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Leaving the Farm


 

        Frank (1900-1975) cherished no pleasant memories of farm work, which had not changed much since the family settled in Tennessee.  Plowing, hoeing and tending the stock remained the first order of the year in Texas, where school accommodated to the planting, growing and harvest seasons. Sunday was a day for the better families to dress up and socialize at church, but e
ven on Saturdays the men would spend the morning "down at the place," doctoring the cattle, tending a crop, pruning or budding fruit trees.  Frank always remembered how the boys could not go to town until they had first collected a tow sack full of Johnson grass roots, Johnson grass being the tall, sharp bladed grass which overgrew the cotton and corn fields. Of a Saturday afternoon they could "go into town." The nearest mercantile community was Gorman.  The general store here was more specialized than that run by Thomas Francis in Flynn’s Lick, or by Willie Paulk in Fouke (see below).  Here it was Higginbotham’s, which carried hardware and farm implements only.  Grocers were separate, although still a credit business.  Since the automobile had now made its appearance, groceries were often delivered. There was no pavement yet, but Frank put some of his first money into a Stuts Bearcat.  His older brother sold Fords. There was a railroad depot and a post office, farmers and cattlemen stood around on the street exchanging news and views, making deals. Their wives might be in at the general store "making a trade."  By Frank's time there was even a corner drug store with a soda fountain and little metal chairs and tables with imitation marble tops. Going into town on Saturday was the family outing.  There might be a medicine show or a traveling carnival.

        Frank started, but did not finish the eighth grade. That was already more schooling than enjoyed by anyone before him in the family. He had what was called "good business sense," a more comprehensive understanding of law and accounting than most educated men of my own more schooled generation. Arithmetic culminated in the "rule of three," what my school teacher knew as proportions, or ratios.  Frank learned it as a nifty way of solving al kinds of problems.  The idea was to arrange any problem as a/b = c/x.  Being good with figures, Frank took a job in his grandfather's bank while he was still a teen-ager. Fifty or sixty years later, he was still able
(at my request) to sign his name with the beautiful scroll-work affected by such responsible officers.

        I have a picture of his grandfather's banks in Duster and in Desdemona.  Today the former has been removed to a nearby park, and Desdemona is reduced to just a few houses on the east side of Hog Creek.  In the oil boom years 1918-1921, "Hogtown" was a fair sized collection of shanties on rutted streets populated by land speculators, oil rig equipment vendors, ox train drivers, gamblers, prostitutes, and general hell-raisers.
  Among the latter was Frank's maternal uncle and namesake, the highly successful bully and gambler Frank Kirk. Upscale entertainment might be a traveling badger in a barrel, whose owner offered a prize to any dog that could bring him out.

        John Casper Kirk and Drusilla née Thompson  are buried in Weaver Cemetery just west of Gorman. Their daughter Laura Ann, and their son Frank married Haile siblings.  Laura named a son after her brother Frank.  The children were "double cousins," a frequent phenomenon in an unsettled and desolate territory, when large families sought association with others of a similar raising.  I have no knowledge of the Kirks before they came to Texas.  Laura had two older brothers, Lee and John.  Quite unlike Frank, they were sober farmers and ranchers.  Lee and his wife, Aunt Ninny, lived "next door," at about 100 yards from Laura.  They had six sons and a daughter.  Two of the sons became bank presidents, one a district judge, one an admiral. 

         But of course I remember best my father's Uncle Frank, who made his fortune in wildcat oil drilling.  
Frank Kirk's enthusiastic followers included the roustabouts, mule skinners and ox drivers dependent on him , but also his teenaged son Arnold and his sister's boys Erin and Frank Haile.   I remember all of these men. Erin ( christened Aaron) probably most favored the Haile line. He had thin auburn hair (which he dyed), was clever, witty, a charmer and fancy dresser who boasted that he had never done a day's work in his life.  He drove a Packard or a Lincoln Zephyr, had rings on his fingers and a lady at his side, was a blustering, likable, dishonest ne'er do well.  Arnold favored the Kirks. Huge, red-headed, freckle-faced, curly red hair all over his body, boisterously good-natured, he was a perfect throwback to the ancient Celts. A crisis I remember from my childhood was when Arnold was shot. The story was that he had accused a man, or had been accused, of irregularity in a card game and was advancing upon the adversary, knife in hand, refusing to stop despite being struck five times in the chest by bullets. Arnold survived. I do not know the fate of the shooter.  Arnold followed his father’s example of wildcatting for oil, and became the proverbial wealthy Texan. His wife made it into Time magazine as the owner of a stunning diamond necklace which spelled out in precious stones a highly improper word across her décolletage.

        It just may be that something of the old cavalier is still perceptible in such fellows. They were swashbucklers, carrying and carried by good nature and self confidence, always ready for a scrap, however ill-prepared. Obviously, their line had by this time survived some pretty tough transitions, yet they individually seem never quite up to it, holding to their cavalier ways. My own father was one of those with whom the times had caught up. He was an experienced cowhand, a good companion. He had a fancy signature, a Stuts Bearcat Roadster, a fur coat, and a pin-stripe suit, but no credentials beyond the rule of threes. Such were not really needed in the prosperous, expanding 1920s.



    Frank's generation was called upon to make a transition no less demanding of courage and perseverance than his grandfather's transition from the merchant-planter's son in pastoral Flynn’s Lick to cowhand on the dry, windblown range beyond the Brazos.  Frank made his start in the new economy with a job for Burroughs Adding Machine Company. It was a large and growing firm (today's International Business Machines), with which he might have gone far had not the Great Depression intervened. Even then, he was not without a job, but now with a finance company, repossessing goods mostly from the blighted farms where he had grown up--tractors, cattle, mules, even goats to be loaded onto the nearest train and shipped to markets at cruelly deflated prices. Back in the better times while Frank was working for Burroughs, one of his clients had been a Dr. Adams in Dallas.  In that office Frank felt called upon, in breach of company policy, to leave a note on the desk of a secretary, Nell Gooodson   

 

    Perhaps having subsequently become more ambitious, Frank joined his brother Rudolf
at the Haile Airport in Austin (you can still call it up on the internet).  There was money to be had "barnstorming," giving instruction, or just taking sightseers up for a flight.  It was a dangerous way to make money, and Nell put a quietus to it. Frank returned to traveling for finance companies, then for the farm implement companies Oliver and John Deere. When I was a little boy he was employed by Bull Stewart, the distributor of the new Ford Tractor, which attempted to replace the traditional massive weight of the tractor by use of a sophisticated hydraulic system.  Frank worked as jobber between distributor and dealer. As World War II approached, Frank opened an "aeronautical trade school" in Houston to place people in the booming aircraft plants in Dallas and Fort Worth.  It taught simple skills like reading blueprints and using electric drills and rivet guns. Soon he opened a second school for Negroes.  Here is a photograph which may not appear unusual today, but which was in fact quite remarkable during World War II.

 

        After the war, demand for aircraft workers white or black fell rapidly. Frank had got enough ahead to buy into a Ford Tractor dealership in Texarkana. Whether this move reflected the fertility of the Red and Sulphur River bottoms, or Nell's fondness for "home" would be hard to say. It offered the advantage of our moving into her girlhood home, the old Tom and Molly Goodson house. After I went off to college, my family moved back out to West Texas, but Frank's attempt to establish a tractor dealership in his dusty home territory was foiled by the terrible drought of 1950-54. I inherited Frank's sentimental attachment to that rainless sand, but in the years after his death I gradually disposed of the peanut farm he had bought and finally even of the rocky hill he had inherited--but not for a while. One time, when I was buying grass seed for one of the places, my daughter and son-in-law were with me at the Turner Seed Company in Breckenridge, Texas. In discussing seeds with Mr. Turner, planting seasons and drought, West Texas conditions in general, I remarked that "You killed my old daddy, God damn you, kill me." I think Mr. Turner recognized the quotation (from "Rye Whiskey"), but Constance and Richard naturally attributed it to my dotage, and still do.

        As for Texas, naked came we into that world, and naked came we hither.  R.T. was able to salvage very little out of post-war Tennessee. One might guess that any culture in his Duster, Texas household came from the Richards family. About the best one can say of R.T. himself is that he was enterprising and shrewd.  He became a well-to-do banker and land holder.  The same goes for his son Fate.  A
lthough I did attend a Kirk reunion in a little town near Eastland, I know next to nothing about Drusilla Thompson and John Caspar Kirk (buried at Weaver Cemetery near Gorman). Their daughter Laura Ann was intelligent. She was the ideal of reticent feminine elegance, but she did have spunk.  I remember how she voted "dry" in the Eastland County election on alcohol sales, in the face of my mother's superior argument in favor of  "wet." Laura conceded that Nell's reasoning was correct, but stuck to her own "dry" vote, because "it is the right thing to do." Lest I depict her as too retiring, I record that she was an excellent marksman. I watched her  in her sixties hit a feral cat in the head with a 22. caliber rifle at forty yards. Her generation still deferred to their men, but sustained them intellectually and whipped them at dominoes. 

        Some of my earliest memories are of my grandmother's elegant parlor where she and her brothers Frank or John, or perhaps her sister-in-law Pearl sat at the ivories, patiently clicking them over and over.  "Six-five'l make fifteen, John."  "Your down Laura."  I was given black wooden dominoes with which I built oil derricks beneath their table.  On my horizon might be a red Folgers coffee can where someone spit tobacco juice, or my Aunt Pearl's cloisonné receptical for snuff juice.  Sometimes Pearl
(Fate's sister) had a pint fruit jar of prickly pear juice as well, which she regarded as very healthful.  Pearl had a kind of white parchment face, but was ruddy, with thin auburn hair drawn so tightly back into a knot that it made her squint.  She spoke hard language ("Take a stick a stow wood atter her."  "Snatch that bitch bawld headed.") and was quick to use her good natured but forceful husband to get her way in Gorman.   It was a contrast with my pious and proper grandmother, a studious Bible reader.

    Unlike his own father, mine was gentle and especially protective of his son.  I suppose the best Frank did by me was to marry into literacy, and to revere it.  He loved to read, but mostly together with my mother.  So far as I know, literacy is a quality which no previous generation of Hailes had shared.  Might this history have done better to pursue the literate Goodsons or the Cranks or the McClures a little farther back?  By and large, they were less well to do, so that the record is more obscure. --Why, you may ask, do I count literacy so important? I think it is to be seen that the Hailes did not really lack ambition. On the contrary, they are a hard-working, enterprising line. It is just a shame their aspirations were so limited. Yet how could they have aspired to more? What did they know?  Frank obviously knew that his was a century of technology--he had his sports car and flew his biplane.  I would guess it never occurred to him that Werner Heisenberg and Robert Oppenheimer were his contemporaries.

        Nicholas the Chapel builder in Baltimore seems to have been receptive to a higher calling. He lived at a time when popular evangelistic fervor had made tthe riches of ancient Hebrew culture accessible
, for a brief moment.  As to Nicholas's Dustbowl offspring--what did they know to aspire to?  To put it perhaps more harshly, what had they to say to one another?  Well, they could speak of everyday objects and concepts, after the fashion of Caliban.  Language is a wonderful metaphor in itself, but its ultimate transport is beyond the common and the immediate into the memorable metaphors of our three-thousand year written heritage.  Writing even permits us to probe beyond writing, into prehistory.  Without our books we live hand to mouth, in the shallow day to day.  Without books we are zombies.

        Frank's family was the product of four centuries assimilating the vast American continent. The old cultural treasures had been too heavy for the oceangoing vessels of the day, and far too burdensome for a trek across mountains and forests and deserts in the New World. Whereas a chimney sweep in London might still have had some inkling of a world of the intellect, be it only at a longing distance, the child of the dustbowl had only his Bible.  Literacy was his sole window on a higher calling.  The Hailes, by the time they had made it out to Texas, and had made it in Texas, found themselves among a woefully narrow people.   Yet about the same age as Frank and his siblings were
the sensitive writer Katherine Ann Porter, born not forty miles  south of the Sabana, and the astute historian Walter Prescott Webb, who grew up about twenty miles to the north.  So a leaven remained, and no doubt still does today, in my own even less literate world.

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