by Jerry Blackerby
Times have changed. Today, babies are born in a hospital, grow up in an air-conditioned/heated house, and stay in the same area throughout their growing-up years. Many stay in the same school system from kindergarten through high school graduation. Babies born in the 1930s were seldom born in a hospital; most were born at home. Some people moved frequently looking for work, resulting in several school changes. My wife’s family and my family are examples of those differences from then until now.
My wife was born in a tent in 1937, not even a house. Her father and mother were working on her grandparents farm, but there was no room for them in the small house the grandparents lived in. Instead, they had a tent set up a few yards from the house. The first several months of my wife’s life were spent in that tent until her father went to work in Texas for a company building roads.
When the road building job slowed down, they returned to Oklahoma, sharecropping. My wife’s father sharecropped for different landowners in Oklahoma until 1956, which caused them to move every few years. The landowner usually provided a house for them to live in. Most of the houses were just shells of a house; usually without electricity. When I met her in 1955, they lived in a three-room frame house and had only had electricity for about a year. My father-in-law wired the house for electricity in 1954 when REA brought electricity to that area of rural Oklahoma. He wired one drop light fixture in the center of each room with the old yellow/black electrical wire. He ran one electric line from the light fixture in the kitchen across the ceiling and down the wall for an outlet for a refrigerator. He did another one in the living room for a radio power outlet.
There was no indoor plumbing; they had an outhouse in the backyard. Their cook stove was butane. Their washing machine was an old gasoline Maytag machine with a ringer. My father-in-law replaced the gasoline engine with an electric motor in 1954 after they had electricity and the gasoline engine quit. They drew water from a well and heated it on the cook stove for laundry or bathing. During the summer, they set the tub of water outside to heat in the sun. Heat during the winter was from a pot-belly stove in the middle of the living room. Air conditioning in the summer was open windows and doors.
Today, almost everyone has at least a high school education. My father-in-law never attended school because his father kept him and his brother home to work the farm. He hid them when the census taker came around. My father-in-law could not read or write, but was a “smart” man. When someone helped pick cotton for him, they could tell him how many pounds they had picked and he would count out their pay, to the penny. He could figure practical math problems quicker than I could. My mother-in-law only attended a few years of grade school and could read and write a little. They made sure their children received a public school education, even though they moved frequently.
Today, most people take their car to a garage for repair. My uneducated father-in-law was the ultimate “shade-tree mechanic.” He could repair anything and taught me a lot about repairing my own car. He always repaired his own car from the first Model T he owned until the last car he owned. Why pay someone else to fix what he could fix himself? His oldest son helped until he left home. My wife helped after that until we married. He taught me enough that I could help after my wife and I married. The first automatic transmission car he owned was a 1949 Ford in 1957. When the transmission quit, he took it apart in the yard until he found the broken or worn out parts. He said the transmission was very much like a Model T transmission. He took the bad parts to the local Ford dealer, bought new parts, and replaced them in the transmission. The transmission worked when he reinstalled it in the car.
Today, work ethics are very different compared to the 1950s. I helped my in-laws prepare their 1955 income taxes during the spring of 1956. Their share of the crop for 1955 was nearly $850. That is only $850 for the entire year. My job paid annually over three times that much. Of course, they had a house to live in, two milk cows, some chickens, and a garden.
The U.S. Government began a “soil bank” program in 1956. This new program paid farmers to not farm some of their acreage. The landowner told my father-in-law that he had put the land my father-in-law was farming into the soil bank. He said that my father-in-law’s share of the money from the soil bank would be $1,500, which would be nearly twice what he made the year before. They could still live in the house they were in. My father-in-law thought about it for a moment or so and said to the landowner, “But, what will I do?” He had a work ethic that meant he had to be working. He did not want a hand out.
The landowner told him that he could work by the hour on other acreage and continue to live rent free where they were. The landowner would pay my father-in-law 50 cents per hour, which meant that he would earn about as much during the spring to fall working season as he had made the preceding year while sharecropping, in addition to the soil bank money. In fact, the land they had sharecropped did flood in the late spring of 1956, which would have really impacted any crop they planted.
My in-laws knew they were not rich, but never considered themselves poor. They never considered asking for a hand out; they worked for everything. When my father-in-law passed away, there was a standing-room-only crowd at his funeral. The local Congressman, also a farmer, was present at the funeral. My father-in-law was well respected as a working farmer and as a person, regardless of the fact that he had no formal education.
My wife’s family did not move quite as much as my family did. My father left the farm when I was two after he had a heart attack and was told he would not live to see 30. Actually he lived to be almost 83 before dying of congestive heart failure, but he moved frequently trying to find work while I was still home.
I grew up in the late 1930s and 40s. From the time I was born in 1934 until I graduated from high school and left home for the Navy in 1951, we lived in 23 different houses. We actually moved 26 times, but sometimes we moved into a house where we had previously lived. Dad was always trying to find a job that would support the family and sometimes worked at more than one job. I attended 13 different schools, but changed schools 18 times during 11 years. The year after I started to school, Texas changed to a 12-year system. I attended three schools in the first grade, but was at two of the schools twice because of moves. I attended three schools my Senior year.
Copyright © Jerry Blackerby 2006