Acton’s roads, housing, and other amenities of living were probably
typical of rural Texas communities.
Main roads were topped with a mixture of caliche and gravel, were dusty in
dry weather, and were maintained by the Hood County road maintenance department; Acton men, including my dad, were
sometimes hired for temporary roadwork.
The quality of an average Acton house was about the same as that of its
roads. Even the few relatively nice
houses weren’t equipped with facilities considered necessary today; for
example, I knew of none with running water throughout. Mama and Papa Grammer had running water at
(1) the storage tank, (2) a lavatory on the east side porch - handy for washing
up when coming in from outside work, (3) a faucet on their back porch, (3) the
tub in their bathroom, (4) the “wash shed” attached to their smokehouse, and
(5) the livestock watering tank. Mama
and Papa Miller had running water to (1) a screened-in porch next to their
kitchen (again, handy for washing up), (2) the well house supporting their
softwater tank, and (3) their livestock-watering tank.
We hauled
water to our house from the storage tank beside the windmill at the “big house”
(as I thought of my grandparents’ place).
My dad used two-gallon buckets, one in each hand; Twila and I used
one-gallon syrup buckets. We never had
more than a few gallons on hand – only enough for cooking, drinking, and
personal hygeine. (Mother did our
laundry in the “wash shed” attached to Mama and Papa Grammer’s smokehouse, so
carrying water for clothes washing was unnecessary.)
Everyone on the Grammer and Miller places heated water on top of wood
cook stoves for washing dishes and bathing.
Water for washing clothes was heated outside, in large cast iron wash
pots. Firewood had to be cut for each
heating process.
◊◊◊
My grandparents’ homes were fairly comfortable by standards of that day
(folks of today, spoiled to modern heating/airconditioning, would have frozen
in winter and sweltered in summer).
Both houses had fireplaces in their living areas (the Grammer place had
back-to-back fireplaces for the living room and an adjoining room). Wood cook stoves kept kitchens warm (hot in
summer). Portable kerosene heaters provided warmth when fireplaces or cook stoves weren’t in
use. Both grandparents’ houses had high
ceilings, so weren’t as hot in summer without air-conditioning as today’s
houses with standard eight-foot ceilings would be. Neither place had clothes closets; the Grammer house had one
shallow closet, possibly three feet wide and one foot deep, beside the living
room fireplace.
My Grammer grandparents built their house in the spring of 1911, at a
cost of $1,100. It had a kitchen,
dining room, living room, bathroom, and was designed to have three bedrooms,
but they reconfigured it two or three times during the years I knew it. It faced south, had a nice “wrap-around”
porch on its south and east sides, plus a smaller porch on the north.
The Miller house had only two bedrooms, but a cross-hallway was large
enough to accommodate the foldaway double bed in which Papa Miller slept during
the years I can remember. A porch
stretched across the entire east-facing front of the house, and there were
smaller porches on both north and south.
Its carbide gas lighting system was unused; I never thought to ask why.
Twila
thinks high cost of chemicals may have accounted for the unused lighting
system. Another possibility is that my
granddad had succumbed to a high-pressure salesman; his house also had
lightning rods (an uncommon feature on Acton houses), the result of the efforts
of a convincing salesman. I have
already mentioned books purchased from The Southwestern Company, so I think my
granddad might not have been as sales resistant as his generally conservative
nature would have made one expect – apparently not as sales resistant as I am,
two conservative generations later.
Both grandparents’ places had a cellar and smokehouse. Cellar shelves contained rows of canned vegetables and fruit “put up”
during the growing season, all surrounded by spider webs (making them slightly
spooky to Twila and me). Hams, bacon,
sausage, and salt pork hung from smokehouse ceiling joists (on long wires, to prevent
access by rodents). [I never knew
anything to be smoked in their smokehouses, for salt was the
preserving agent.]
◊◊◊
Our little house was about
four hundred yards north of the Grammer house, up a sandy lane. Walking the lane barefooted in summer was a
searing experience; my feet never got tough enough to allow me to actually walk
the hot sand – I ran from patch to patch of grass.
Several
yards east of our house was a sizable patch of ironweeds, covering an area
about ten yards wide and thirty yards long.
I thought the weeds unsightly, so decided one summer day to cut them
down. Sometime in mid-afternoon I discovered
a copperhead snake coiled among the clump I was cutting, only
inches from my bare feet. Unnerved, I
went in the house and told my mother what I’d found; she killed the snake with
the hoe I’d been using, but I quit the job, leaving about a third of the weeds
still standing (and looking worse than if I’d never started the task).
Twila describes our house as
“unpainted, frame cracker box construction…vertical plank siding with narrow
boards nailed across cracks between siding planks…three rooms until sleeping
porch was added…no heat at night other than irons to warm the
feet…lamplight…two-eye cast iron cook stove…water carried from well.” Heat in our living/dining room was provided
by a wood-burning heater, which I remember well because Mother’s legs often
became “piedied,” as she called it, from her sitting so
close on cold winter days (and evenings).
(“Piedied” is a word I’ve never heard used in any other context, but
Mother’s usage must have been valid, for my dictionary defines “pied” as
variegated, or covered with patches or spots of two or more colors.)
Our three rooms and a path were typical of Acton. Every house in the community (to the best of
my knowledge) had a path; nature’s calls, whether at home, school, or church
had to be answered at outhouses (or in the great outdoors).
Neither
church had an outhouse, so school facilities were used by church attendees, at
great risk to the principle of church/state separation. Baptists, across the road from the school, were rather distant
from the toilets, which were located at the farthest corners of the school
property (girls to the northeast, boys to the southeast). I remember seeing my aunt Ruth drive from
the Baptist church to the “facility” at the far corner of the school property;
others probably did likewise, without my noticing.
I’ve
mentioned spiders residing on cellar shelves.
They also liked outhouses; the sight of a black widow spider or two navigating a web just below the spot one was about to place
an exposed part of his anatomy could be unnerving. I was told black widow spiders were so named because they bit men
and made widows of their wives, but I was afraid one of them might want to try
the taste of younger, tenderer, meat, so didn’t perch long over their
abode. (In more recent years I’ve heard
folks say that females of the species eat males after mating, thus making
widows of themselves, but items I’ve read on the Internet report that
conventional wisdom to be erroneous, that females seldom eat the males, but
they do live three to four times longer.)
Out-of-date mail order catalogs from Sears, Roebuck and Montgomery Ward were
prized for their utility in the “pathroom.” We never had toilet tissue at our home
facility.
◊◊◊
We bathed in #3 washtubs, in front of the kitchen stove, using hot
water from the kettle on the stove plus cool water from buckets on a nearby
stand. Room temperature was hot in
summer, chilly in winter. We bathed
only every other night in cold weather – but that was probably oftener than
most of our friends did.
[Twila
still speaks of the cold metal tub rim freezing her back. Years after leaving Acton I attended a
performance by stars of The Grand Ole Opry.
A humorous song about bathing in a #3 washtub in front of a fireplace on
a cold winter night brought back old memories; “Your front’s a-shakin’ while
your back’s a-bakin’ comported with my own experiences.]
We were frugal in our water usage, for the supply (carried in buckets
from the well at my grandparents’ house) was limited; used water wasn’t thrown
out between baths. Twila was first in
the tub, I was next, then my mother, and, finally, my dad. Hot water was added at each stage to keep it
comfortably warm.
Some time
ago I told Don Coleman, a long-time friend and
former Fort Worth neighbor, about our family’s bathing routine when I was a kid
living on the farm (i.e., adding hot water to previously used water). He said that although he grew up in the
city, his family had done the same thing, but that he had to be last in the tub
because he was always the dirtiest.
As an
adult I’ve never enjoyed tub baths (wallowing in one’s own filth), but such
baths now, with fresh water, certainly beat those of my childhood, when each of
us except Twila bathed in the water of one or more predecessor’s
ablutions. Fortunately, the practice
didn’t bother me at the time.
Our bathtime routine of those days paralleled the theme of “the old
family toothbrush” chorus:
The old
family toothbrush, the old family
toothbrush,
The old
family toothbrush, that hung on the wall.
Ë
First it
was Father’s, next it was Mother’s,
Now it is
Sister’s, and soon ‘twill be mine.
Ë
Father
abused it, Mother misused it,
Sister
refused it, and now it is mine.
Our sharing, however, didn’t include toothbrushes, although
I remember times when I had no
toothbrush, so used my finger instead.
We usually had toothpaste, although I recall occasions when we used salt
and soda mixtures as a substitute.
◊◊◊
The REA hadn’t yet reached rural Hood County with its services, so
Acton residents had to devise their own means of doing things for which we
depend on electricity today:
·
We read and studied at night by light from kerosene lamps. Most country folks
went to bed and arose early, to maximize the use of daylight.
·
My dad devised a simple system for keeping milk and butter
from spoiling too quickly; burlap bags hanging on all four sides of (and into)
a rectangular pan of water provided cooling as breezes evaporated water “crawling”
the burlap. [Twila says fresh “sweet
milk” in quantity wasn’t as necessary as it is today; many recipes called for
buttermilk (i.e., “soured”).
Furthermore, all the adults around me preferred buttermilk to sweet milk as a beverage; I never liked buttermilk.]
·
Ice, manufacured at a Granbury “ice-plant,” was available
from small general stores; those stores purchased ice in hundred-pound blocks
(scored for breaking into smaller blocks), hauled it (wrapped well with old
quilts or tow sacks to deter melting), stored it in well-insulated icehouses,
and resold it to customers who could afford that luxury and had a place to keep
it. (The “ice box” my family had in
Fort Worth was placed in Mama and Papa Grammer’s kitchen when we moved to
Acton; Twila says some of Papa Grammer’s medications required refrigeration; fortunately,
they could afford to buy ice.)
·
Air-conditioning was unknown. Ladies at church moved warm air around their faces with fans
provided by Estes Funeral Home of Granbury.
·
A gasoline-fueled generator on school property charged lead-acid batteries and provided DC
power to school/tabernacle/churches for lighting at
nighttime events. (The DELCO, as
everyone called it, was on school property, but no one ever fussed about
separation of church and state when it was used to power church lighting.)
·
The nice cabinet model Majestic radio my parents bought
while we lived in Fort Worth was unusable at Acton in the pre-REA ‘30s. Crystal radios, which didn’t require
electricity, could bring in powerful stations such as WBAP-Fort Worth and
WFAA-Dallas, but when I tried to get a crystal unit to operate I was unable to
find a place on the crystal where the “cat hair” would pick up a broadcast signal.
I heard
radio occasionally, at the Dick Rash home.
Elsie, the eldest of Aunt Myrtle and Uncle Dick Rash’s four children,
dated Mark Stewart, a young man who lived on the prairie east of Acton and was
interested in electronics; he had built radio receivers and put up wind
chargers to provide electric power to operate them. His fondness for Elsie led him to install a wind charger at the Rash house and provide her with a radio he had built. The first song I remember hearing on Elsie’s
radio was “Turn Your Radio On,” made popular by Ray
Stevens many years later; a gospel songbook I have shows “Turn Your Radio On”
to have been copyrighted by the Stamps-Baxter Music Company in 1938, but the
quartet must have been singing it on the radio a couple of years earlier.
◊◊◊
We didn’t have radio on the Grammer place, but we could have homemade
music, for Mama Grammer had a Gulbransen piano in her living room. She and Papa Grammer purchased the piano
from Aunt Lucy Stribling Tandy, who shipped it to Acton from her home in
Temple, Oklahoma.
The big
wooden crate in which it was shipped stood beside Mama Grammer’s chicken house
all the years we lived on the Grammer place; I never saw it used, but I suppose
it was originally placed there for storing chicken feed. I didn’t think to ask my mother about it
while she was still alive.
Mama Grammer could play her piano, as could Mother and my aunt
Ruth. I banged on it, mostly
discordantly, learning nothing, but Ruth used it in giving lessons to Doris
James. Doris must have learned well, for, as noted
earlier, she accompanied our singing at Acton school assemblies.
Mama Grammer never objected to my generally tuneless “banging” on her
piano; my repertoire as a child was a two-finger rendition of “I Dropped My
Dolly in the Dirt.”
I mention
at another point in this writing that my repertoire today, though somewhat advanced
from “I Dropped My Dolly…” is limited to stumbling through – by ear –
relatively simple, familiar songs; I can’t read even the simplest music fast
enough to play as I read. I wish I had
asked someone to teach me about music when I had access to a piano as a young child,
but I considered piano playing a female art; I knew no male pianists.
◊◊◊
Our grandparents’ homes had telephones;
ours did not. Acton’s telephone system
was operator-assisted. [At “Central”
was Aunt Mattie Camp, Papa Grammer’s half-sister, who, along
with her brother, Wheeler Grammer, moved to Texas (with financial assistance
from my granddad, as I understood the story) some years after Papa Grammer and Uncle
Walter “came from Alabama with their banjos on their knees.”] All lines were four-party. I can’t remember the Grammer telephone
number, but the Miller number was “nineteen three;” I suppose that meant three
rings on line nineteen. (Twila says
combinations of “longs” and “shorts” provided further distinctions between
parties.)