James P. Isenhower of Conover was born Sept. 6, 1920, the day his father left the office as Catawba County sheriff. It was hardly the end of his career. When the Depression hit, Isenhower's father, John A. Isenhower, had five different jobs.
He and his father had a store in Conover, P.E. Isenhower & Son. He was a partner in five different cotton gins. He ran the Newton Bonded Warehouse, a cotton warehouse, and owned Catawba Ice & Fuel.
"He never had to ask anybody for a penny," said Isenhower, the pride still in his voice enduring through the decades since.
Among the jobs Isenhower had was collecting rent on the mill hill near the old Young Cotton Mill, which his father turned into the warehouse. Rent was 50 cents a week, but sometimes his dad told him not to worry if someone didn't have it. That was one way the young Isenhower heard about hard times.
Another way he could see from his house, which sat where Peoples Bank in Conover is now. When trains rumbled through on the nearby track, he could see the men standing on the tops of the cars like birds on a wire. Those were hobos, he learned, men with no place to go, going wherever they could.
When the train stopped outside the warehouse, people would jump onto the rail cars and knock blocks of coal to the ground so they could take them home, he said.
At the store his father helped run, they kept a loft full of peanuts and peach seeds they would ship to places that needed them. People traded those things, along with fresh eggs, butter, sweet potatoes, even live chickens, for their groceries.
When the store closed, sometime in the late '30s or early '40s, Isenhower said some people still owed their Depression debts.
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