Ben Love: My Life in Texas Commerce

Chapter 1. Growing Up in Paris

Chapter 1 growing up in paris I was born in 1924 in Vernon, Texas, a growing center of trade and commerce some two hundred miles northwest of Dallas. The 1920s were a time of optimism as an economic boom opened opportunities for more and more Americans. During my early childhood, my family seemed destined to lead a comfortable middle-class life. I do not remember the details about our life in Vernon or even about the promise of the 1920s, but I do remember how that promise evaporated with the Crash. I do remember how my mother and dad and I spent the decade of the Great Depression working hard to survive on my grandfather’s small farm outside of Paris, Texas, and I do remember seeing my dad devastated by economic forces beyond his control. Those experiences have stayed with me my entire life, as did the values I learned while growing up poor during those hard times. Both sides of my family had roots in the South; both had moved to Texas in search of opportunities. What I know about my father’s father comes from family stories, a few old photographs and newspaper clippings, and his detailed Civil War military records that an Alabama attorney living in Washington , D.C., secured from the National Archives and mailed to me in 1992. I read my grandfather’s military records at a time when I was most interested in understanding the impact of my military service in World War II on my own life. The parallels between our experiences some eighty years apart in two of the nation’s major conflicts were of tremendous interest to me. My paternal grandfather, Henry Benton Love, was born in 1839 and grew up near the small Alabama town of Athens on the outskirts of the larger city of Huntsville, a trading center just south of the Alabama-Tennessee border some one hundred miles west of Chattanooga.1 His family had lived in the area for at least two generations. Unlike southern Alabama, with its large cotton plantations that used thousands of slaves, northern Alabama, where Henry Benton Love was raised, was in the “hill country,” unsuitable for large-scale farming and, therefore, not dependent on slave labor. When the Civil War began, however, my twenty-one-year-old grandfather enlisted as a private in the Fourth Alabama Infantry, which became a part of the Army of Northern Virginia. His four years of service and the defeat of the Confederacy marked a turning point in his life. Henry Benton Love saw heated action as an infantryman in thirty-three of the major battles of the war. His unit first marched to Harper’s Ferry, Virginia , the site of a major Union arsenal. Slightly wounded at the First Battle of Manassas, he went on to fight at Chickamauga and Fredericksburg, where he suffered more serious injuries to his hands, face, and thigh from bombshell explosions. He was wounded a third time at the Battle of Spotsylvania Courthouse and engaged in action close to his grandfather’s farm near Huntsville before taking part in the pivotal battle at Gettysburg, where his unit fought at Round Top. He returned home after the war walking on a crutch. His fate is summarized in a note on the back of one of the few photos I still have of him: “When I got home, everything was burned. My sweetheart was waiting for me. We decided to go to Texas.” In the chaotic aftermath of the Civil War, he and his young wife, Louisa Fielding Love, made their way to northeast Texas, where they acquired a 154-acre farm outside of Hopewell, near the larger city of Paris, Texas, a farming center and the seat of Lamar County located about one hundred miles northeast of Dallas. There he settled down and began a new life. After Louisa died in 1882, my grandfather married Mollie Fooshee of Paris in 1884. He had a total of twelve children from the two marriages. Large families were common among farmers in that day. Children were expected to help with the hard work of growing crops and livestock for food and raising cotton to bring in much-needed cash. My father, Benton Fooshee Love, his father’s tenth child, was born in 1887 and grew up on the farm near Hopewell. His mother died when he was only seven. A local newspaper article (undated, but probably from the late nineteenth century) about the...