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The Masonic Home By Bill Mize

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The Masonic Home Bill Mize, my great grandfather, watched in awe everyday as his father did the difficult job of being a railroad conductor in the 1940s. “I was completely fascinated by my father, he worked tirelessly to provide for the family, and was an incredible man,” Bill recalls. At the young age of fourteen Bill suffered the devastating loss of his father, the man he spent most of his childhood admiring. His father died abruptly of tuberculosis at the age of fifty-nine the family was completely shocked and devastated by this loss. Without his father, Bill watched everything in his once normal life quickly fall away; the family’s finances were slim to nothing and his mother could no longer support Bill and his sisters. Throughout the extremely rough time following his father’s death, Bill was forced to make some difficult decisions that no fourteen year old should have to make. Bill had to make the impossible decision to leave the rest of his family so that they would not starve, and move into a home for the children of Freemasons. Following the devastating loss of his father, Bill watched in horror as his mother and four sisters struggled to live through their grief. The United States was still recovering from the depression in the year 1942, and jobs were not only hard to come by but dangerous to their health as Higgs describes in his book, “Often, they entailed substantial risks of death, dismemberment, and other physical and psychological injuries,”

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