Times were hard, real hard. But he never complained. He speaks of work ethics, and lives by integrity.
As a young boy, to help the family make ends meet, he’d climb the hill to where the train came through Canonsburg, PA, where it would drop coal along the way. It was his job, at five years of age, to haul the burlap sack up the hill, fill the bag, and drag it back down the hill and head for home.
Home was a two-room flat, in a village-like community where everyone knew everyone, and nobody really knew they were dirt broke. He shared those two rooms with his mother and grandmother.
“That’s just the way things were back then,” Leroy Brown, Sr., would say. “Everybody was broke.”
It was during the mid-twenties and things were tough all over. The nation was going through the Depression.
“I rarely saw my dad, but Mother and Grandmother were there all the way.” In fact, once he grew up, he ended up taking in Mother, her husband, Bill, and his Grandmother until eventually, they would all die.
That’s the type of man he had become. Family means everything to him. This man, who grew up without a true example of real matrimony, became husband—in the truest sense of the word—to one woman, Dorothy, who would bear his nine children.
It wasn’t until I was grown and raising my own daughter without her father around, that I realized what this man had done for us. It didn’t occur to us that he was always there. We just always knew he would be. It was his creed; his belief.
It was instilled in us (especially his girls) that, when we went out with friends, we HAD to take change to make “that call” (cell phones weren’t around then). You know “that call” when your friend decides not to bring you home because she met someone, or some guy would only offer to take you home if you…you get the meaning. We always knew to bring change and find a phone booth. Our Daddy would always come for us.
