Roaring Twenties

The Roaring Twenties enter Frank Sheeran’s account as a remembered childhood setting rather than a general portrait of prosperity. Across the Delaware River from Philadelphia, the land outside Camden, New Jersey, was then flat, fenced farmland. Sheeran contrasts those open fields with the later landscape, where little free land remained even for a small Victory garden. The changing terrain gives the period a precise local shape: it is the countryside he remembers before later development filled it in.

A Childhood Landscape

Sheeran recalls New Jersey as rural and peaceful beside Philadelphia, then a port city. The farms lay beyond Camden, and the area around the site of what would become Camden Airport was still available for harvesting. His description holds two views of the same landscape together: its quiet openness and its fences, which marked the boundary between a family’s need and a farmer’s property.

Work and Family Need

Sheeran’s father, Tom Sheeran, borrowed a large, clumsy car with a running board and drove him to the fields. They went in the early evening, when there was enough light to see but the farmers were preparing dinner. Sheeran climbed over a fence and tossed back whatever was in season—corn or tomatoes among the crops he names. The work was not presented as a childhood pastime: he describes it as a way to get by and put food on the table. His image of a first encounter with enemy fire from farmers gives the episode a wry edge, while keeping its underlying cause in view: scarcity.

The Decade in Retrospect

The recollection resists an easy equation between the Roaring Twenties and family prosperity. Sheeran’s account of the decade is shaped by the fields his family entered for food, and by his broader insistence that his family had never had money. He places his ninth year in 1929, when the Great Depression began, but the remembered hardship does not start neatly with that date. The open farmland is therefore more than a backdrop: it makes visible a childhood in which a seemingly abundant landscape still offered no secure livelihood.