By Mickey Walker - November 15, 2009
It was 1936. My
Grandfather David Pace hitched up his mule to his cultivator to turn some
January soil before the spring planting to come. On a cold Milam County, Texas farm he rode his ancient plow
in the morning mist, and before noon, an ongoing lung infection had caused him
to take to bed early that afternoon. Medicare or any kind of Welfare did not exist in those days so a family
had to make do the best they could. The next morning a deep hacking cough and a high fever had taken Dave
Pace, and soon pneumonia set in. Death sat in the rocking chair beside his bed, smiling knowingly in his
dark cloak and hood. Dave died the
next morning without fanfare like so many humans back then who had
nothing. Instantly there was no
more money coming in on the farm, and the Paces braced for many hard years to
come.
The Pace family lived in a sharecropper’s shack in Donahue,
Texas, far from any town. It was
30 acres, and they never made a profit. Forever in debt and enslaved to the bank and the landowner, they worked
to keep themselves alive. Old man
Pace was survived by his wife Rhetta and her 11 children: Em, 25, Buck 24, my mother Eva, 21, Georgia,
19, David, 18, Dubb, 17, Ernestine, 15, Floyd, 12, Ruth 10, Kenneth 6, and
Dennis, 4. The oldest 5
children had married or had jobs working for the CCC or farming. My mother Eva and father, Bud Walker
were the only Paces and Walkers who had gone to college and were teaching
school between Temple and Rosebud, Texas when David Pace died. Urgently, the first order of business
became feeding the children to keep them alive.
During the latter days of the Great Depression jobs were
scarce. Eva and Bud taught school
at a rural schoolhouse between Temple and Rosebud. It was called Meeks, and it
was on good black farm land. A
century before, German and Czech immigrant farmers had settled there to raise
their families and crops. There
was plenty of food on the farm back then, and the excess harvest was donated to
the needy. No one in the community
was needier than my Mom and Dad. They were desperate to keep her young brothers and sisters alive in
Donahue. So the Meeks school
community gladly gave my parents canned peaches, smoked sausage, fruit
preserves, corn meal, live chickens, and pork bellies. These farmers and their wives were a
kind and appreciative bunch who had formed beef clubs where the members would
go every Saturday to a different farm house to get free beef from the farmer
whose turn it was to kill. Then
after two or three months, it came your turn to kill a steer, and everybody
came to get their share of fresh beef from you. It was weighed on a J Scale,
and the ledger showed how much meat in pounds each member got each Saturday,
and if there was a greater amount received by a member, he would pay cash money
into a fund kept by the club bookkeeper. At the end of the year, those receiving less beef would be paid in cash
a proportionate amount in dollars and cents to account for the difference. Fair and equitable trading seemed to be
the norm in those days.
Rhetta and the remaining 6 children made do until the next
weekend when my Mom and Dad would drive the mud roads in their 1941 Chevrolet
coupe to Donahue to make a food delivery. It was a precarious 15-mile drive. Cars were scarcely seen in the Pace neighborhood. But when the kids saw the tan Chevy
round the hill they began to shriek with delight and run down the dirt road to
meet it. They knew that Mom and
Dad had brought them food. And
they were starving.
To this very day, Ken Pace, 79, recalls those days. He says that by the time the car
arrived each Saturday they had eaten every scrap to be seen from the previous
delivery. He said nothing ever
tasted as good as peanut butter and crackers and all the stuff we might call
junk food these days. You could
see in his glazed-over eyes how the thought of starvation had moved him. Some of the other kids don’t like to
recall those hard times and how close they came to extinction. That was before FDR and the New
Deal. The churches and other
private sector experiments had failed, and people perished like flies from
starvation and disease.
David Pace worked a hard scrabble farm for his family and
never had any spending money. Several times a year he would go spend an hour in the banker’s office in
Bartlett, Texas, and plead for money on account (loaned) for seeds for planting
of corn, cotton, and perhaps Maize for the milk cow before they had to kill and
eat her. David Pace was hooked on
tobacco, and reluctantly, he asked for a couple of dollars every 6 months to
buy a few cans of Prince Albert in the red can, but the banker said, no, that
he could use Bull Durham in the cloth sack instead. It was almost half the price. It was a degrading exercise to sit in the banker’s office
and have him dictate to you what you could and could not have as a free human
being and a citizen of the United States. But you had no choice. There was no other help.
Recently, Kenneth Pace told me how his mother, Rhetta, would
give him and some of the other kids, her allotted portion of whatever food they
had, telling them that she was not all that hungry. Imagine that heart-breaking scene.
One winter, the Pace family’s cast iron wood stove
overheated and broke in half. Mom
and Dad drove up the next day and saw the massive steel pieces in a heap on the
wood floor. Immediately Dad took
charge. He would make them a new
stove, no problem for him. He
directed Floyd and Dub to take the old stove pieces out to the barn and bring
back some stray pieces of corrugated tin that rested in a field near the
barn. With big tin snips Dad cut
pieces of the tin to size and bored holes with a metal bit and auger and screwed
the tin into a coffin-shaped structure with a flat surface on top and bricks
for feet so the heat would not make the wood floor upon which it sat catch
fire. He made the fittings tight
so there would be no leaks, and he attached the old tin smokestack to the new
stove and heater and they were in business. He fired it up with kindling wood. It worked. They
cooked biscuits in skillets smeared with lard on the top and warmed themselves
by the new tin structure when it was freezing outside.
After their father died, the Pace’s had not had a milk cow
for a couple of years. Dad bought
them one from a neighboring farm for the little kids and gave it to his tearful
mother-in-law, Rhetta, who had no money, no means of working the farm and no
semblance of human dignity. Dad told Rhetta that he wanted the calf though that
would fold in a couple of months, and when the calf was born, Dad sold it and
took the proceeds to Temple, Texas where he bought Mom a wedding ring that, due
to lack of funds, had been 2 years overdue.
The Paces never had much meat to eat. When David Pace was alive, he allowed
the children to snag a stray chicken from a nearby farm that happened to find
its way into their front yard. And
nobody ever complained of any missing poultry. There was a story about how David Pace would bring home a
Thanksgiving turkey, too. He shot
it in the woods, he said. But most every year there would be a big bird, a
domestic Turkey on the Pace table, and when the kids would ask their father how
he had come by such a fine bird, he told them that it was a “Chaparral”,
another name for Roadrunner. But
it was at least 50 times bigger and heftier than the skinny sleek Roadrunner,
so the kids, with big delicious eyes, though they knew something was fishy,
enjoyed the Thanksgiving meal with much gusto and never questioned their Dad on
it. Over 60 years later, I spoke
with some of the families who knew and lived by the Paces back then, and they
told me that, yes, knowingly, their fathers and uncles had made a stray turkey
available to the Paces at Thanksgiving time. They made sure that it wandered into David Pace’s fields
right before Thanksgiving when he was out feeding livestock or something.
I guess the Pace family did survive without Social Security
back then, but it had to be hard. First thing to go was your dignity and self-worth as a human being. Families made do without a lot of stuff
now we take for granted. Before
they became teachers my Mother and Father got married in San Marcos, Texas on
September 21, 1936. He was 20, and
she, 21. They each had part time
jobs as students at Southwest Texas State Teachers College which was against
the rules because only one married student at a time could hold down a
university job back then. But they
would tell no one and celebrate in silence. They spoke of that fine evening all the days of their
lives. So they strolled
delightfully down the fall road back to their apartment where they had a
wedding feast of baloney sandwiches. Through the years they both agreed that it was the best meal they ever
had. But that was long ago. Back then there were no government
programs to help people survive the hard times. 