Kenneth Jay Sissom Short Biography

Kenneth Jay Sissom was born on January 25th 1931 in Bedford Tennessee. He was born into a farm family that all together had 10 kids. They lived in a four bedroom house with two beds to a room and the “comfort zone” or the toilet was located outside and they had no water bill. Each of the children had their own daily chores to get done to go about their way of life at that time. “The work of the children worked mainly for their own parents on the home farm. On the contrary, it is a highly commercialized, nearly always hard repetitive labor characterized by long hours and unsuitable and often hazardous conditions of work and subject to competitive pressure.” Around those years his father was only making a dollar a day while his mother was busy tending to the children and taking care of all of the whole household duties. The children worked a total of ten hours a day seven days a week unless it was during the school year. They were expected to attend school every day by foot no matter what the weather was like. Then you didn’t have to worry about kidnapping. Kenneth proceeded to say “You would get strung up by the highest tree around” when I asked him if it were to ever happen. By high school they had bus transportation but by that time only few went because they put work in front of school in their priorities. Kenneth dropped out of school when he was a sophomore at the age of eighteen. Most of the teenage boys at that age had been recruited or you were sent to a CCC Camps. The camps were President Roosevelt’s idea for young men to work for the military but not exactly be recruited for duty. Kenneth had broken his leg on a wagon rut on the farm and lost his leg due to infection. He wanted to live up to something like his brothers so he sought out to work anywhere possible to make a …show more content…
Also to receive a higher paying job at only seventy cents a day. His transportation was by his black 1939 Chevrolet Custom. In Nashville gas was nineteen cents a gallon and out of state it was down to seventeen cents. He stayed up there for half of a year and came back to get his sweet heart from church and marry and start a family. By that time he moved to Indiana and started working for Good Year Tire and Rubber making only a dollar and five cents a day. Kenneth wanted to move closer to home to raise his kids and be closer to his family. He moved back to Nashville to work for the Wethern Bag Company only making seventy five cents a day and stayed there for thirty years then retired in 1980 at minimum wage. He bought the farm he lives on today for 125,000 for 192 acres and sold not even half of that in 1986 for the exact same price. He and his wife only had three kids, so it was obvious by that time that he made enough money to not have to rely on the family farm. Although they still did a lot of farm work. Kenneth had a pepper farm and he paid his kids fifty cents for a full bucket to buy their school clothes or just spare change for anything they wanted, but they still had to earn