(1)
Wages, (2) Working Conditions and (3) Living Conditions. By living
conditions I mean the home and its security. My father had reached the
stage where this was the problem that worried him. He was growing old
and must soon cease working. But his home was not yet secure and he was
haunted with the fear that his old age might be shelterless. We told him
not to worry; the Davis boys were many and we would repay him for the
fatherly care he had given us. But he was a proud man (as all muscular
men are), and he could find no comfort in the thought of being supported
by his sons. I am glad he never had to be. Independence has made his old
age happy and he has proved that a worker, if he keeps his health, can
provide for his old age and bring up a big family too.

We older boys left home and hunted work elsewhere. I was young and
not bothered about working conditions or living conditions. I was so
vigorous that I could work under any conditions, and old age was so far
away that I was not worried about a home for my declining years. Wages
was my sole problem. I wanted steady wages, and of course I wanted the
highest I could get. To find the place where wages were to be had I was
always on the go. When a mill closed I did not wait for it to reopen,
but took the first train for some other mill town. The first train
usually was a freight. If not, I waited for a freight, for I could sleep
better in a freight car than in a Pullman--it cost less. I could save
money and send it to mother, then she would not have to sell her feather
beds.

All of this sounds nobler than it was. In those days workers never
traveled on passenger trains unless they could get a pass. Judges and
statesmen pursued the same policy. To pay for a ticket was money thrown
away; so thought the upper classes and the lower classes. About the only
people that paid car fare were the Knights of Pythias on their way to
their annual convention. Railroad workers could get all the passes they
wanted, and any toiler whose sister had married a brakeman or whose
second cousin was a conductor "bummed" the railroad for a pass and got
it. None of my relatives was a railroad man, and so to obtain the free
transportation which was every American's inalienable right, I had to
let the passenger trains go by and take the freights.

Once I got ditched at a junction, and while waiting for the next freight
I wandered down the track to where I had seen a small house and a
big water