Ben Love: My Life in Texas Commerce

Chapter 12 The Lessons Of A Life

Chapter 12 the lessons of a life More than sixty years after leaving Paris, Texas, for college, I returned there to visit the graves of my parents at the Evergreen Cemetery and my grandparents’ graves at the Hopewell Cemetery and to take a look at the farmhouse and the town. The house, so bright and large in the eyes of a child, seemed shrunken in size by my lifetime of experiences. As I toured the area that had marked the boundaries of most of my life during the Great Depression, I could not help but reflect that my values and attitudes had been formed by those years. Much of who I am and what I became reflected the world of that 150-acre farm near Paris, Texas, in the 1930s. ★ lessons from the farm The demands of the Great Depression shaped the generation that grew up in the 1930s, my generation. Economic security became our dominant concern, but we also came away with eternal empathy for those less fortunate. We understood at a gut level that life could be very hard and that personal sacrifices and the help of others were needed to survive. Nothing was guaranteed . Hard work was a daily fact of life but no guarantee of success. These values proved useful during the extreme demands of World War II and shaped the behavior of most of the Great Depression generation for the rest of our lives. With few exceptions, we “ran scared.” We also came out of these years with a healthy respect for our nation and our democratic system. We had held together as a nation through its greatest economic challenge. We had used democratic institutions to begin to address common problems. The electricity brought to our farm in the late 1930s by the Roosevelt Rural Electrification Administration, for example, fundamentally altered our living conditions and opened many economic and educational horizons. Closer to home, I saw firsthand that one woman’s passion and activism could establish a new school bus route that enabled me, and others, to attend high school. Even in the hardest of times, the American nation still found ways to offer upward mobility to those with a true work ethic, ambition, and promise. A poor farm boy named Benton Love could find a path to college even as his parents continued to struggle to make a go of it on a oncedeserted family farm in Hopewell, Texas. My own journey turned sharply upward when I hitchhiked from home to attend Trinity University on a debate scholarship, duly supplemented by an afternoon sales job at the Cheeves Brothers department store in downtown Waxahachie. Twists and turns in the road later took me far from the farm, to Austin, England, and Houston, but throughout my journey, I carried with me much that I had learned in my years on the farm and in Paris. Like many others who grew up in the Great Depression, I have continued to embrace many of the lessons I learned in that era. Indeed, when Margaret and I had our own family after World War II, I formed a nightly habit of telling the children—first Jeff, then Jan, then Julie—bedtime stories about my life on the farm. Each story began with “once upon a time” and ended with the implied moral lesson about the value of work, education, determination , and family or the importance of keeping one’s commitments. I told the stories in part to try to help my children place in perspective the life of relative prosperity they enjoyed in postwar Houston. But I also told them to remind myself of where I was from and who I was. Years later, at the urging of my children, I repeated the stories to my grandchildren, whose daily reality was far removed from the world I had experienced as a child. One evening, after overhearing me tell one of the stories to my granddaughter, my daughter Jan (affectionately called “The Little General” . . . and not without some justification) convinced me to spend a contemplative retreat at my Galveston beach house and write down these stories for future generations. I must admit the project also gave me pleasure and an overwhelming sense of gratitude to my parents. The stories stress the importance of a strong work ethic. I learned about hard work first from the daily example of my parents going about the repetitive , physically demanding, stressful drudgery required to keep food on the...