My mother shared how difficult it was keeping kids in school in the olden days. Like the 20s and 30's.
Going to School in Central Texas during the 20’s and 30s
My grandparents, Earl and Lavonia Goode struggled to send their kids to school. My mother, Bertie Lee, was the oldest and could not start school until she was nine years old. She told me this story one day:
“We were living in Lee County around 1920. Mama and Daddy’s family all lived in Lee County. I was just turning seven years old, and I was getting ready to go to school. But then I got pneumonia. I was real bad off, real sick, and I didn’t get to go to school that fall. I was sick all winter. I was real sick, because my lungs were real bad. So the next year, it was three miles to the school, and the doctor told them he didn’t want me to walk to school. It was too far and I was not well. So I didn’t go to school that year either.”
She continued her story, “My brother William who was to start that year, didn’t go either. It was too far for him to walk by himself, and I couldn’t go with him, so we both stayed home. Mama’s family, the Evers, had moved earlier that year to Coleman County. They said there were some good places up there with good farmland and lots of cotton and they wanted us to move up there. So we left in November on the train. It was Mama, Daddy, William who was seven, Ada Mae, four, and Ellen, who was one, and me, nine years old. Elmer Ray, Ada Mae’s twin, who we called Sonny Boy, had died two years before at the age of two, before Ellen was born.”
Perhaps the sad memories of little Sonny Boy persuaded Grandma to leave Lee County and go Coleman.
Mother went on, “We took all our belongings on the train. Uncle Ben met us, and he had found us a house and Daddy a job. We lived in this little two-room house, on this man’s ranch. Daddy hunted, and worked for the man, and that winter it was so cold in that little house! But we were happy. We had a lot of relatives and kinfolk around for company.
Mother’s Uncle Ben and Aunt Mary lived in a community called “Down in the Bend of the River” in McCullough County. A few months later Earl and Lavonia decided to move their family to that community. It was where my mother, Bertie Lee, and William finally started school. It was a one-room schoolhouse beside the river. She was already nine years old. He was eight.
The two were in the same grade for two years then they moved Bertie Lee to a higher grade. Their mother had already been teaching them at home. She had books and had taught them reading, writing and arithmetic. The children had caught on fast.
The next year they consolidated that little school with a bigger three-room school and called it The Harding School. She went to school there one more year and then the family moved again.
This time she went to Waldrip School. She continued school there until she was 15 years old. Waldrip was a small town with a church, school, drugstore, and a mercantile store. Bertie Lee loved the Waldrip School.
But then something happened. Earl moved his family back to Coleman County.
She said, I was going to have to go to school in Coleman, in town. I didn’t know anyone, besides William and I would have to walk three miles to school. I had two friends, neighbor girls, and they really wanted me to go to school. I wanted to go but I was ashamed of my clothes! Girls then were beginning to wear silk stockings, and they had nice clothes and silk stockings. I didn’t have no silk stockings, and I didn’t have hardly any dresses to wear and the ones I had were old. Besides I needed notebooks and things like that, and we didn’t have any money at all. Now I look back, I know if I had waned to go bad enough, Mama and Daddy would have figured something out and helped me. So both William and I quit school. We talked Mama and Daddy into it. Later on it was so stupid of me, because I blamed Mama and Daddy for letting me quit school, for not making me go! They didn’t make me quit! I wanted to quit! And William wanted to quit too, since I didn’t want to go. But he was only 14 years old.”
My mother’s eyes were troubled as she thought back to those years. She quit school and worked on the farm. She tended cattle, helped tend the neighbors’ cattle, worked in the fields, and made a dollar here and a dollar there. Several other children were born and they all went to school. Five more children were born to the family in Coleman County, before moving to Floresville in 1930; Sallie, Fay, H. E., Johnny and Allie Pearl who died at the age of one, in Coleman County. When they moved to Wilson County the other children went to the Green School in Camp Ranch.
Mother always regretted quitting school. She always made sure we were in school. We didn’t miss school! She loved to read and introduced us to the Floresville Library and Bookmobile. Every trip to town for her was also a trip to the library to get more books.
My grandfather, Earl Goode, was a learned scholar I heard. I was told he once taught school in Pleasanton in the early 1900’s. Somehow, he wound up being a tenant farmer and trying to keep his kids in school. I often wonder what happened? Somehow he must have lost his vision, focusing on raising a family the best he could.
I can relate to this fine story of your mothers, my father's family was from rural south Oklahoma and my mother's from around Cleburne Texas with similar background of moving from one farming area to the other, until my parents married. thank you for the reminder of people like these from harder times
Your story paints a vivid, although brief portrait of what rural people faced in the early part of the 20th century without electricity, hardscrabble work with little pay, large families and the need to move when the land petered out from over farming/ranching.
Your mother acquired a real need for education when she was deprived of school both at the start and the end of her public school education. You benefited from it.
My mother wrote of her early life a few years ago. Although poor and rural, her life was much happier.
Your heartfelt story indicates that your family valued an education despite their hardships. It truly is one of the most valuable possessions we can have for its unlimited potential.
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