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Last Updated 11/02/06
Email: joy@our-town.com
It Was Hot And Dry In ’36 Too
by Joyce Whitis
It was hot in Texas back in ’36 and dry too. The hottest day ever recorded in Texas was in Seymour that year, 120 degrees, which says something interesting about global warming. We lived on a cotton farm just outside Chillicothe in ’36 and that’s not far from Seymour. In fact, it might have just been hotter in our cotton patch but there wasn’t a thermometer out there. I remember a lot about 1936, much of it not good. The depression that started out in October of ’29 was going pretty good then, with lots of folks eating beans and cornbread every day and glad to get it.
That June there was something pretty big going on away off in Dallas. Texas was geared up and celebrating 100 years of Texas history, my brother said. He told me he was going down there with some other boys from his high school ag class. Said they were going in Lance’s flatbed truck. Said they would be gone three days. When he told me that, I just locked my arms around my knees and rocked back and forth. I’d never been further from home than Vernon, sixteen miles away, and to me Dallas just might as well be in another country. Boy, just imagine going all the way to Dallas. Why that might be more than 200 miles! I sure would like to go too, but instead, helped mama pack that old black suitcase with shirts starched so stiff they could stand up by themselves.
When the pups were old enough, the family found homes for them, took D-Dog to the vet and brought her home “fixed”. From that day on she became a pampered house pet. Anyone entering the house became a friend, a friend who was expected to pet that broad head, and looking into those brown eyes, see what complete trust and unconditional love looked like. She slept on the coach, the floor, the foot of the king-size bed, in bed with the grandkids, on the front porch, on the shady side of the yard, under the trampoline. She could find rest anywhere.
The day Austin left for the centennial celebration, it came a sandstorm and the air was so full of dirt, we had to light the coal-oil lamps at three in the afternoon. Dad sat by the kitchen table smoking one Prince Albert cigarette after the other and pretending to read a dime western novel.
As the grandkids grew, their little hands grabbed D-Dogs’ sturdy tail and pulled themselves upright and they learned to walk. Little curly heads cuddled up to her broad belly and using her as a pillow took a nap. Little legs straddled her broad back and hitched a ride across the floor.
I was old enough to know what the blowing sand could do to crops. The young cotton plants, the ones that had been planted with seed paid for with borrowed money, would be cut off at the ground or blown out by the roots. This meant that all those long days in the dusty fields with man and mules getting the ground ready and planting the seeds had been sore muscles for nothing.-It meant that Daddy would have to go back to the bank, ask for more money for replanting and toil out endless days to get more young plants. Maybe it wouldn’t be too late to make a crop, if the wind didn’t come again and ruin everything. I knew what my daddy was thinking as he sat there, counting his losses and wondering if he’d be able to come out ahead this year.
I watched that face that I loved so much and saw the pain in his eyes as he mentally ran the figures . I wanted to say something to make him forget or not care so much. “Play me a game of poker?” I begged. He nodded, a flat hand-rolled cigarette gripped between his teeth. I ran to the highboy and got a deck of red bicycle playing cards and a box of matches from the kitchen cabinet. As I dealt the cards and counted out the matches, the wind shook the house and the linoleum lifted ever so slightly from the kitchen floor. Sand settled over everything, even with all the windows and doors shut, somehow the wind forced fine sand inside as the storm raged outside.
Wiping her hands on her flowered apron, Mama left the kitchen and sat down on the stool in front of her piano. Softly her fingers ran over the keys and the hauntingly beautiful “Clair De Lune” filled the house. Daddy and I played on, the matches beginning to pile up on his side of the table. And then finally the room got lighter, the wind lessened until it was calm again. Mother blew out the lamp and we all walked outside. Most of the crop was destroyed and the next day Daddy hitched up the mules and started planting over.
When Austin got back from Dallas, he entertained us all with the sights he’d seen. “Why the buildings are so tall, you have to lie down in the floor board to see the tops,” he said. He saw Sally Rand dance behind a huge feathered fan (but he never told Mamma) and he saw a two-headed calf and twin boys joined at the hip and no tellin’ what all. He brought me a purple silk scarf with cowboys all around the border and a red book of cartoons about Texas history put out by the Magnolia Oil Company.
He read the book to me and I felt pride in the Alamo so much that I went out and named my three kittens, Travis, Bowie and Crocket. We didn’t make much of a crop that year but with the butter and egg money and the sale of watermelons, we got by and stayed healthy.