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Dr. E. W. Branyon’s Bio
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them. Nor did we know enough about blacks or the Civil War to figure out what they were protesting. They didn’t do any harm and seemed sort of like the Masons.
There were very few jobs around Hamilton. We had one of FDR’s Civilian Conservation Camps (CCC) nearby that sup- plied jobs for our teenage dropouts or unem- ployed graduates. They’d feed, cloth and house you in a barracks and pay $20 a month to clear brush and other low skill work. Our school played them in basketball.
Most of Marion County’s people were subsistence or truck farmers. You weren’t exposed to many other occupations. There were also the circuit-riding preachers, school teach- ers, two lawyers, two doctors and once I got to see an engineer build a bridge across the Buttahatchee. Logging the virgin forests was probably the biggest employer, and next biggest was bootlegging.
Literally, to bootleg meant to hide something in your boot. Prohibition ended in 1932, but Marion County stayed dry. Much of the homebrew was poisonous because the bootleggers used lead pipes and they would dissolve in the heat. One time the sheriff was chasing bootleggers who raced towards the
