GROWING UP IN WEST TEXAS DURING WORLD WAR II

Some people have asked what it was like growing up in the country in West Texas back in the good ol’ days. I also wanted to write these things down for the kids and grandkids. So, I thought I would start posting my memories.

I was in elementary school in Kent County, TX, during World War II. To say we were poor would be an understatement.  As the old saying goes, you could have thrown a cat through the cracks in the walls of our home. No one had money to buy much of anything. We grew most of what we ate. We canned vegetables and fruit and butchered animals. We wore clothing until they almost fell off. Everything was handed down in the family, and then from family to family within the community. We bought only necessities. Merchandise was rationed. We had government issued ration stamps that gave us permission to buy a limited amount of various products, including some foods, gasoline, tires, and so forth. Everything went to the war effort. With so many men gone to war, the economy was rough in the rural areas and paying jobs were scarce. The jobs were in the cities.

Dad had lost his leg to osteomyelitis, caused by a high-jumping accident during high school when his pole broke and he fell on the pole bruising and injuring the bone just below the knee. A very treatable injury today, but back then, amputation was the only way to fight the resulting infection. Consequently, he wasn’t able to go to war. He was elected as county treasurer, which left us better off than some in our community during the war. But nobody had much money.

There was no electricity in Kent County because the Rural Electrification Administration (REA), a government funded program to bring electricity to rural areas, had yet to put up poles in our area. Basic living for us hadn’t changed much since the 1800s.

Well water was scarce, there was no drilling equipment at that time and wells were hand dug, so we had only cistern water. Water was put in the cistern using guttering around the house to catch rainwater. During August when it was so hot and dry, I drew buckets of water from the cistern and poured it through cheesecloth to strain out the wiggle-tails and trash. Then the water went into the house for cooking and drinking. We all bathed in a #2 washtub using the same water and then it was carried out to put on the garden.

As we had no indoor plumbing, we had an outhouse. Dad had a battery-powered radio with a wire strung from the top of the house to the top of the outhouse as an antenna to listen to the war reports at night. We used coal-oil lamps for lights and Mom cooked on a kerosene stove. That was also the only heat in the house.

In winter, Mom would put my twin brother and me to bed and cover us with so many patchwork quilts that we were trapped there until morning, as we couldn’t get up or turn over because of the weight.

We went to a two-room schoolhouse. Of course, there was no water or electricity. Grades 1-7 were in one room and the upper grades in the other room. There was a big round cast iron coal or wood burning stove in the middle of the room for heat. Lighting came from windows on three sides of our room. 

There were two outhouses, one for girls and one for boys. There was no playground equipment. The younger girls played hopscotch or jacks. The older boys went to the corral to mess with the horses. The younger boys played mumbley-peg, tops, or ante-over. We had an old rubber ball and the boys divided into two equal groups and went to different sides of the building. The ball would be thrown over the top of the school and the boy on the other side who caught it would run around the building and try to hit a boy. If he was hit, he was out of the game. That went on until there was only one left, the winner.

There were no buses; kids came in riding in a buggy or wagon. But most rode horseback. My brother and I rode an old gray mule. Mom was a schoolteacher. She taught the older kids and was paid in scrip, as the school had no money. The grocery store finally stopped taking it for payment for food, as the grocer couldn’t exchange the scrip for money. I still have some of it.

We took our lunch in a sack along with a jug of water. The boy who got the most gold stars during the day for being good, got to take out the ashes from the stove and bring in a bucket of coal as long as the coal lasted. After that, parents or boys brought stumps in to burn. The best girl got to take the erasers out and dust them on the porch. What a reward, but it worked.

One afternoon, we heard screaming in the room for the older kids. We all ran to see what had happened. Mom had opened a map that was in a roll and a rattler fell out the end. He’d chosen that place to spend the winter. The boys killed it with a rock they used to hold the door open on warm days.

Yeah, this was the good ol’ days.