That period of time, often referred to as the "thirties", was a hard time. I am glad I grew up in that period of history; I think it was better for me to have learned what was to be learned from the hardship of the thirties, than to have not learned those things.

Thornton was a small town. Everyone knew everyone else. Everyone cared what happened to everyone else. I am glad I grew up there; I wish everyone could grow up in a small town. We are shaped and molded by the times and places in which we spend our early years, and our outlook on life itself is formed by our association with times, places, and people. I had the best of all of these in my teen years, and before.

After the Wall Street Market disaster of October 1929, men were without jobs, women and children hungry, families without homes. Small towns like Thornton were especially hard put for its citizens to make a living. Farming was the backbone of Thornton, and "king cotton" ruled. Farmers depended on cotton for their lively-hood. The price of cotton hit rock bottom about 1931, 3 cents a pound. That meant that a bale of cotton that weighed 500 pounds, would bring $15.00 at the cotton yard, and if a farmer made a bale of cotton to every three acres of land he plowed, he earned $5.00 an acre for his labors, before he paid for the seed.

Thornton had 3 gins, a cotton seed mill, a cotton yard, and a railroad loading dock; all of them closed. Their closing put just about everyone in town out of work. The farmers could not afford to hire anyone to help them make and gather their crops, so that put still more people out of work. It could be described as a domino effect. About the only men in town with jobs were the men who worked for the railroad or one of the businesses that managed to survive the depression.

In 1933, when I was 8 years old, Hugh Nichols gave me a "Brown Mule Chewing Tobacco" box, with a foot rest carved out of a piece of wood and shaped so that a man's shoe would rest on it while someone shined it. The box was convenient for carrying shoe polish, a shoe brush, and a shoe shine rag. I became self employed; I was in business.

I spent Saturdays on the streets of Thornton shouting, "Shoe shine, a nickel, get your shoes shined for a nickel". The first pair I shined belonged to Mr. Clyde Black, who owned one of the two drug stores in town. I remember him telling me that if I could get the rag to "pop" he would give me a dime instead of a nickel. - I did, he did.

I shined many pairs of shoes after that, and I cannot honestly remember, anyone giving me a nickel. Most of the time I got a dime, but sometimes I would get a quarter. I wasn't all that good at shining shoes. The men, whose shoes I shined, knew that the money went to help pay the grocery bill and buy clothes at my mother's house. Everyone in Thornton cared about what happened to everyone else.

Something happened one Saturday that I would never forget. I still wake up in the middle of the night and think about that event. I saw a family feud come to an end with the death of two men. It is very disturbing to see one man kill another. We see men killed every day on TV, but that is not the way it really is. In real life they don't come back for a curtain call. You never see them alive again.

I was shining a man's shoes when, suddenly, he jerked his shoe from under my shoeshine rag and started running across the street. I looked up, and the bench, on which four or five men had been sitting only moments before, was empty. I looked to my right and Mr. Meadows, a farmer from near Big Hill, who was the husband of a good friend of my mother, was standing with a six shooter in his hand. He said, "Get out of the way, Kimbell". After I took a quick glance to my left, and say Mr. Foster, who I knew also, standing with a pistol in his hand, I grabbed my shoe shine box and got out of the way.

I had barely gotten to the other side of the street when the two men began shooting at each other. They were both excellent shots and as a bullet would strike one, and knock him down, the other would wait for him to get up and return a shot, before shooting again. Finally, Mr. Foster didn't get up and Mr. Meadows turned and staggered half a block to the doctor's office, where he fell through the open door, dead.

Mother and I saw Mr. Meadows' shirt, at Mrs. Meadows' house, later and it had nine bullet holes in it. I don't remember, and I doubt if anyone in Thornton can remember, what the feud was about. As far as I know, that was the end of the feud. The Meadows and Foster families in Thornton are good friends now.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected President of the United States in 1933. I well remember the night, after the election, when we heard, on Uncle Will Childress' radio, he had beaten Alf Landon. He had promised prosperity; a job for every man, no more hunger, and a home for everyone. He brought us prosperity, but it took a war to do it, and that was not to come for ten more years.

The "New Deal", that President Roosevelt introduced to the Congress, and they quickly approved, brought about changes in America that we still see the effects of today. He introduced broad social changes, such as Social Security, farm price support, and farm and business controls.

The federal government through programs such as, the National Recovery Act (NRA), Public Works Administration (PWA), Works Progress Administration (WPA), and Citizens Conservation Corps (CCC) created many jobs. However, along with the new programs, which created new jobs, came new federal government controls.

NRA called for the opening and closing of stores and businesses at specified hours, and certain days. Cattle were bought by the federal government from farmers and shot and buried, so that the supply of beef would be decreased, and the capitalistic theory of "supply and demand", would drive the price of beef up, and the farmer would get a better price for the cattle he raised. The same theory was applied to the growing of cotton and farmers were paid to plow up cotton they had planted, leaving only as much cotton acreage as the government would allow.

PWA, WPA, and CCC gave jobs to men, and women, building parks, lakes, highways, government buildings, restoring historical landmarks such as old forts, and installing water and sewer systems in small towns such as Thornton. Sewing rooms and cannery were opened, so that clothes could be made and food preserved, and passed out to the needy.

Just about everyone drew some benefit from those programs, and slowly, the country and the world began to recover from the "Great Depression". There were still people out of work, and some were still hungry and homeless, but there was a bond of love and care among the American people that has never been equaled, before or since. There was hope throughout the land.

Uncle Will Childress got a job, with the NRA, measuring cotton acreage and telling farmers how much cotton they were to plow up and how much they could grow. It was not a job that would bring him a lot of popularity, because lots of farmers opposed the program and some even threatened him with bodily harm when he went to measure their crops. It was a job; it had to be done.

It was not until 1936 that Mother was able to get a job at a government sewing room, although she had worked, on a part time basis, at the cannery in Thornton. When she worked at the cannery, she was paid in canned goods, but when she went to work in the sewing room she was paid $24.00 a month for 40 hours a week.

From 1933, when I started shining shoes, until Mother went to work at the sewing room, we had gotten by on what I earned and what we got from the government truck that came once a month. The truck would come to town, usually on a Saturday, and people would stand in line to be handed out canned goods, flour, meal, potatoes, and non-perishable foods, along with clothing. I can remember that all the shirts and pants they gave away were blue.

Mother did some quilting for some of the ladies in town, who could afford to have such things done. She also sold "Christy Products" from door to door. Christy was like Avon Products are today, and I can remember loading my little red wagon, that Daddy had given me, with the good smelling things she had sold, and delivering them all over town.

About the time Mother went to work at the sewing room, I got a job, as a paperboy, for the Waco Times Herald. My route was 13 miles long, and I would pick up my papers at the train depot, every day after school was out at 3 o'clock. It would take me about 4 hours to deliver the papers and get back home, and then there were chores to do after supper, such as feeding the chickens, and slopping the hogs, and bringing in fire wood.

The local newspaper editor gave me a job, on Saturdays, sweeping and cleaning up the newspaper office, and he let me take the type letters out of the previous week's paper press and put them away into their proper compartments at the "printer's devil" table. He even let me set type, from time to time, for the next week's paper. That is how I became a janitor and printer's devil.

When school was out for the summer, I worked on the farm for Uncle Will, Uncle Jim, and Hugh, picking cotton. I would stay with Una and Hugh, and W.H. and I would get to play together when we didn't have to work, like on rainy days. We usually played "cops and robbers" or "cowboys and indians". There were some deep ditches in the pasture next to Uncle Will's house that was caused by erosion, and we could hide in them and dig caves in the walls. We would get to ride Uncle Will's mules sometimes and we would also spend a lot of time watching him work in his blacksmith shop making parts for the farm machinery or the old windmill. We would even get to climb up on the old windmill sometimes; you could see for miles from the platform on top.

One summer Uncle Bruce Jordan, my mother's brother took me to Odem, Texas, near Corpus Christi, with him to pick cotton. He would go down there every year and follow the cotton harvest north and west until the cotton-picking season was over. I remember the cotton stalks being taller than my head and I could not reach some of the boles of cotton in the top of them. He would have to pick those for me. I could pick 150 pounds of cotton a day there and could make 75 cents. Cotton picking paid 50 cents per hundred pounds. We wore kneepads made from old automobile tires and shoelaces, and pulled long white sacks made of burlap to put the cotton in. When we got the sack full, we would take it to the cotton wagon and the farmer would weigh it and put down the weight in a little black book. Most of the time my sack would be too heavy for me to carry so I would drag it to the wagon and the farmer would have to lift it onto the scales. On Saturday, he would add up how many pounds of cotton each of us had picked and pay us.

We did not have a house to stay in, so we would pitch tents and sleep on the ground and cover up with quilts. We would cook on a campfire. We washed our clothes in the stock pond and went swimming to get a bath. We called it "skinny dipping".

I did not get to stay with Uncle Bruce until the cotton picking was over, because I came down with whooping cough and he had to put me on the train back to Thornton. I'll bet I passed the whooping cough to half the people in Texas while I was riding the train back home.

After I got over the whooping cough that summer, I went to work for Coleman Kennedy, sacking groceries. Grocery sacking in those days wasn't like grocery sacking is today. There were no super markets or checkout lines. Ladies would call the grocery store and give the grocer a list of what they wanted or else they would bring the list to him and the grocery sacker would go all over the store and get the items off the shelves and put them in a sack for her. Most of the time we would carry the groceries to their home and help them put them up in the pantry. Coleman paid me a dollar a day.

When school started again that fall, I bought the paper route back from the Pringle brothers, for $5.00. It took a while to build the route back up because they had let it run down by not taking good care of the customers.

December 19, 1936 is a day I will remember all my life. I went to the depot that day to get my papers and start my route and Mr. Mills, the railroad agent, told me I had a crate that had arrived that day. He said he thought it was a bicycle and if it were he would help me put it together. Sure enough it was, and we put it together, and I learned to ride it that evening while I was throwing my paper route. I fell down several times but I threw my papers and got home in two hours instead of the usual four hours it took when I had to walk.

It was a Christmas gift from my sister, Loraine. It wasn't supposed to be delivered until Christmas Eve, but Mr. Mills failed to see the note on the waybill. Loraine always gave me nice gifts. She always seemed to know what I needed and wanted. That was the only bicycle I ever owned.

Links to other sites on the Web

Back to Jimmy's Home Page
Next Page
Back One Page

© 1997

This page hosted by Get your own Free Home Page