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“I’m Here to Tell You!: Family Vignettes from the Depression Era”
- University of North Texas Press
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I’M HERE TO TELL YOU!: FAMILY VIGNETTES FROM THE DEPRESSION ERA by Robert J. (Jack) Duncan I was born in Pilot Point, in Denton County, Texas, on December 7, 1941, just a few hours before the Japanese planes attacked Pearl Harbor . Before 1941, more Texas babies were born at home than in hospitals ; after 1941, more were born in hospitals. That year was the break-over year when it was about half-and-half. I was born at home. I was an only child, and I was the seventh grandchild on each side of the family, so some family members felt that I somehow lent a certain balance and symmetry to our family tree. We lived in Pilot Point for a while and then moved about five miles north, to my paternal grandparents’ farm in the Liberty Hill community east of Tioga, in the southwest corner of Grayson County. My dad (who earlier had worked as a grocery store clerk) helped his father with the farm work during the war, or at least during much of it, when labor—like virtually everything else— was scarce. My grandparents and my Aunt Pat, who was just six years my senior, lived up the road in a two-story farmhouse that—in my child’s memory—seems as big as a mansion, although I know, in reason, that it was nothing very large or elaborate. But for the purpose of oral “shorthand” we all referred to it as the “big house,” that contrasted it to the farm’s other house, the one that my parents and I lived in, which we called the “little house.” My earliest memories—at around the age of two—are of that time, and they are so sketchy they seem almost like grainy snapshots, or perhaps tableaus caught, illuminated, and frozen in time by a strobe light. One of those memories is of my parents and me waiting for the rural mail carrier, and then seeing his car come up the road to deliver to our roadside mailbox a letter from the local draft board. Daddy came extremely close to being drafted, but he was granted 39 an exemption at the last minute, probably because of his farm worker status, an occupation necessary to the war effort. Most of the things that I want to tell you about, though, happened before I was born, and likewise, of course, before the war. I learned about one of them just a couple of decades ago. Sometime around 1989, I had driven my dad somewhere, and we were on our way home, going south through the eastern edge of Pilot Point. Dad was eighty, give or take a year. “See that barn over yonder, and that row of trees?” he asked. I thought I knew what he was getting at. My parents were married ten or twelve years before I was born. For as long as I can remember, I have known that Daddy and Mama had lived on that place for a year or two as a young married couple. It was “Uncle” Jim Ledbetter’s home place; he was an aging bachelor who had hired them, Daddy to do much of the farm work, Mama to cook and keep house. The honorary title “Uncle” was a prefix used simply to convey respect and affection, not kinship. I remembered that my folks said that Uncle Jim sometimes kept late hours visiting a “widow woman” in Gunter. One night Uncle Jim came home pretty late, and he had lost his house key. Daddy had to get out of bed and unlock the door to let him in. Daddy seized the opportunity to kid the old man. “Good God, Uncle Jim,” he said, “If you don’t quit tom cattin’ around, you’re liable to have to marry that ole gal.” Uncle Jim’s face turned red, but then he took Daddy’s warning as a compliment and chuckled. (Ironically, eventually he did marry the woman, and my parents moved back to town.) “Did you hear what I said?” Daddy asked me. “See that barn over there?” That jarred my mind back to the present. I nodded. He said, “That’s where you were conceived.” I don’t think I had ever heard him use that word before. “You mean in the two-story house that used to be there,” I said, to correct him. “Nosir, I mean in that barn, up in the hayloft. I know, in reason , that’s...