ACADEMICS – Jessica Lyn Kinsey, daughter of Mickey6 [Joe5, Oscar W.4, William Fernando3, Peter2, Thomas1] and Kay Kinsey of Hamilton, was a charter member of Alpha Gamma Delta at Texas A&M University – Corpus Christi. In 1998, she was the first athlete to sign with TAMU-CC on an athletic scholarship for the inaugural golf team. She has held the vice president position for finance for the National Panhellenic Conference at TAMU-CC. In 2001, Jessica was a junior and majoring in marketing. She was involved in other organizations such as Baptist Student Ministries and Texas Marine Mammal Stranding Network.

 

GENEALOGICAL SOCIETY REPRINTING FRANKS BOOK – The Coryell County Genealogical Society has reprinted “Seventy Years in Texas, by J.M. (Josh) Franks. Originally published in 1924, the book by the late cowboy includes short stories about Indian fights and cattle drives, naming several old timers in Coryell County. The book sells for $20 plus $1.65 tax. An additional $1.50 is required if the book is to be mailed. To order, or for more information, call 254/865/4258.

 

 

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Book Review:  Harder than Hardscrabble

 

Sitton, Thad. “Harder than Hardscrabble.” Austin, Texas:  University of Texas Press, 2003. 237 pp. ISBN 0-292-77726-4. UT Press: http://www.utexas.edu/utpress/subjects/tex.html, $21.95 paper. $13.97 from http://www.hutchinson-almanac.com and http://www.amazon.com. 

 

Until the U.S. Army claimed 300-plus square miles of hardscrabble land to build Fort Hood in 1942, small communities like Antelope, Pidcoke, Stampede, and Okay scratched out a living by growing cotton and ranching goats on the less fertile edges of the Texas Hill Country. While a few farmers took jobs with construction crews at Fort Hood to remain in the area, almost the entire population – and with it, an entire segment of rural culture – disappeared into the rest of the state.

In Harder than Hardscrabble, oral historian Thad Sitton collects the colorful and frequently touching stories of the pre-Fort Hood residents to give a firsthand view of Texas farming life before World War II. Accessible to the general reader and historian alike, the stories recount in vivid detail the hardships and satisfactions of daily life in the Texas countryside. They describe agricultural practices and livestock handling as well as life beyond work: traveling peddlers, visits to towns, country schools, medical practices, and fox hunting. Many of the anecdotes are from a world very different from today: a world where you asked the phone operator to dial “I-W” to reach your grandmother, where a mother cut and sewed the tough skin of an old basketball into a pair of shoes, and where people walked for miles to dance a “stomp” or “dose-e-doe.”

The stories also describe a fast-disappearing rural society. Modernization made kerosene lamps and mule-drawn ploughs less common and enabled the radio, automobiles, and the Sears catalog to become regular features of rural life. The Great Depression and the Works Progress Administration also left their mark on the isolated communities, until finally the military necessities of World War II required the entire area being supplanted.

 

Thad Sitton is an independent scholar and writer in Austin, Texas. Among his ten other books on Texas history are three winners of the Texas Historical Commission’s T.R. Fehrenbach “best book” award.

 

 

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