd worked shifts for sparrows point. And I remember my grandmother's telephone number. I think if it wasn't my telephone number, it was a tune for nine J and J was the phone on a party line. So you had 20 people on the party line who shared that particular line and the operator, right? Add these cords to plug in. So one source of recreation with my mother and her sister was to pick up their telephone and their friend had the telephone operator would plug in a phone call between one of their girlfriends and her boyfriend. And they would hear the conversation of them talking to one another about all sorts of adventures that they were having. And they were plugged in to that. Joe, there was plenty to do in the family time. The family activities provided by the company town, the Bethlehem steel company cloud, uh, North point Boulevard all the way into the city, near the what's the name of the Lake jello Montebello. And that park up there. Yeah. All the way to herring run park so that everybody who might know, could make it down to the plant on time. And so this is what company town was like. They also had different competitions. They had in the summertime, they had a massive contest to see who had the best rescue teams and first aid teams. It was a very useful
Speaker 1:School and nice life.
Speaker 2:If they sponsored later on, they sponsored Betham steel night at Memorial stadium and they occupied the whole upper deck. So there was also, they had babies
Speaker 1:Sure. Park my ass
Speaker 2:And Libby after my uncle, Bob got back. And when my uncle Bob, who came back as an experienced member of the engineers, he did not have an engineering degree at all, but he had a lot of experience and he got a real good job in the engineering department so that when he got back, his job was good enough where my aunt Liv had a ticket of membership in first old Bayshore park and then new Bay shore park. And I remember stopping my mother and I would go with my aunt live and we would stop at the gate. And she would say Dirks, D I R C K S. And uh, give them the number. And that would get us in to go swimming. In addition, when I was little on Saturdays, aunt Liv and uncle rib, when uncle Rupp was back from the service, they would put me, I guess I was about five, four or five. They would put me in the basket of a bicycle, put a blanket in the basket. We would go across North point Boulevard through the bungalows and down to what they called
Speaker 1:First bridge, which was where the beach was for swimming.
Speaker 2:And we would go swimming. And at the time uncle rep or somebody would say now watch out for the floaters. And I always watched out or things floating around in the water because you were supposed to Dodge him found out later on that the first bridge was the spot where the sewers emptied into. So you, uh, I didn't know what was floating, but you had the Dodge, the floaters, and I did it live to tell about it. So all of this was, uh, going on and part of life at the company town known as a sparrows point addition, uh, there was a country club and golf course when sparrows point, my uncle Bob Dirks lives right on that golf course. And he grew up playing golf and he turned out to be a really good golfer. But when he was younger, he played, he would just walk over to one of the holes when it wasn't a Visy and practice playing golf. And he lived next door to the, uh, the, the manager of it, or the greens, capers, someone who looked out for him and on the golf course, there was a Lake. And in the winter time, the Lake froze over. And during the day everybody would go ice skating on the golf course Lake was, they had open. And at night, one time, uncle Bob took an Lynn and my mother and father and I out on the Lake to go at night where you weren't supposed to be out there at night. And sure enough, we were swimming, ice skating away, and the police came and they wanted to know what was going on. I was there and I heard my uncle Bob explaining like, crazy about how he knew the, uh, operator of the golf course. And this was okay and so forth. Then they got away with it. But that was all part of living on the company town. Uh, during the war, my grandmother, mom Ford also participated. She was a ambulance driver for the red cross. Her job was to drive the ambulance and pick people up. Had my grandmother was very short and I can just imagine her driving a big high ambulance and her feet reaching where she did it. And she was an ambulance driver among other things during the war. Now, I had mentioned that in those days the men were hard and they were, will that build over into the, the next generation of my father and my uncles. And by the way, many people are familiar with the, uh, the book and the, the news shows series done by Tom Brokaw called the greatest generation. And I'd like to go through some of the things that I saw that backed that up. Both of my uncles, bill, the older brother and Robert or rip uncle rev, the, a younger brother, both of them had GI bill benefits when they came home from the service. And both of them ended up getting a college education. My uncle bill graduated first. He went to McCooley college McCoy college was part of Johns Hopkins university, and it was the night school. And he went to night school at McCoy collegey for college for 12 years before he graduated and became an accountant and then a CPA. And then eventually he became the comptroller of a very successful Maryland corporation that produced stationary and greeting cards. My uncle rev came home and went to this school in Virginia, Emory and Henry if I remember correctly, and I think he was there for a year or whatever. And he finished up at the university of Baltimore. He was finishing up at the university of Baltimore. Well, he had a part time job in the mail room with the standard oil company in their office or st. Paul street. And he graduated from there and went on to work full time with the standard oil company on st. Paul street. And from there, he moved out to their towels and office. And by that time he had become in their operations department. They put him in charge of the building out there. I might add while he was in charge of the building. He hired me to work out there and the building crew during the summers, but he was in charge of that building.
Speaker 3:And then from there, they put
Speaker 2:I'm in charge of the, the poor on Boston street down in Canton, the whole entire plant down there with all of the tanks in the ships loading and in whatnot. And from there, they moved him to Philadelphia where he eventually became in charge of the humble oil and refining company, which had so building the so company became humble and it became, uh, he became the operations manager for the Northeast, which was not, uh, a small job. And they retired from that job and went on to form his own company, teaching truck safety among other things. So we've got my two uncles who started out working in the main office and, uh, going to war for their country and then getting the GI bill, getting their educations and doing extremely well for themselves. And both of these two were very much pointed out examples to me as to what was expected.