Theodore
They also took a step which had quite an influence on my life. They bought a
farm out in Baltimore County about 20 miles northwest of Baltimore-actually,
the
overlapped across the northwest branch of the Patapsco Falls-that is
what they call it-and over into Carroll County. So it was right on the county
line there, near the little town of Reisterstown.
And they really thought they would go out there and make a living on a
acre farm. But the fallacy in that can be demonstrated by my mother's talking
about how they had looked for farms up and down the countryside of
Maryland, Anne Arundel County waterfront and everywhere, and she said,
"When we drove over the top of the hill and we saw that farm spread out
below us in the valley of the Patapsco Falls, we knew that was the place for
us.
Well, the fact that it was such a lovely, idyllic setting, with wooded hills and
rolling country made it not a very good farm. Terrible erosion-they didn't
know about contour plowing in those days. Of course, my early recollections
are of living on the farm, and I remember the way those fields would erode.
They planted corn and wheat and had horses and cows and chickens-it was
just going to be a general purpose farm.
My father built a tenant house and hired a man to run the farm. The man's
name was Solly. I don't know where they got him, but he had grandiose ideas
of riding around on a horse and telling the hired hands what to do. Of course,
you don't do that on a
farm.
And the origin of the 1929 crash was in the agricultural depressions in the early
years of the '20s. I don't know just which year they found out their dream of
making a living on the farm wasn't going to work, but by 1923 my father had
gone back to work in the city. He was commuting back and forth to Baltimore,
driving a big Reo touring car.
Photography,
No. He was working in real estate. I'm not sure when he started to work for
Randall H. Hagner and Company, where he was involved largely in apartment
house maintenance, but that was what his work was most of the time when I
was growing up.
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