We used to have a wire-haired terrier named Barkly, whose cleanliness instinct was ruined. No matter where we kept him, he was used to pooping indoors and not pooping outdoors, and that posed a problem. The dog “marked” a wicker baby bassinet in the living room and soiled the summer kitchen when we tied him outside. We took him to an animal shelter, where it was said that surely he would find a good home since he was so cute, but Barkly is now in doggie heaven, since nobody in their right mind would have him.
The year 2020 saw out-of-control rioting, burning, smashing, and looting of small businesses in primarily Democrat strongholds. This was supposedly outrage over the killing of George Floyd, a black man who was arrested and detained with pressure on his neck under the knee of a police officer. However, if the protestors had really been concerned about the loss of life of a black man, they also could have been concerned about the loss of livelihood of all those small business owners whose businesses were pillaged and destroyed. Most of them were owned by their neighbors.
As a small business owner, that burning and looting did not sit well with me. No doubt, we can expect BLM and Antifa to be at it again in the near future, whenever things do not go their way because it has been proven that they have some strange immunity to prosecution.
It is the small businesses of America who employ nearly half of our total workforce – and 99.9% of businesses in the US are small. I draw a parallel between Barkly and BLM / Antifa, who don’t mind pooping in their own home. Or, if not that, it is something more sinister. By the time this is posted, we may know more, since tomorrow is supposed to be the inauguration of another Democrat U.S. president. For the sake of our country, the Church, and our struggling small businesses, I am praying God will intervene.
But let’s talk about how the Haley family made a living here in flyover territory, and how we were eventually brought to realize our own American Dream. This will probably take more than one post, though ...
I’ve spoken before about Dr. Ray & Dorothy Moore, who “wrote the book” on homeschooling. That was how we got started, and their books were our manuals for many years. The first book was Better Late Than Early, which set the stage for homeschooling by explaining “the why” of it. That book was followed by Home Grown Kids, and later by Home Grown Schools. Because they so adamantly believed that children should not be in any kind of formal instruction at an early age, the Hewitt-Moore Child Development Center eventually split up and became the Hewitt Early Childhood Center, and the Moore Foundation, the latter of which agreed with and taught Moore’s principles.
Another principle they believed in and taught in their books was that the home was the best place for the father – that he should not be leaving home all day long, but should stay home and involve the family in moneymaking enterprises, called “cottage industries.” They wrote an entire book about this, called Minding Your Own Business.
We tried a lot of things to make money “on the side,” and we needed to! But sometimes it’s hard to find one that really works!
When we just had the two young children, we wrote and delivered singing telegrams for a living. Eric and I both had uniforms with white shirts and slacks, green vests, and green visors. I made the vests and visors. Eventually, Eric did all the deliveries and I manned the phones and schedules. We both wrote songs.
Me in my uniform, with Lisa (5-1/2 mos. old) at Grandma Haley's house
Eventually, we wrote an entire book of standard songs that we used in our business, but for more money, people could still order a custom one-of-a-kind song. We sold the publishing rights to the standard songs to a balloon distribution company called Balloon City, USA, and they produced and sold these songs, along with tiny cassette tapes of ourselves singing them. (That day, we found an all-day babysitter, locked the noisy parakeets in the back room, and took the phone off the hook.) Every month, the balloon company sent us royalties from the sales, and they wanted us to do more.
Book Two was produced later, and though we were supposed to have received a copy of that, we never did. We gained much notoriety in the Lafayette area, and we were featured in many a newspaper article, along with our specialty acts, such as Jeremy Camp’s father Tom, who sometimes went out with his guitar and harmonica; another Tom who was a local bagpiper with the 42nd Highlanders; and Carolyn, who played Santa Claus and the Queen of Hearts. Eric also dressed up like a cow, a female pig, Scrooge, and a hobo. We added balloons, flowers, candy, bumper stickers, and stuffed animals. Our preschool girls learned their colors by identifying the color of the helium balloons, which had been blown up in the basement and floated up to the top of the stairwell before they were tied together.
On Valentine’s Day we always prayed we would not be dumped with snow. That was our biggest day of the year – back-to-back singing telegrams from early morning till late at night, every 15 minutes, with people who worked for us going four directions at once. Once, I stayed up all night long the night before, hand-writing all the telegrams and coordinating the Valentine’s Day schedules.
Since I also kept the books for the business, which was doing so well we actually had it incorporated as “Haley & Haley Singing Telegrams, Inc.” with hopes of franchising, I was really surprised because somehow, even though we were really busy, we never seemed to be getting ahead. What I didn’t know was that Eric had been embezzling private funds on the side and saving them up for a fur coat for me!
But then, we started homeschooling and it was really important that I focus on teaching the kids! So we took down our shingle and tried something else. About that time, Eric began buying review copies of college textbooks. We got into this because Eric had met someone who knew there was money to be made in the area, but they were giving up the territory themselves.
Since we needed to get out of the house from time to time, and we missed Daddy, we sometimes took an all-day trip with him, packing lunch in a cooler, school supplies, and consumable workbooks. We had the freedom to have our school on the road, to visit a museum on a college campus while he was buying books from a professor, or to have recess by the fountain. Yes, we sometimes got shy of having anyone see us, to ask why our kids “weren’t in school.” But over the years, that wore off. Our kids were free! We sometimes pointed to other kids on a school playground and referred to that fenced-in area as “the zoo.”
Eric was also buying collections of bound periodicals from libraries, who were digitizing all of them to save room. When he was able to invest in a collection like that, he would make a lot of money suddenly, and we would be able to pay our bills! But it was sometimes difficult to get around in the living room for awhile.
The book buying job didn’t last long, though. Book buyers were sometimes stigmatized by professors who considered it unethical to sell books they had received free from publishers as review copies. Sometimes Eric had a retiring professor sell his whole collection, but other times, Eric was told he was not welcome (but not officially). So either we ate that week, or it was slim pickin’s. And after awhile, we found out that there was something a little sketchy about the company that was buying up the textbooks, so Eric started selling his books to the University Bookstore on Purdue Campus instead. It was an honest company and that worked much better.
The moving of very heavy boxes and loads of college textbooks and oversized books ended up taking its toll on Eric’s health, causing backaches and arrhythmias. Eric found himself in the hospital from overexertion and dehydration from too much ice tea. The ambulance ride also was a result of the Urgent Care people hooking up the heart monitor leads backwards, but still ...
So, he finally decided it was time to go back to work at Home Hospital, where his job as a monitor technician was still wide open after he’d left it to do singing telegrams. No one had taken his place. But somebody really needed to be there on night shift, to read those rhythm strips and alert a nurse that someone was having tachycardia or atrial fib. So they were glad to hire him back.
On the side, Eric worked at his dad’s antiques store (Leonard’s Antiques & Used Furniture). When he found out that his dad had been throwing away all the books he’d acquired when he bought estates, Eric offered to buy the books from him, and he rented a single bookshelf in the store, to sell the best ones. The sale of those books also supplemented our income, and Eric’s dad found out the books were actually worth something, but he still let Eric have that part of the business.
In 1988, Leonard Haley passed away at age 61. And since Eric had been here for his dad, his mother sold us the store on contract and later gave it to us outright. Eric quit the job at the hospital again, changed the name of the store from Leonard’s Antiques and Used Furniture, to Leonard’s Antiques and Books, and finally, as books started taking over, to Leonard’s Books. We moved to Burrows but Eric still commuted to Lafayette every day to keep the store. And every day, before he left home, our kids laid hands on him and prayed for good success at the store. It didn’t take long for them to memorize the prayer they used, and since they all prayed at once, it sounded like a Pentecostal prayer meeting.
Lisa and Emily both went with Dad on certain days of the week while the rest of their siblings stayed home. Lisa walked down the street from the store to St. Elizabeth Hospital to do candystriping and take Latin from a nun. Emily entered book descriptions into a database we submitted to Bibliofind, while simultaneously painting her toenails. We paid her for the number of books she entered.
Sometimes Dad’s North End store was the setting for a school project, such as having a Medieval feast with friends in a homeschool co-op, complete with wall tapestries and trenchers. Lisa and Emily made armor and jousted with their friends atop their daddies’ shoulders, on the sidewalk in front of the store, while customers of the bar across the street came out to watch the fun.
These jobs seemed like they should do the trick financially, but they were always not quite enough. We periodically tried to make a budget, but gave up because it really never added up right. How could it? We always needed just a little more before we could be financially stable. We would be selling an average of eight books a day, … but needed ten. So we were in earnest prayer for ten.
But somehow, we never lacked. We didn’t have insurance, but we had a doctor who cut our fees because he could, and because we were in the same homeschool support group. His kids were always in my plays. And when we started having home births, the midwives were hoping we could make monthly payments, but probably would have accepted chickens if they had to. We always found enough to pay them.
We did have really big gardens, and the kids were recruited to help with the gardening and the canning. We would put up about a hundred twenty quarts of tomatoes every year, and squeeze and can at least 50 quarts of grape juice. We were given a wheat grinder, and we bought a bushel of wheat from a farmer, sometimes two, and that and the soybeans and dried corn would be enough to feed the growing family just fine. And there was always some amount of Earned Income Credit on our taxes.
So, referring back to my title for this post, why did I cry? Well, for one, Lisa had some space between her front incisors. That had to be solved with a little bit of a brace to squeeze them together, and it wasn’t too expensive. But with this first one, we had set a precedent. When Chris needed some major orthodontics done on his teeth after that, his work would cost something that seemed pretty astronomical. I had to be the one to put the $5,000 on our credit card for it, and when I did, I cried, but I tried not to show it. It seemed it could never be paid off, and we didn’t do any more of that with the other six.
So when we finally realized the book sales really never were quite what we needed, I began doing some odd jobs from our home to make some more money. We had very good friends who felt sorry for us and wanted to help, so they came up with ways we could earn some extra bucks, even though we weren’t really qualified in those areas. Once, I did an audit of a CEO’s spending for someone on the board of the corporation and set up some new accounting software, but I charged too much and did the job too slowly, so the CEO was really angry at how much it cost him. Since he yelled a lot, I was really glad when he fired me!
Another time, I was coached on how to be a drug rep, selling packets of tea that were a bad-tasting cancer cure from China made from reishi mushroom. My friend even bought me professional clothes so I could do a presentation for prospects and not look like a mom of little kids who only owned sweatshirts. I was only occasionally successful, and eventually, after having too many returns, my friend’s husband fired me. This was really not my cup of tea.
I also did tax preparation using a professional tax software, hoping all the time that none of my clients would be audited and then suffer financial loss because of some mistake I’d made. Yeah, there was some anxiety involved with that job!
And then, there was line editing / proofreading. That was a job I really loved doing, so I did it for both fun and profit. There was a Biblical counseling book by my famous brother-in-law, Dr. Kerry Skinner, and there was a really technical book by my friend about the Chinese mushroom cure I was selling. And I read every single article on LifeNews.com for three years, to find all the errors and sent them to author Steven Ertelt, whom I’d never met, but because he was doing such a service to mankind and he couldn’t afford my inflated prices, I did that for him in exchange for an ad for Eric’s business – which worked very well, I might add! (More about that business im a future post.)
Eventually, with all this experience behind me, I put on my professional outfit, slid my neatly typed resumé into my professional briefcase, put on make-up no less (being desperate), and answered an ad in the Carroll County Comet for a proofreader for the paper. They said they couldn’t afford me, that I was overqualified, and that they wanted some housewife at $7.50 an hour a few hours a week for a little extra spending money. That just wasn’t enough for me to drive to Flora.
But there were times when we were at the end of our rope, times when I just didn’t know how we could get along, with having to put a little more on the credit card, and then a little more, and then a little more. And we needed to have some kind of income, so I faced the possibility of having to work outside the home.
I was pretty sure I could get a job with Roxy, the produce manager at Marsh. I was intimately familiar with the names of every kind of fruit and vegetable in the store since we were all on the Fit for Life diet after our #6 baby, Valerie, was born. And Roxy was so used to seeing me there with kids in tow that she had begun to put all the “seconds” in large boxes and sell the whole thing to me once a week at $5.00, rather than packaging them up and selling them at a discount.
But as we thought about this idea, I took a long walk in the country with Eric, and we talked and prayed, ... and I cried. I could not stop crying. When I thought of having to get a full-time job so we could make it, I knew it meant the end of homeschooling. And I could not bear the thought of entrusting the kids to a public school. We hadn’t done that since Lisa was in kindergarten. It was too painful to think about.
So, we just pressed on, somehow, and always managed to find some other way to live and pay our bills.
Then, I had bronchitis, which became worse and worse, until I started having atrial fibrillation. Eric knew what that was from taking my pulse and got me to the hospital fast.
The diagnosis? The bronchitis had progressed to pneumonia with pericardial effusion. There was fluid in my lungs up into the bronchi and leaking into my pericardium – the outer area of my heart – and that was squeezing my heart and causing irregular heartbeats. The cardiologist was advising me of my condition and telling me that if the antibiotics didn’t work, he would have to pull the fluids out of my heart with a long needle, and he didn’t want to do that. So a lot of prayer went up on my behalf. As a reply to all that prayer, God did a miracle of healing in my body, and Dr. Krause was quick to point it out at my follow-up visit. He didn’t even make another appointment for a return visit.
But… I had to file for Medicaid. Government assistance. We had avoided that for so long! But here I was, in the Family Services office, filing for a welfare program. The social worker told me all our kids qualified too, so here, fill out this paperwork for all of them. And while you’re at it, here’s what you sign to get food stamps. I cried.
The social worker saw me crying and somehow knew I was feeling shame and misery. With a little bit of conversation, she found out from me that I felt like a failure, that we should be able to just trust God and depend on Him for our every need, so why did we need government assistance? She bent down next to me to look me in the eye and said, “I’m a Christian too. And I would just say, maybe God wants to provide for you this way for a while.”
So I signed the forms, always with the understanding that there would be an end to this season in our lives. Our wonderful family doctor didn’t take Medicaid payments, so we couldn’t use him for our kids anymore. But we still didn’t have to put our kids in a public school, which we also called “government welfare schools.” (Think about it!)
God did take care of us. Again, we had no lack.
There were two more jobs I haven’t told you about yet, so this story is to be continued. Eventually, there was the “American Dream,” and the way there was pretty interesting. Here’s what I can tell you about “the way there,” without telling you what lies ahead:
Yes, the LORD will give what is good; And our land will yield its increase.
Righteousness will go before Him, And shall make His footsteps our pathway.
~Ps. 85:12-13
Better is a little with righteousness, Than vast revenues without justice.
A man's heart plans his way, But the LORD directs his steps.
~Proverbs 16:8-9
The Lord leads us by going first. He has “been there, done that.” I wonder how many failed enterprises Joseph had before Jesus reached maturity. And there were times when the God of the Universe was literally hungry. Does He care, when we go through these trials? Absolutely! And rest assured, our individual circumstances and the needs we have along the way will help Him get our attention and direct our steps, as we but follow in His footsteps.
As for tomorrow, may God, whose name is “Salvation,” save us from our enemies…
