Ten Cent Row

On one of my trips to London, I met a couple in the hotel from Arlington, TX. We enjoyed one another's company, went to a play together, and I was interested in them and their background just as I am interested in the background of most people I meet. They were in London buying British antiques for their home in Dallas. But, he was originally from Arlington, TX the area between Dallas and Ft. Worth. He had become a very successful millionaire businessman. He said as a child living in that area, in the cotton field picking cotton, he would see the truck of bottled drinks on the highway. His ambition was to be the driver of a drink truck; because he felt that he would have all the cold drinks he wanted to drink. His ambitions changed; and he and his wife, his assistant, became two of Texas's greatest entrepreneurs.

In the small country school where I graduated (13 in my high school graduating class) I remember the principal saying to a group of senior boys, of which I was a member, ”you boys can do anything you want to do, because you are Americans”. Have our teachers, parents and pastors and other leaders forgotten this, the greatest principal of American life?

After working my way through 4 years and graduating from the University of Chapel Hill, I went on to medical school at the University of Tennessee, Memphis. I lived in an apartment, in a garage, next to an alley in a very disreputable part of the city. Two other young men lived with me. We prepared our own food and lived on almost nothing. There was one grocery store in the neighborhood which had a ten cent row. All the food in this row was just ten cents. Most of the cans were abused in some way, label torn, outside dented. This is where we obtained our groceries which we cooked ourselves.

Going to school with a full schedule during the day, I had a variety of jobs at other times. On weekends, I would work as a shoe salesman, in a large department store (Goldsmith's, Dan Cohen). At night, I sold at one time, cookware. I would buy the groceries, an elderly black woman would prepare the food. I would serve the food at a dinner party for a hostess; and then I would attempt to sell the cookware and method of cooking to her guests. For several years, I sold pre-need cemetery property for pre-need customers in the large Forest Hills cemetery on the edge of Memphis, near present day Graceland. This is a cemetery where Elvis was first buried in the great mausoleum before he was buried at Graceland. The latter was probably some of the most rewarding work of my life; because I had the opportunity to talk to people about a matter which most do not want to consider. When I talk with young people who think their lives are so hard, I have very little sympathy because many of us went to school and received our training before the time of the largess of scholarships and government grants.

The economy will not be solved by people who are not conservative. Liberals know nothing of conservation. Conservation is a mindset, you either have it or you don't. If you were reared in a home where everything was handed to you, no questions asked, you were spoiled to the erroneous idea that it is a “me” world and “me” can have anything I want, regardless of need. This narcissism and lack of discipline will get an individual or a nation into the financial eclipse we face today led by the demon of liberalism, President Obama, a total economic illiterate, and his minions of liberal depravity. Those who have never had to do without anything have never had to work for anything, have never had to wait for anything, can ride in the Communist saddle on the horse of environmentalism, deceiving a dumbed down electorate. The economy will not get any better until self-centered, self-serving opinion molders learn the honor of labor and honesty.

I had two great friends in the military, one a black medical officer, came from the poverty of the Mississippi Delta. From the cotton fields of the Mississippi delta, his concerned parents, working several jobs and saw him through the black medical school, Meharry in Nashville, TN. He knew conservatism and until the military, had never had a pair of shoes except work shoes, brogans. Another, a German Jew, whose parents and seven brothers and sisters died in Hitler's gas chambers, was not exterminated because he was a dentist before the Holocaust. He was kept alive in order to take the gold out of the teeth of those exterminated. After the war, he came to this country, from the benevolence of American Jewry. He attended dental courses at Howard University and then went into the American military as an Army Dental Officer. These two Army officers, like your writer, a retired Army Medical Officer, knew conservatism, knew the principles of the democratic republic which we call the United States of America.


Pledge to be true for America
More dreams will be born…
Hand On Our Heart For America, Trade Martin