My West Texas Boyhood In The Dust Bowl During The Great Depression

Common Sense Commentary:

I was born the year following the 1929 stock market crash and beginning of the Great Depression. My earliest, meaningful memories are when I was four or five years old. We lived on Lemon Street (a dirt road) on the northwest, outskirts of Sweetwater, Texas, on the poor side of the railroad tracks. Times were very difficult for my young parents, but they never complained. I never knew we were poor, back then, until I was grown. I don't have to fear poverty; I've already been there. I know how to be poor. It actually takes very little to survive, if you are not wasteful.

We lived in a little shotgun house with three 8 by 8 rooms, an outhouse, and a little 10 by 10 barn for a milk cow and chickens. My father had dug a 4 by 8 storm cellar just outside the back door for my mother's fruit jars of canned vegetables and preserves for special Sunday Dinners. Dad never gave it much thought but Mom thought of that cellar as a safe place to go when one of the many thunder and wind storms blew in, usually from the southwest or northwest. Those winter storms from the northwest, Texans called "Northers" and swore there was nothing between West Texas and the North pole but a "bob war" fence (barbed wire). I remember very clearly standing in the middle of the road, there, looking west at one of the most impressive sights I have ever seen. We lived in what was known as the "dust bowl", which covered much of the southwest. What I saw that day was a black wall that reached from earth to the clouds and as far as I could see north or south. It was a "dust storm" that would blast the paint off houses and cars, blind your vision and cover everything with inches or feet of dust and destroy farmer's crops. West Texans would ride those dust storms out in the house with windows and doors closed tight against worn out old clothes saved for that purpose. Even so, when those dust storms had passed, there was an inch deep and a yard square of dust on the floor at the door and on all the window sills. There was dust in the food, dust in the clothing drawers, closets and in our eyes, ears, hair and grinding in our teeth. I love West Texas still .... It's home.

Storms never seemed to bother Dad but Mom was most frightened by tornadoes. There seemed to be a lot of them in the 1930's across West Texas. That was the main reason Mom insisted we have a "STORM" cellar. Well, every time a bad storm blew in, Mom was up, at all hours, looking outside and listening for that "locomotive" sound of a tornado. When she saw or heard what she was convinced was one, she would wake up us kids to "put something on quick", and then rush in and shake Dad awake with vocal emphasis. "Bob, get up, a tornado is coming .... Bob, wake up, a tornado, BOB, TORNADO !" Dad would arouse, listen a moment, and say, "it's just the wind, Alma," then, turn over and go back to sleep. That agitated Mom when we had a perfectly good storm cellar standing safely underground, empty, except for survival and winter only, canned goods. But one night, she was "really" excited when she awakened us screaming, "GET UP, TORNADO !" This time we could all hear it coming like a freight train bearing down on our little house. Dad was also awakened by it and pulled on his trousers and led us all out the back door to our storm cellar. The cellar door, covering the entrance, was wood, covered with galvanized metal, was very heavy, and angled from the ground up to the top of the dirt mound covering the cellar. We stood by, in the whipping gusts of wind and rain, while Dad reached down for the big metal door handle he had fashioned himself. He couldn't seem to open it, as he usually did, with one hand, so he changed positions and with both of his big hands and powerful arms jerked two men up about eighteen inches out of that cellar, clinging desperately to the inside handle, built large for that purpose, when the wind really got bad. They looked horrified, thinking it was the tornado jerking the door off. Dad was said to be the strongest man in Sweetwater. He held the door open and could see our two neighbor families jammed in there, scared to death. Dad told them to "stay put" and Mom was speechless until the next day. The storm passed, she went into her cellar to discover several jars of her prized peaches had been eaten and the empty Mason Jars left for her to wash. She wasn't too fond of that. After that, we didn't bother going to our cellar during bad storms; it was always full of neighbors.

Yes, those were the "good old days" when neighbors were neighborly, food meant beans and cornbread, one pair of cheap shoes per year when school started ... if at all. Some children went bare footed even in winter, a "Guess What" package of two pieces of caramel candy and a prize for a penny, sweet milk or buttermilk over a glass of old cornbread, the iceman left a 25, 50, or 100 pound block of ice in your "ice box", oil lamps for light in half the houses and two light bulbs (total) in the others, a wood stove sitting, red hot, in the middle of an 8 by 8 living room for the whole house, 5 cents a bushel for mesquite beans gathered and delivered by me to the stock yard a mile or two south of my private mesquite orchard, one Niagara Shredded Wheat biscuit delivered to our door by a nice neighbor for us kids to share. We had only oatmeal or cream of wheat. My toys were an old broom stick horse, tumble weed cattle, big rock chickens and little rock chicks, and a big world full of imagination and adventure awaiting me. From time to time, we saw dirigibles and even zeppelins passing over Sweetwater, with loud, low tone, humming motors, following old Hwy.80 across America. Almost every cold wintry night I could hear wind whistling around the eves of our house, or the shrill whistle of a freight train way off in the distance. Each year, we kids could pick Cotton and pull the sack up and down the rows for several hours for 25 cents and sore fingers. A Coca Cola was a nickel and many a man labored hard for $5.00 a day to support his family. Mom would heat a brick on the stove, hold it with a towel and iron our cold sheets in winter and then wrap it in the towel and leave it at our little feet. A barrel of coal oil for Mom's cook stove and for doctoring cuts and smashed fingers by Dad.
Sin wasn't complicated in those days, "Don't lie, cheat, steal or cuss around women or girls. "There were those who did the first three but no man or boy cursed around women or girls.

The whole family took a bath, in the same wash tub full of the same water every Saturday ... whether we needed it or not. Moms first, kids second, Daddies last. All old men were toothless, chewed Brown Mule tobacco and used a cane. Women wore flour sack dresses, they made themselves, with the colorful sacks flour came in.

All of that was what is meant by the "good old days". But we had more, much more, a secure home, loving, hard working parents who reverenced God, made our house the best home a kid ever grew up in. Thank you Lord for Mom and Dad, I didn't deserve them then and still don't, but will love them for eternity.

Pass It On. A blessed boy at 80 years young.