Tanks, Refrigeration, and Cotton Harvesting
When we moved to Elmdale in 1943 during the middle of my third grade year, we had no electricity, no running water, not even a well. We had an above ground cistern in which we caught water during rainy weather and also some gutters which delivered water into 55 gallon drums and that was our water supply except during the summer time when it wasn’t raining.
Roy Griffith, our landlord, decided to dig a “tank.” For those readers who didn’t grow up learning proper nomenclature, a tank is roughly the equivalent of a farm pond in West Texas. It’s designed to provide water supply for animals, irrigation in some places, and is the habitat of water moccasins and turtles. We were anticipating plenty of water for livestock and had plans to stock it with fish. Unfortunately the subsoil turned out to be caliche, and it wouldn’t retain water for more than a few days. So much for the tank. We had a good crop of cattails, but that was it. Once in a while we bought water from the city of Abilene. They had a huge pipe out near the airport where you could go and get water. We had several 55 gallon drums. We had a flat bed truck and we filled the drums with water. We would always put a big block of wood in each drum to prevent sloshing. I soon discovered that it wasn’t a good idea to ride in the truck bed when the drums were full of water. I’m not always a slow learner. A good drenching sold me on the benefits of riding in the cab.
There was also the problem of refrigeration or the lack thereof. A few people without electricity owned kerosene powered refrigerators, but we were not among them. I always thought it was such a neat deal to visit somebody’s house who had a refrigerator. If I was really fortunate I would be permitted to get ice cubes out of the freezer part. In the winter time we didn’t worry much about refrigeration. Hogs were slaughtered after the weather got cold. The better portions - hams, shoulders, bacon, etc, where “sugar cured” and hung in the smokehouse. Milk and other perishables were placed in a part of the house that didn’t receive heat. In the summer time, we bought ice and placed it inside an icebox. The icebox was insulated much like a modern refrigerator but it had no power. A 25 or 50 pound block of ice would last about a week. If you were really tight with money, which we often were, you bought a 12 and a half-pound block and did without refrigeration part of the time.
We never really thought much about having not having electricity or modern conveniences. We thought that was the way most people lived. We were poor but didn’t have sense enough to know it, so we never thought of ourselves as poor. We thought the poor kids at school were the ones lived in a slum area near Abilene. We felt sorry for them. Sometimes they got head lice, and when they did, we all got tested. They ran toothpicks through our hair to see if we had lice. My head always itched after they did it. I was afraid the toothpicks had given me lice.
Some of the kids didn’t start to school until November. They were held out to help with the cotton harvest. I worked in the cotton fields after school and on Saturdays, but I was never held out of school to “pull bolls.” My father picked cotton in his boyhood, but I pulled bolls. By the time I came along cotton gins had developed the capability of separating the cotton from the bolls. Harvest was much faster that way. I remember one day when I pulled four hundred pounds of bolls. That was considered a major accomplishment.
Everything about cotton was hard work. The modern techniques of raising cotton were developed about the time I reached adulthood, so I got in on the hard work. We were aware that it was important to the war effort. We were raising the fibers for the uniforms in Uncle Sam’s army.
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