My brother, Buster (15); me (6); and my brother, John Earl (11) -- circa 1930

I was born on a farm in Delta County, Texas, southwest of the small town of Klondike, about fifteen miles from where my husband, Basil was born.

I was the seventh child of Charles E. and Inez Voorhees Stunkard. All were living except for Doris, a sister two years older than me, who died at birth. I had three brothers, Howard, Buster (Travis Lamar), and John Earl, and two sisters, Velma and Eddrie.

I was the baby of the family. John, who was five years older than me, was nearest my age. Howard, the oldest, was fifteen years older.

In addition to my parents and siblings, Uncle John Voorhees, my mother's brother, lived with us. He had been gassed in World War I, and was never very healthy. He kept Baby Ruth candy bars in his suitcase for me, to dry my tears in case I got hurt or something.

I was happy as a child. Being the youngest gave me a lot of clout! *grin*

My earliest memory is an event when I was about two years old. Our house was built on a terrace, two or three feet high. Daddy had an old buggy and the older kids would pull it to the top of the terrace. All the kids would get on and ride it to the bottom.

This particular day, my sister, Velma, was holding me when the buggy went down. She dropped me, and the buggy with all five kids in it rolled over me. What I remember is my mother holding me while Uncle John pumped cold water from the well and poured it over my face. I guess I was out cold.

I often wondered what happened to that old buggy because it wasn't around when I got older. Just a couple of years ago my sister, Eddrie, told me that Daddy had taken an axe and chopped it to pieces after they ran over me.

When I was about four, Daddy bought a hand-cranked portable victrola and some records. One was called "All Around the Water Tank," by Jimmy Rogers. I learned that one "by heart." Another was "The Preacher and the Bear," which I also learned, at least most of it.

We had most of Jimmy Rogers' records. He died in the early '30's, at the age of 33, of tuberculosis, I think. He was the forerunner of the Country and Western singers who came after him.

Daddy was a builder until arthritis so disabled him that he couldn't do it any more. He was building a new barn on our farm, with my brothers' help and, as always, I dogged his footsteps. He told me if I didn't stay out of his way, he was going to spank me. I asked, "Daddy, what's a spanking?" He picked up a little board and showed me, gently. I was five.

When I was six, the family, except for Mama and Uncle John, planned to attend the Texas State Fair in Dallas. Of course, I was too young for such a tiring trip, but they didn't tell me that. I got up when all the rest did, and they told me to go back to sleep and they would awaken me when it was time to go. But when I woke up, they were long gone, and I cried my eyes out. Uncle John took me on his lap and fed me Baby Ruths to shut me up. I dearly loved my Uncle John.

(I was seventeen before I managed to finally go to the State Fair.)

In 1930, when I was six, Daddy bought a Model A Ford. He wanted to learn to drive it, and Buster (aged 15) was going to teach him. They got in the car with Daddy at the wheel and got started. Somehow or other, Daddy missed the road completely and mowed down our garden fence before Buster could stop the car. (Even I didn't do that badly when learning to drive. I just hit a bridge!)

Daddy did learn to drive, though, in time to haul us to school at Klondike when I started.

We were doing well on the farm in those days. We had everything we needed, and perhaps more. Most farmers were pretty much self-sufficient during the Depression. We raised most of our food and had crops to sell. But, then the hammer fell.

Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected President and everything changed.

We had seven or eight cows whose milk was for our own use. We had plenty to drink, plus plenty to make butter and to feed to the hogs. However, in order to raise the price of milk, Roosevelt's "farm program" sent men out to family farms like ours, where they painted a green "X" on the forehead of all the cows except one. The marked ones were shot and dragged off to be burried. We were not even permitted to use the meat! We were left with one cow for a family of nine!

A better way to raise milk prices would have been to thin the herds of dairy farmers (although very few could afford the prices already charged for milk). Family farmers were not buying milk anyway, nor would they. It was too inconvenient to hitch the mules to the wagon and go five miles to town to get it. It would spoil by the time they got home with it.

They could at least have left two so we would have one to milk while the other was dry, but they didn't. I never tasted whole milk again until I was grown because, in order to have butter, all the cream had to be skimmed from the milk. We called what was left "Blue John," and I can't stand skim milk to this day.

The Depression hit people in the cities pretty hard, with no jobs and no place to grow their own food, they were between "a rock and a hard place". People who lived in small towns and on small farms, however, didn't feel the brunt of the Depression until Roosevelt was elected and started fooling with their means of supporting themselves.

Even people in small towns like Cooper had room for a garden and could raise and can enough food to keep them going. People on farms also had room for a fruit orchard, cows to meet their milk and butter needs, and hogs, male calves, and chickens to meet their meat needs.

The Roosevelt Agriculture Department's takeover of the farms and what they could produce put us all in the same boat with city- dwellers, not enough food to keep us going. There is where today's welfare economy really started.

Roosevelt also bought into the economics preached by John Maynard Keynes, known as "deficit spending". Even Keynes recanted his theory and admitted it would never work. He tried to get Roosevelt to drop its use in our country, but Roosevelt was sold on it, and we are paying for it to this day.

People were self-sufficient before FDR. Families took care of their own, not expecting the government to take over that responsibility for them. Today, many elderly are housed in "rest" homes, and some are completely abandoned by their families, family members not even caring enough to visit.

All these things go back to the beginnings of a "Big Brother" big government. We probably will never get our sense of being able to take care of ourselves back again.

The agriculture program also proclaimed that a good amount of cotton (ready to harvest) be plowed under. Daddy had a few choice words to say about that, adding that he would PICK his cotton before it was plowed under. And he did. That is when Daddy, a life-long Democrat, became a Republican.

Another foolish thing they did was to require farmers to plant two rows of peas between two rows of cotton or corn, but you couldn't eat the peas. You would get a "Pea Check" for them. Again, Daddy could not see plowing under good food, the peas were picked first, then the plants plowed under.

The railroad ran near our house on the farm, and I remember homeless men (truly homeless, due to the Depression) stopping and asking for something to eat. Mama always fixed a plate for them and they would sit on the back steps to eat it.

I would plop down beside them and talk their ears off while they were eating. Mama didn't have to worry about my doing that -- people were good and you could trust them in those days.

I guess the men liked to have a child around for a bit, it reminded them of their own home and family. After they finished eating, they always asked what chores they could do in return for the food, they did not want or expect a handout. Some of these men were very well educated but, because of the Depression, could not find even menial jobs.

We left the farm in late 1933, and moved to Klondike. Daddy and the boys still farmed the land, but my sister, Velma, and her husband lived in the house. And the Depression wore on.

Very few women worked outside the home before or during the Depression. Most of them got married, had children, and took care of the home while their husbands worked. If they had, the statistics of the unemployed would have been much higher than they were. Even without women working outside the home, the unemployment rate was 33% (as best I can recall) until World War II brought jobs in the ship-building, aeronautical, and munitions fields.

Many people believe FDR "solved" the Great Depression. He did not. World War II solved the Depression. What a lousy way to solve anything! The people in our part of Texas were in a lot worse shape around 1938-1940 than they had ever been before. Everything was cheap all right, you just didn't have the pennies to buy it!

I remember the hot lunches at school were 12 cents per meal. After I found a worm in my peas one day, I wasn't too crazy about having a hot lunch at school any more. The Roosevelt years were the worst years of my life.

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