Many East Texans, such as this man shown in his Jefferson home in 1939, lived in poverty during the Great Depression. Photograph by Russell Lee, courtesy of the Library of Congress.
They also offer their thoughts on today’s economic crisis.
*****
“We just didn’t have any money and no work.”
– D.A. Benton, 94
Dirt poor but fresh out of business school, D.A. Benton moved to Longview in 1933.
“This was the hottest place in the world” because of the oil boom, Benton said. “I had that business degree and I thought, man, I’ll get a job. I must have tried dozens of places until 1935, and before I just had a few days of work now and then.”
Living in a shotgun shack in Greggton, Benton did odd jobs in the oil field and tried his hand with the federal Works Progress Administration.
“Roosevelt started the works project, and I worked for them a little bit,” he said. “Just a day or two working on streets and digging ditches. That was really the government keeping us from starving, that’s all it was. We just didn’t have any money and no work.”
Benton grew up in Arkansas. His family bounced around the southern state after his father lost his farm, and steady work was hard to come by.
When Benton graduated from high school, he hitchhiked to a business college in Little Rock, where he found work in a grocery store that paid $1.10 for a 10-hour workday.
Benton earned his degree in 1933. He had three aunts whose husbands found work in the East Texas oil field, and the Benton family soon followed.
“My dad was already out here working for oil field supplies,” he said. “My mother rode on the cab and my brother and I rode on the front of the truck, and we got to Longview, Texas.”
After two years of unsteady work, Benton was hired as a bookkeeper and shop sweeper for Standard Tool and Machine in Greggton. A year later, one of Standard’s owners formed an oil-field service company and took Benton with him.
“Ever since then, the Lord has blessed me so much I nearly cry to think about it,” he said. “Everything it seems like I’ve touched since then has been helpful to D.A. Benton.”
These days, Benton said he follows the economic crisis with concern.
“I’m really worried about this condition now,” he said. “I’m just not smart enough to know what is best.”
A longtime Longview City Council member and three-term mayor, Benton is on the board of directors at Texas Bank & Trust.
*****
“White people worked in the oil field. Blacks were not allowed.”
– Lawrence Oten, 86
Lawrence Oten got his first paying job when he was 14, working on a neighboring farm in northern Rusk County.
“I plowed a mule for a dollar a day and dinner,” he said.
Farmwork was what he knew. As a child, Oten walked a couple of miles to the Star Bailey school near Laird Hill, and when not in class he and his siblings helped his parents on the family farm.
“It was pretty tough, but you were making it,” he said. “You raised your own meat, hogs, chickens, grew stuff in the garden, the vegetables. But you still made it good.”
One important crop was corn. After the harvest, they took the corn to a gristmill to be ground into meal for cornbread.
Though wildcatters were drilling for oil throughout the countryside, Oten said, his family and friends did not benefit from the boom.
“I knew very few people,” he said. “White people worked in the oil field. Blacks were not allowed to work in the oil field.”
Oten farmed until he was nearly 20 years old, when he joined the military during World War II. Everything from bologna to overalls was cheaper then, but Oten said he does not long for the old days.
“People, they wouldn’t want to live like that,” he said. “It’s just so much better living now than it was then. Then, a fellow was lucky to walk around with 25 cents in his pocket.
“Now you don’t know how much a fellow has in his pocket. He could have a million dollars in his pocket. It’s just so much different.
He doesn’t concern himself with the current economic crisis.
“No, it doesn’t worry me, you know. I don’t think about it. You just have to go with the flow. You make a little money, you have to govern yourself,” he said.
Oten said he gets by on his retirement pension and Social Security benefits. He offers advice for any people and businesses who might be struggling.
“If you don’t live within your means, you’ll mess yourself up,” he said. “You get yourself hanging out so far you can’t get back.”
After returning from Italy following World War II, Oten worked in a mechanic’s garage in Kilgore and later in the Kilgore Ceramics plant. He retired in 1987.
*****
“No food with no place to get food.”
– Mary Thompson, 92
Hobos wandered the railroad that ran alongside Mary Thompson’s farm when she was a young wife.
“My husband fed ’em just like they were family,” she said. “He’d have me cook bacon and eggs, because we had them.”
Thompson’s husband came from a prosperous family of cotton farmers in Sherman, she said. One day, Thompson recognized a hobo who she had fed the day before. She refused to cook for him a second time.
“My husband said, ‘Feed that man. He’s hungry.’ You’d just get sick of ’em, but they had no food with no place to get food,” she said.
Thompson grew up shelling peas and helping to can vegetables on a cotton farm in Howe, seven miles south of Sherman. Her father died of pneumonia in 1930. Thompson was 14.
“Back then, you didn’t go to the hospital like now,” she said. “It was just a poor time.”
When she was a senior in high school, Thompson’s mother bought a little restaurant to make ends meet.
“She just did everything to make a living,” Thompson said.
After graduation in 1933, Thompson’s aunt helped her find work unpacking clothes at a ready-to-wear clothing store in Sherman. Thompson married her husband, Albert, two years later.
“Back then, we were all the same, but I can look back now and see how prosperous we were because we didn’t have to do without nothing,” she said.
When she considers the state of the economy today, Thompson said she is not a pessimist.
“I just think that we’ll be OK,” she said. “I just think the Lord will take care of everybody. When he gets ready he’ll shut her down.”
Thompson moved to Longview three years ago to be near her grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
*****
“It was bad. It was just terrible.”
– Rev. Frank Richardson, 82
When he was a child, the Rev. Frank Richardson’s family was among the fortunate ones, he said. At the height of the Great Depression, however, as many as 15 or 16 relatives crowded into his family’s Dallas home.
Richardson was 4 in 1930 when his father moved the family from Paris to Dallas to become the district superintendent of Dallas’s Methodist churches.
“We had a great big parsonage, and I remember all the family moving in with us because they didn’t have jobs,” he said. “I also remember people coming by every day to get some kind of food to eat, and my mother kept a big pot of soup that she kept on the stove all the time.”
One time a cold snap cracked the pipes at the parsonage. The plumber’s helper didn’t have any clothes to wear in the freezing temperatures, so Richardson’s mother gave him warm clothes.
Another time, a church in Oak Cliff fell into debt and was taken over by an insurance company. Richardson’s father had to go all over town to raise money to get the church back.
“I can remember it well,” he said. “It was bad. It was just terrible. You’d see pictures in newspapers of long lines of people trying to get something to eat. It’s bad now. A lot of people are out of work, but not like it was then.”
Richardson is a retired Methodist minister who lives in Longview.
*****
“Everybody was the same. We did without a lot of things.”
– Fay Field, 96
In college during the beginnings of the Great Depression, Fay Field said her classmates didn’t think much about economic hard times.
“Everybody was in the same boat,” she said. “Most people that I was with at that time didn’t feel really hard-pressed because everybody was the same. We did without a lot of things, but everyone else did so you didn’t mind it.”
Her father grew cotton, and her family leased their Navarro County land for oil drilling, enabling Field to go to college.
“One thing I remember about being in college during that time is the college boys were sitting on the corner of the campus watching the girls go by because they said that in good times the dresses were short, and then in bad they were long.
“They were watching the girls go by before the dresses became longer.”
After she graduated, and before she began her graduate studies at Southern Methodist University, Field applied for a teaching job at Pilot Point.
“There were people for blocks and blocks standing in line to go on into the school building to apply for teaching jobs,” she said.
Field got the job. It paid $100 a month.
Field is a longtime teacher who has lived in Longview since 1946.
*****
From crash to recovery
Black Thursday: The stock market crashes on Thursday, Oct. 24, 1929.
Collapse: The banking system collapses, prices and productivity fall, factories shut down, farms and homes are lost and mills and mines are abandoned.
No jobs: In 1933, nearly 25 percent of the workforce was unemployed. Gangs of young people ride the rails as hobos in search of work.
New president: Promising a “New Deal,” Franklin Delano Roosevelt is inaugurated on March 4, 1933.
Migration: Families split up or migrate in search of work. Shantytowns spring up. “Dust Bowl” residents abandon their farms and head for California.
New Deal: Through spending programs and price stabilization the New Deal jump starts the economy.
Depression’s end: World War II creates millions of new jobs in the civilian and defense industries, ending the Depression.
Source: Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum, Marist College
*****
Longview’s escape from the Depression
Gregg County suffered a major setback the year of the 1929 stock market crash, according to local historian Van Craddock.
The Texas & Pacific Railway announced it was moving its terminal from Longview to Mineola. Seven-hundred jobs and a $1 million payroll were gone.
“High unemployment followed. Then there was a major drought, cotton prices fell, timber production decreased and along came the Depression. It was the worst of times for Gregg County. But it wasn’t long before Lady Luck – some said it was divine providence – again smiled on the area.”
Wildcatters around Kilgore struck oil in 1930, and East Texas was thrown into the chaotic Oil Boom.
“While much of the nation had Depression bread lines, Gregg County had pipelines.”
– “Historic Gregg County: An Illustrated History,” by Van Craddock
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