Chapter 1
Childhood – Youth
1893–1916
Ohio– Wisconsin
I am writing these first hundred pages at the Catholic Worker Peter Maurin Farm on Staten Island, N.Y., and will finish the book in my shack on Desert Ranch west of Phoenix, Arizona. Between these farms and Valley Farm, Negley, Ohio, a mile from the Pennsylvania state line and thirteen miles from the Ohio River and the West Virginia state line, where I was born in the midst of the 1893 depression there is a story of a Rebel who travels both in body and spirit as he meets and faces a changing world.
I hardly got born at all, for I was a three and a half pounds, seven months baby, put to bed in a cigar box; and when in a regular bed my mother could hardly find me among the covers. A mud hole just over a bridge on the dirt road was my nesting place when I bounced off of the pillow in my mother's arms, for I was so small I couldn't be held in arms like a regular baby. Anyway that first year I hardly made it, what with pneumonia, colic, and other troubles. After that I was not sick and grew to my five foot nine and a half inches.
My mother came of that Fitz-Randolph family that landed at Barnstable, Mass., in 1720. Ashford and Vail are the Quaker names of my ancestors in this line. My paternal grandfather came from Ireland in 1848 at the time of the potato famine. Whether the name was misspelled in transit I do not know. He fought for the North in the Navy when not fighting booze. He married a Pennsylvania Dutch girl by the name of Calvin. I never saw her. Each of their children were adopted by different Protestant neighbors. Peter Brown, a wealthy farmer, adopted my father. I saw my Irish grandfather when I was a small boy when he came for a visit from California. He gave me a bright penny. Both he and my grandfather Fitz-Randolph were tanners with vats in which to dip the hides.
John Brown and Johnny Appleseed were names familiar in our household and the Coppac Brothers who died at Harpers Ferry with John Brown had lived on a farm which was pointed out to me with pride, for here were stations of
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