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vivid--is friendly smile, his jolly face, in spite of the load he was carrying. This was a case of the good dying young--Bake was among the best from all angles and sadness reigned in the whole department. He left his wife and a boy 7 and a girl 3. So many threw themselves into the breach during his illness--the day of his death, Harry Harrington contributed a pint of blood for a transfusion, and Harry's wife, a former nurse, and helped every way possible, nursing Bake and helping with the children. I suppose a dozen others had helped and hoped. I believe it was about the first tragedy of that sort which I'd seen among my associates and it affected me deeply. For one thing, I guess I wondered just where the justice in it was. The next evening Perkinson and I stopped at the funeral home to pay our last respects. And although I hoped fervently to live long and well, I couldn't help but feel when I looked at that familiar face in death, that there was peace, utter peace, the fight over, the pain and suffering forever gone. After the desperate, terrible, losing fight he fought, that infinite peace seemed like a blessing.

As I've said, we seemed to be at the very bottom of the depression but the beauty of the spring cheered us and gave us renewed hope and faith in the more prosperous future that had to be just around the corner. And then again, I'd find myself making a complete turnabout in getting morbid over the depression and the economic future when I should've been rejoicing to be alive instead of dead of blood poisoning. And then I'd feel guilty of ingratitude and do my best to throw off my depression and quit worrying about anything except making my life everything it ought to be. By the mid-May, my weight was back up to 133 against the normal of 138 and I was feeling stronger every day. Harold and Catherine Holmes came over for bridge one evening about this time and Harold told me he had had pay cuts at Hammermill totaling 30% so I figured we were lucky with my 10% so far. However, there was more to it than that and I quote my diary of of May 15, 1931: "I hate to think of how our $5,500, which we had in [[underlined]]cash[[/underlined]] in September 1929, has shrunk, 'invested' in the stock market. It is worth less than $2,000 now but I have great hope of hanging on to all our stock and eventually salvaging it all, but it will be years. If I had taken mother's advice in the fall of 1929 to stay out of the market, wouldn't we be sitting pretty now! Well, all I can say is, I was an ignorant kid, as ignorant as any office boy or stenographer playing the market in the Boom, and I'm glad I learned my lesson when I didn't have much to lose. And I hope to lose nothing in the end. We shall see." In the summer, we had to take an extra week's vacation without pay. In my December 20th diary, I write: "The stock market is so low it is actually dragging on the ground. I haven't estimated what our net assets are but I doubt if they're over $1,500--from $5,500 in 1929. Everyone is in the same boat. Middle-aged men are talking of 'just starting over again.' I'm