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.
v v v
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.
v v v
Homepage – Kinsey / Coskrey Update
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