The Great Depression
I was born in 1933 during the middle of the ‘Great Depression’ when most of all Americans farmers hurt without having an economy which allowed them to produce and sell their products. The farmers could produce their crops and milk but working class people did not have the means of buying the goods they grew.
My father, like most farmers during the middle of the ‘Great Depression’ who hurt without having an economy which allowed them to produce and sell their products. They voted as Republicans, and most hated to see some of the methods used by Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) to bring our country out of the depressed economy. My personal belief is that it was a necessary sacrifice to bring our country out of the very deep depression we had to go through.
My Dad found it hard to ever forgive FDR for pouring the milk out on the streets and taking cows into ditches to slaughter for helping to create a market for their products. He made, fortunately, use of some of the many programs developed by FDR, such as the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and Social Security but always felt that the waste of crops and milk would have better served the needs of the starving hordes of Americans.
My father was always a tenant farmer in that he could not get enough capital to own a farm but could either rent or share the profits with the owners of the farms on which we lived. Both my parents worked hard at raising their seven children and we survived by raising our own food in our gardens and pigpens and canning enough during the growing season to sustain us through the winter.
I remember when my father wanted to improve our flock of chickens and he bought a new rooster to allow him to mix in with all the hens and to better our chicken crop. You’ve never seen such a rooster! First, he started to romance all the chickens around and when that wasn’t enough, he began to romance the turkeys. He even began to make eyes at the ducks and started after the sheep and goats. One day, my father said to him, “you know, big fellow, you’re going to kill yourself if you keep this up.
Then, one day, we came out and there was the rooster laying on his back, his eyes rolled back into his head and all the buzzards circling in the sky overhead. We went up to him and my Dad said to him, “Well old fellow, I told you that if you kept up things like you have been, it would kill you” Bout that time, the rooster opened an eye and said, “Would you be quiet! When you romancing a buzzard, you do it their way.
~This guy doesn’t look like he would be willing to play dead for a vulture.
A plan, civilian service, and conservation for the US! ~ Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC)
Starting in 1939, my family moved from the house on the hill we lived on to where they rented a larger house on Belle Plain and later took in renters, evidently to help pay with the expenses. We lived there when my Dad joined the CCC and spent two years (from 1939 to 1941) working on parks and road projects which were of great help to the infrastructure demands of the country and provided help in bringing the USA out of the great depression.
CCC was a public work relief program that operated from 1933 to 1942, for unemployed, unmarried men, although they made exceptions on the latter need. The workers were given a position similar to a military position and earned one dollar a day or 30 dollars per month.
The workers were given uniforms, board, and food plus $5 for other needs. Twenty-five dollars would be sent home to care for the family while the CCC workers were away from home.
At $1 per day, it gave my Dad and millions of men who were without jobs some hard work and it supplied our family, which consisted of two adults and seven children, with enough money to survive the crisis. Most of the workers gained new skills to use and was the greatest asset to our country.
Early years in school
It was when we moved from the house on the hill (in about 1938 or 1939) to the house on Belle Plain Avenue. I remember beginning to attend North Ward Elementary School, where Miss Lizzie, (Felician Elizabeth Bullion) a long time friend of the family and a fellow member of the same church, and was the Principal of the school.
At the beginning of first grade, I remember Miss Lizzie taking all the boys into the bathroom to show us how to use the urinals. Although she didn’t demonstrate how it was done, she did tell us on the proper way to use the ceramic urinals, which reached from the top of our first-grader heads to just in front of our feet and to do so without splashing on the wall or wetting the floor. Later, she would stand outside the bathroom during recess or breaks and she would have us hold up one or two fingers to show her if we were going to use the urinals or the commodes so that she would know how long we would be in the restrooms.
I remember “Miss Lizzie” as my parents called her because she was a unique person in herself. She and her mother and siblings lived near North Ward Elementary on Belle Plain and near the church. She was what was known as a “spinster” and lived with her aged mother, an old bachelor brother and two or three sisters who were unmarried. In addition to her work at school, she and her brother took care of a small farm they owned near our house on Adams Creek just off of Belle Plain Avenue. Her brother served in World War I and had made it to France to fight in the trenches. He was injured by the mustard gas which had been used by German soldiers and he suffered from this for the rest of his life.
Years later, when I occasionally did some work for Fue and Miss Lizzie, she would pay me by taking out a small, emptied tobacco bag in which she had pocketed her money and kept hidden in her bra or somewhere in the front of her blouse. I laughed to myself as I never knew what she was going to pull out when she reached for her money to pay me.
It was also about this time that someone or some agency gave to the schools a five-page document on the “facts of life” which was more explicit in detail than anything else I ever saw in schools.
Mother confiscated this and said that she had taken it from me to keep in her safe deposit box, which was my Dad’s old footlocker from the Civilian Conservation Corps. I am sure that she did not take it from me to save but because of her own embarrassment.
She gave it to me only a few years before her death as she was dividing up some items she and Dad had collected over many years. I still have kept this document and would like to add it to my life memories as I am sure that others would find it as fascinating and as educational as I did.
You might wonder, as I did, whatever possessed the schools to distribute this fairly accurate sexual pamphlet unless it was to educate the parents so that they themselves would know enough to practice better birth control methods.
I still have no idea why the school district sent this out with young students and not with the older students at the high school level who probably had more need for understanding and making use of the information that we first or second graders had. “Miss Lizzie” was not the author of the material as she was an “old maid” and would never have thought of initiating the sending of this home with students. She probably may have not really understood most of the data herself. Miss Lizzie Bullion actually lived to be over 101—this longevity probably was God’s reward for her serving so many years as an Elementary Principal.
My Encounter with the Metronoscope Reading Machine
It was while here living in the early forties that my oldest sister, Anne, married my brother-in-law who had recently moved from Bluff Dale to Brownwood to work for Educational Laboratories in Brownwood. The company made the first simple machine, which I recall, as being known as a Metronoscope Reading Machine.
These devices were unique in that they allowed the teachers in the classrooms to use stories and pictures, written or drawn on rolls of paper, about 3 feet in width, and which revolved in front of three windows on the machine that raised and lowered in sequence as the rolls turned.
Controls on the equipment allowed the teacher to manipulate the speed at which these rolls turned and allowed the instructor to control the student’s speed of reading these rolls (or stories). It was the first attempt at developing a computer-like device for use in the classroom that I ever knew about. This is the way I remember watching the machines in my very early years of education. These machines were manufactured and distributed by American Optical Company beginning in 1932 until they began to make them in Brownwood.
Aaron Edward Lamb, a Brownwood school teacher and later a Junior High Principal, was in charge of the testing of this equipment for Educational Laboratories and did much of this in his own classrooms. North Ward Elementary School, which I attended, made use of these machines on occasions. This was probably because the school was in the poor area of town and the school district was attempting to bring the lower functioning students up to the level of those on the more affluent South Side of Brownwood.
Many of us thought of the students from the south side of the city as being more financially stable because most had a father who held a job and many were purchasing the homes in which they were living. It took much less money to be considered to be affluent, in the early years of my life, than it does now, as I grow older.
“Seckatary Hawkins” books threw me a lifeline
As a result of our move back to the farm, in 1940 or 1941, I attended the school in the town of May. I had skipped grade three and I am sure that in doing so, I missed out on lots of mathematics and reading skills. I did advance from second grade to fourth, but only because that was the year that Texas went from having eleven grade levels in the system to add the twelfth grade. It was about this time when Texas realized that the students needed more training, because of the needs of the military, and they saw this as one way to carry out this.
In order to treat everyone fairly, they skipped all students, who were in school and who had passed, two grade levels. I suppose you could say students already in school was ‘grandfathering’ all new students beginning in first grade would now be doing twelve years of learning, and not eleven. I am guessing that, if you failed your year of instruction, you would be moved only one grade level so you could keep up your status, rather than seen as going backward.
I do not ever remember sitting in reading groups, but I am sure that the teacher probably used this method. I just can’t ever recall receiving education in that manner. I am sure that, if I had, I would have been a “bluebird” or whatever the lowest group might be called.
I vividly recall that there was a set of books in the fourth-grade class about a boy who was the secretary of a club and these books were similar to the Nancy Drew series. It was called the “Seckatary Hawkins Club” and the members of the club solved problems or crimes, had great adventures or something like that. The books were known to me as the ‘Seckatary Hawkins books’, as that was his name and his role in the club.
I was captivated with the books and I am sure that my great excitement with these books was responsible for throwing me the lifeline I needed and gave me the best reason for learning to read.
I searched for these books for all these years and only found information on Google about the “Fair and Square Club” which is still around. Thank you, Google! I was surprised to learn that Harper Lee of “To Kill A Mockingbird” fame, was also a real fan of these books so I guess I was in good company. The books, written by Robert F. Schulkers between 1918 and 1932 and originally cost a dollar or so.
The originals sell online from $300 to $1,250, not because of the great writing skills that produced them but because there are so many people, like myself, who remember and value them. I have found a couple on eBay for only $28 to $30 and ordered them to see if they were that interesting. They weren’t as much fun or provided as much pleasure now as they did when I so badly needed and read them at nine years of age. I still hold them to be the best books I ever read because they inspired me to learn to read and this gave me the greatest gift that I have ever received.
My first Good teacher in school and how I cured my learning disorder
While we were living there, a realtor from Brownwood came to see my dad to get him to buy this good farm for about $5 per acre. I can’t remember if my dad did not buy the place because the farm did not have the mineral rights on it or if dad did not have the $5 per acre for the purchase? Regardless, it would have been a great investment and something Dad could have enjoyed working and leaving to his family.
Even my mother liked the place as it was close to a Baptist Church where she could attend Sunday services. There were very few people who attended the Church but I remember that there were three deacons who controlled everything about the business of the Church.
I remember that when they conducted church business, it would go something like this. ‘Well, Doc, what do you think we ought to do about this?’ ‘‘I don’t know, Tommy, what do you think?’’ That was the way business was always conducted. I think that this greatly influenced my older brother, Norvel, as he didn’t like the way the Church was run. Norvel probably went into the ministry because he realized how some people could abuse the church’s lack of democratic methodology. I went into education because of how I saw the need for improvement in educational pedagogy or the nurturing for godforsaken and estranged pupils, such as myself.
Moving back to the farm meant that we had to ride a bus from our house which was near Rising Star about eight miles back to May as we lived just on the northern edge of Brown County. It was while living here that I finished the Junior High grades in May, but it was not until Ninth grade that I had my first really good teacher that I remember.
Her name was Mrs. Baker and she was the wife of the Superintendent at May Schools bewteen1945—46. I remember when she first walked into the classroom and, for the first time in my life, I was fully aware of everything which was happening. As she walked in, it seemed that the portals of Heaven opened and cherubic Angels were sitting on her shoulders and blissful and celestial music began to play and all was right with the world.
As I have had the time to ponder this, I think that I might have just been cured of my attention deficit disorder or I was having the religious experience I had expected to find when I was saved at the Belle Plain Church Vacation Bible School.
I enjoyed my ninth grade seasoning, even though it was the year that my music teacher told me that some people could add to music class by singing and others by shutting up. She had to move me to a different part of the room for me to understand that it was I whom she was expecting to get the hint. Why would anyone expect me to understand this? I had earlier musical experience from having played ‘sticks’ in the rhythm band at North Elementary School while in first grade.
Next, you can check out Rabble Rousing:
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Places where I have been
https://www.welchrarebits.us/interesting-homes-ive-visited/places-where-i-have-been/
Interesting homes I’ve visited
Rutabaga and other roots