During the Depression years, like now, some of my parents’ neighbors were losing their homes. Due to careful management, my parents paid for theirs and also a business building.
Most women sewed in those days. We wore patches on patches, but they were clean. Patchwork quilts were not only stylish, but necessary. Families customarily kept a rag bag of scrap cloth and used them for bandages, hankies, spill picker-uppers (no paper towels then), dish cloths, dusters, patches, you name it. Hand-me-down clothes were commonplace. A hole in your shoe sole? Just stick a cardboard inner sole inside. Homemade lye soap did the laundry, and bleach was a cheap disinfectant. Wood-burning black iron wash pots were seen in some back yards. People beat the dust out of rugs hanging on the clothesline. Butter churns were still in use. So were some outhouses with no high plumbing bills. There was no TV, so people visited a lot.
Most people worked long hours. They adhered to the general admonition from the Good Book that if one didn’t work, one didn’t eat. Leisure, if any, mostly consisted of swinging on the front veranda to feel the breeze.
As a small child, I was always cautioned to keep the front screen door hooked until strangers begging food could be ascertained by my parents as to their intent and need. Most were shaggy, ragged and dirty. Mother always gave them a job first before food. If they were sickly, she let them just sweep the front porch. If they were robust, she let them mow the front lawn.
Temple, being a railroad town, got more than its share of hobos. It was said that under culverts near the tracks, maps were drawn pointing other hobos to the best handout addresses. I remember hearing a tale that Temple got so many hobos, one time they were loaded in a box car and the door nailed shut and sported a sign, “Do not open till Galveston.” I also heard that Galveston never did forgive us for that. I remember beggars sitting in storefront doorways on Main Street with a tin cup in their hands and sometimes a guitar. Farther down the street was a life-size wood sign painted red with big white letters, “WPA.”
