In Praise of Pluck

I came across this Depression-era picture on Shorpy the other day and just had to grab it. Most faces tell a story. Some are an epic poem.

pluck-1936

This photo of an unknown woman was taken in November of 1936 in a squatters camp outside Bakersfield, California. You didn’t end up in a place like that without have been run through a gauntlet of rock-hard realities and heartache. But the children of the Civil War era were made of pretty stern stuff. The photographer noted that this woman said:

If you lose your pluck, you lose the most there is in you–all you’ve got to live with.

I don’t want to lose my pluck. I need my pluck. Thirty years from now I want to be able to stare down some young punk with a glare like this:

pluck-1936-crop