Farmersville Tales

Introduction

I grew up in Farmersville.  This series of essays, largely memories and impressions of my youth, span, roughly, the years 1950 to 1965 a period during which I, and Farmersville (finally incorporated in 1960) came of age.

These are my stories.  And the stories of a special people.  My people.  Many were migrants who moved west during and immediately after The Great Depression. This is about them and their children as much as it is about me.  Many boys and girls from those years experienced what I did. They share the memories, the history, of how our families got to Farmersville, what it was like growing up there and what became of our families.

Most of our families, were, at times mired in abject poverty, devoid of advantages, imbued with a singular memory deep in their soul of what it was like to be forced off the land during The Depression. They had memories of what it was like to have nothing, what it was like to be hungry, to have hungry children. And one who experiences that deep empty feeling of hunger never forgets.  Many of us had brothers or sisters, aunts, uncles and other relatives or friends who didn’t survive the deprivation of those times.  Some succumbed to disease curable but for the want of money, some were crippled or killed in accidents easily preventable but for want of safety standards, some were mothers and babies who died in childbirth, who may have survived but for want of sanitation and access to medical care. There is the memory of those folks of ours laid to rest in Arkansas or Oklahoma or Texas, in unmarked graves or marked with but a single rock or pile of rocks.  My own brother died in Arkansas because my Father didn’t have the dollar to pay for someone’s gas to get him to a hospital. Many of us had Fathers who could talk about leaving home as teenagers to hop the freights looking for a job, any job, for a way of making a living. And they were young, thirteen, fourteen, in some instances, leaving home facing the danger of bumming rides from strangers, climbing into empty boxcars, going they knew not where.  

Although there were unhappy endings for a few, there was also happier times and I will relate many of those as these essays develop.  And there is a pride our people have that many of us, the children of the migrants, went on to succeed in life as judged by most measures.  Just in my immediate circle of childhood friends, we had individuals who in adult life became successful businessmen in the corporate world, medical professionals, college professors at places like UC Berkeley, skilled tradesmen and, yes, even a District Attorney.  

And I will say this from the beginning, it was earned.  Nothing was given.  It was earned by working hard, overcoming obstacles, being disciplined, being smart and using our brains.  There were no Headstart programs, no grants in aide, no afterschool programs, no poverty programs, no lunch programs.  At school you ate, if you ate, what your mother packed in a paper sack or sometimes the cafeteria food if there were an extra couple of dimes she could put in your hand as you left of a morning.  You may have been dressed in blue jeans with patches on the knees and hand me down shirts, but you were clean.   And if you met with difficulties, if someone picked on you, because they didn’t like your looks or where you came from you dealt with it, sometimes with your fists, other times with your brain. There were no bureaucrats to whine to and no lawyers to file a lawsuit.  It was up to you.  If given offense, you could either swallow it or do something about it.  Yourself.  You were either strong and brave or weak and cowardly, but there was no help for unfairness.

We all, both the migrants and the children of migrants, at one time or another, worked in the fields.  We picked cotton, fruit, peaches.   We pruned vines and hoed and dug ditches and tilled dirt by hand for planting. We harvested crops in the heat and cold and fog. 

Our families were mostly from the Southwest.  Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, and Kansas with a representation from Tennessee and Mississippi.  You heard names like Staley, Johnson, Smith, Petty, Kerns.

We lived in ramshackle houses, sometimes tent houses, with wood sides and canvas tops, and with no running water.  There was no air conditioning, no central heating. We had shelter, but not much else.  We had outhouses and chicken coops down at the back of the lot and bathed in old tubs with water from a well.  We washed clothes in those same tubs and got the dirt out with scrub boards and hung them up to dry on a clothesline. The home I first knew was on Shasta Street not far from Snowden school. We first lived in a tent house and then my father and uncles moved a wood house onto the lot.  It was set on blocks.  My brother and I continued to live in the tent house for a time while my sister and parents moved into the house.

My generation, growing up in Farmersville during those years, lived through a transition from a time of poverty and want into something that was approaching the middle class, with indoor plumbing, electricity for TVs and radios and washing machines.  And cars that could get you to a job, the store, to school.  

And we got something else from those years.  A lived personal history.  Not the speculations of some elite history professor hid away in an ivory tower drinking tea and making up the parts he didn’t know, but a lived history.  A history that lives in the stories and tales from those times.  

These essays are some of mine.

The Pictures accompanying this post show our old house on blocks, the well where we drew our water (along with the tub for baths and washing clothes) and to the side of the picture of my brother and me, the old tent house.  And the handsome boy with the trademark scowl is none other than your author.  

For other writings by Phil Cline, you are invited to visit philcline.com