Bootlegger's Other Daughter

Leaving East Texas

L eaving East T exas – during the war, many of our neighbors had moved their families from farms to cities where there was work to support the war effort . Having already established themselves in more populated areas during the war, they stayed on afterward and found other work there. Those who had not moved away, like my family, found themselves in much the same situation they had been in before the war—stuck on a hardscrabble farm. Although Daddy had made more money working at common labor on defense jobs during the war than he had ever made before, he still had no spare money to put aside for his children’s education. In today’s world, going to college seems a natural next step. Most young people simply take for granted that going to college is the next thing they are supposed to do, especially since nearby community colleges make it affordable, and cars make it accessible. In our small East Texas community, going away to school was still a bit of a rarity in 1948, but Mama had set a precedent for my sister and me. She had gone from elementary school to what she referred to as “subcollege” in the early years of the 1920s. With a loan from the same uncle who had helped Mama go away to school and the promise of a part-time job in the library, my sister had gone away to East Texas State Teachers College after her graduation from high school in 1942. In 1948, during the last months of my senior year in high school, I began to think about the options open to me after graduation. If scholarships, grants, and federal loans were available in those days, I knew nothing of them. I knew that some scholarships were available to the highest-ranking students in the class and that some of the town service organizations granted a few to certain students, but those were unavailable to me. I could work in town (if I could find a job and if I could find transportation to and from that job), or I could, perhaps ,borrowmoneyfromthesameunclewhohadhelpedmymother and sister go to teachers’ college, but I knew for certain, then, that I did not want to be a teacher. I could go to nursing school, I told Mama, but she wondered aloud how I could possibly consider that since I could not stand the sight of blood and cringed at the thought of emptying a slop jar, which was not all that unlike emptying the bedpan of a sick patient. Then maybe, I countered, I could go to telegraph school in Springfield, Missouri (or was it Springfield, Illinois), with my friend. We could get jobs and work our way through school. “Ooh,” Mama said, “too far away to think about.” Around this time, three young women, all former students from our high school, came to talk to our senior girls about the joys of attendingTexasStateCollegeforWomen (TSCW)inDenton.Ihadnot heard of that school before, but it did not have “teacher” in its title. I became excited when I learned of the possibilities for different majors. I would not have to be a teacher! Denton was farther away from the farm than Commerce, but it, too, had a cooperative plan whereby a student living in the Smith Carroll system could pay for about half of her room and board fees by working in the kitchen or cleaning the dormitory for one hour each day. Textbooks could be rented and turned in at the end of the year. Spending money could be earned by workingoddjobsaroundthecampus,andbytoday’sstandards,thetuition fees were minuscule. One of the girls gave me a TSCW catalog. For weeks I thumbed through that 1948 pamphlet until it was worn, spinning stories around each picture, just as I had spun romantic stories around the pictures of glamorous stars in the old movie magazines I had worn thin. L eaving East T exas 159 Recently, in preparation for my fiftieth college reunion at TSCW, now know as Texas Woman’s University (TWU), I came across that same old college catalog and yellowed letters from the registrar’s of- fice responding to my inquiries about enrolling there. Among this old correspondence, I found a receipt for two dollars documenting the “Co-operative Room Assurance Fee for the 1948 Summer Session.” What could two dollars reserve today? Other summer sessions charges outlined...