Not the help wanted ads, every worker was scouring those, but the transactions in businesses and real estate, even the legal notices of governmental contracts, when viewed through imaginative eyes, could suggest possibilities to the eager mind.
He read a story just last week, where the manufacturer of a billiards factory refitted his plant to produce bathroom plumbing products yet kept the capability of his plant to still produce pool tables.
When Roosevelt initiated the Civilian Conservation Corps, the federal government put out contracts for both toilets and pool tables to be installed in the recreation halls for the thousands of CCC workers expected to sign up for the program. It was pure genius, Eugene thought, to glean such an opportunity where none had existed before. This was how Eugene Quindlen’s mind worked.
Today, however, the newspaper was no help. Besides, his needs were immediate. It’s true that he had paid his rent for the month. In fact he was covered for January as well. The gas and electric were paid. This is also how Quindlen thought: necessities first. Kitty’s cupboard was not completely barren. There was food in the pantry. He had foreseen the possibility of want, the expectation of hunger late last summer.
He borrowed a truck and drove out to the fertile fields of Lancaster County. There he spent what little money he had on bulk farm goods. Kitty learned how to put up the bounty by canning. Eugene turned the basement of their rented home into a root cellar. But, it was proving to be a long winter. Work was nonexistent and the money dried up and disappeared.
And, now it was Christmas Eve. The faces of his children with anticipating eyes and their innocent smiles full of trust in daddy’s promises of a wonderful noel that he could not keep plagued him. The worst of the art of deviltry - despair - besieged him.
He began walking down Germantown Avenue again, then up a steep hill until he came to a trolley loop. There was a green door and a small sign that read “McNally’s Tavern.”
Because it was Sunday, the bar wouldn’t be open for business. He knocked on the green
door anyway.
REGINA | 89