Thank you for the kind words, RaiderDad. Growing up on a farm in West Texas in the 30s, 40s and 50s, it never crossed my mind that someday a description of that scant existance would be of interest to anyone.
Those were lean times for every family I knew. Cash money was in short supply and mostly we survived from harvest time to harvest time as best as we could. Merchants in towns fared no better than the farmers and a poor crop year affected everyone in the community equally.
I will not go into the thrift that was practiced by families in pre-1950 West Texas because persons old enough to appreciate it have heard the tales many times from the elders ... and those too young find the descriptions incomprehensible.
No doubt most readers think that I overstated the profound transformation of life quality in West Texas with the end of WWII. Where before that time, patent medicines and folk remedies were the only treatments available for ailments, in 1947 pharmaceuticals developed by the US Army became available ... pharmacies replaced "drug stores." Country doctors gave way to more thoroughly trained physicians and surgeons. Hydraulics developed for heavy machinery used by the SeaBees became available for farm implements and heavy construction machines. Plants that turned out materials for war were converted to building civilian automobiles and home appliances ... wondrous things we had not imagined before. Mills that had been dedicated to military clothing and other fabrics were converted to supplying domestic materials, including new goods such as nylon and rayon ... they were great at the time. And then there were the chemicals and lubricants developed by the Army that were a godsend to farmers, more durable tires and tubes for vehicles, electricity into rural areas, and telephones in every home. Refrigeration, air conditioning, the list is endless.
It was some years later that I began to reflect on our life in those pre-WWII years. How we managed in those years was not all that much different from our grandparents in the 1900 era. Even today I gaze back on the 30s and 40s in wonderment at the changes ... how did we manage? One way was that my daddy and grandaddy taught me the things that they had been taught ... assuming that I would require a knowledge of such things as harnessing mules and doing home blacksmithing and the like the rest of my life. (Heh, heh, I bet none of you readers can tell me the purpose of the peening head of a ball-peen hammer in an old time farm shop ... farmers knew this secret before auto engineers at Detroit figured it out.)
I will be the last to say that life in older times were fun, or even enjoyable, or even barely tolerable. We worked hard, ate generally well, were close friends with relatives and neighbors and enjoyed a simpler form of pleasures. I suppose it would take another 75 years to describe it all in detail, so consider all the previous entries in this thread as the Cliff Notes version of a fairly ordinary West Texas life.
