By 1931, the Depression had tightened its grip on America and unemployment reached more than 20 percent. With no possibility of finding another job in Aurora, Eric, Amy and baby Clive moved in with Will Hunnewell. Amy’s mother had died in January and Will was living in Minneapolis. Thanks to his seniority, Will’s job with the railroad was secure and he was fortunate to have a steady paycheck.

Unwilling to sponge off anybody, especially his in-laws, Eric immediately looked for work. For a short time, he sold refrigerators. “Selling refrigerators,” Clive says, “door-to-door in Minneapolis, in the Depression, in the middle of the winter! He might as well have tried to sell them to Eskimos.” Clive chuckles, “Dad always insisted he actually sold one, but nobody believed him.”

In late winter 1932, Eric’s luck took a turn for the better. He was hired, with a salary of $23 a week, as a traveling auditor for the Jewel Tea Company. Founded in 1899, the Jewel Tea Company was a home delivery service, offering housewives an assortment of coffee, tea, spices, laundry and toilet products. At one time, the company’s brown and yellow vans and their friendly drivers were a familiar sight in much of the U.S.

During the Depression, it was not unusual for a company to give a new employee an advance on their wages. When Jewel Tea advanced Eric $8, he brought the check home and proudly laid it on the dining room table. Clive remembers his mother’s story about the entire family standing around the table, staring in awe at the check, while she burst into tears.

Traveling by train or car, Eric was constantly on the road. To maximize his time with his family, the Cussler’s rented a series of apartments in Terre Haute, Indiana and Louisville, Kentucky, before moving back to Minneapolis in 1937. When they lived in Louisville, Clive recalls leisurely walks with his grandfather along the banks of the Ohio River. “We would watch the steam boats on the river and pass by the Seagram’s distillery. Seagram’s big water tank was shaped like a jug and I thought it was amazing. One of those things that always stays with you.”

Now six, Clive was enrolled in kindergarten, but soon became desperately ill and was diagnosed with pneumonia. Before the development of antibiotics, pneumonia, known as the “captain of the men of death,” was often fatal, especially for children. Treatment consisted of simply placing the patient in an oxygen tent and waiting for recovery or death. Much to his family’s relief, Clive chose the former.

After more than a week in the hospital, Clive’s condition began to improve and another patient was moved into his room - an elderly derelict named Wendell, who had been found half frozen in an alley. Bored to tears, Clive was happy to have somebody to talk to, especially a character as colorful as Wendell. “That old guy,” Clive says, “taught me card games, made funny faces, performed tricks with his false teeth and told me stories no six-year-old should have heard.”

One morning, a nurse came into Clive’s room to check the boy’s vital signs. Clive pointed to his new friend and asked why Wendell had turned an unhealthy shade of blue. The nurse took one look at the old-timer, gasped, and whisked the curtain around the bed. Shortly after, two orderlies appeared, covered Wendell with a sheet, and quickly rolled him out of the room. When Eric was informed a “street bum” died in the bed next to his darling son, Clive remembers his father’s fury. “I could hear him yelling in the hall with his German accent and was afraid he was going to tear the hospital down.”

With Clive on the mend, Eric and Amy wanted him home for Christmas. Ignoring the medical staff’s objections, they extricated Clive from the hospital and soon tucked him into his own bed. Although money was still scarce, Clive discovered later his parents sacrificed their small savings to insure he had a merry Christmas.

On Christmas morning, Eric and Amy helped half carried Clive to the living room where a shiny black Lionel steam locomotive and three bright-red passenger cars were racing around the Christmas tree. As the train passed a little white shanty, a switchman would spring out, swing his lantern, and pop back inside. Clive spent Christmas morning stretched out on the floor, entranced with the mechanical switchman. Amy suggested he give him a name. Clive thought for a moment and nodded. “I’ll call him Wendell.”

“That’s an odd name,” Amy said, “Where did you come up with that?”

As he continued to watch the switchman, dutifully swinging his lantern to protect imaginary motorists from the thundering express, Clive replied, “Oh, from a man who makes funny faces.”

In late January 1938, the Jewel Tea Company notified Eric there were two available positions he might want to consider. One, a promotion, would require him to relocate to Chicago. The other, in the Los Angeles office, was a lateral move - his salary would remain the same. The temperature in Minneapolis was hovering near zero and Clive, still recuperating, was as white as the snow piled eight feet deep around their apartment building.

With his son’s health paramount, Eric elected to apply for the job in California. Within a week, the Cusslers packed everything they could fit into their 1937 Ford Victoria and hit the road. The first day they managed only twenty-six miles. Road maintenance was almost nonexistent, and Eric often had to plow through a foot and a half of snow. The Ford slid off the icy roads three times; on two occasions, they were pulled out of a ditch by sympathetic truckers. After spending the night in a motor court, conditions improved and when they reached Omaha, the snow, much to Clive’s amazement, was beginning to disappear.

In Texas, Eric turned west onto Route 66, and a few days later, they crossed the Colorado River on the Old Trails Arch Bridge and entered California. For Clive, “Our trip west was a great adventure. I, of course, knew absolutely nothing about California, but realized my parents were excited about the move.

As the town of Needles receded in the Ford’s rearview mirror, Eric concentrated on his driving while Amy busied herself with a map. Sitting in the back seat, Clive, his face pressed against the window, stared at the desolate desert stretching forever in all directions. What kind of future, he wondered, waited for him in the Golden State?