(The
following story was written by my father James Edgar Myers, Sr.)
James Henry & Alberta Harless Myers Family
We
(James Henry Myers family) moved to Hubbard, Texas about this time, I (James Edgar Myers, Sr.) was probably
four or five years of age.
I
do not remember how we moved down there, probably by wagon, as we did not own a
car until 1927. During World War I years the price of cotton was about 50 cents
a pound which was about four times the normal price. My father quit his job at
the shops and decided to start farming and get rich off raising cotton. I don’t
think the venture was too successful, as only three years and we moved back to
Cleburne in 1922.
I
remember that we lived near a railroad crossing and the trains came by our
house several times each day and night. The engineer always blew the whistle
for the crossing. We would wave at him every time he passed. My brother, George Ralph Myers, and I slept in a
room where the front door was located. One night I woke up and saw a man
staring through the front door at us. I promptly covered up my head for a long
period of time. When I finally peeped from under the cover, the man was gone.
I
remember one day a small airplane ran out of gas and landed in our pasture. My
father took me to see it and I was real excited. My father said the allies were
using planes like this to drop bombs on the Germans and also fought the German
planes with machine guns in the air. My father told us the Germans had
developed a long range gun that could destroy cities over thirty miles away. He
told me they had tanks that could run over trees and buildings. I always
worried about them coming to America and destroying all our cities.
One
day we went to town and there was an Army band there playing music and
recruiting men for the army. I couldn’t resist getting close enough to look at
the huge horns some of them were playing. One of the players reached down and
grabbed my cap and put it down into his horn. After teasing me for a while, he
returned it.
I
loved to ride in a wagon to town to buy supplies and food, as we usually ended
up at the drug store when he bought me a double dip ice cream cone and himself
a large mug of root beer. I also enjoyed going to the hardware store, as it had
a deep well through the floor of a back room. We would draw us a bucket full of
cold water and get a drink. I liked to take a peek down into the well and see
the reflection of light on the water.
We
moved to another farm that had a large cotton field west of the house. My
grandparents (George Washington Harless)
lived at the other end of the long rows of cotton. Ralph and I would slip off
and go visit grandmother Mary Adelaide
Royal Harless every chance we got. She usually had some popcorn, cookies or
cake waiting for us.
One
day my sister (Eunice Myers) and I
was playing in the cotton wagon. My father kept some matches under the wagon,
to light his cigarettes with. He always carried a chunk of “Brown Mule” chewing tobacco and a sack
of “Bull Durham” smoking tobacco in
his pocket.
He
always rolled his own cigarettes and there weren't very many ready-rolled ones
available back in those days.
As
I was saying, we were playing in the wagon full of cotton and decided to see if
cotton would burn. We struck a match and the whole wagon was ablaze in a few
minutes. Luckily my father and C.D. were picking cotton nearby and came and put
the fire out in the wagon, but you can easily guess he set out tails afire with
his hand. I don’t remember who struck the match, but that was the last time we
ever struck a match in a wagon of cotton.
It
was at this farm that I almost died with pneumonia. I remember feeling very bad
for several days before I mentioned it to my mother. She felt my head and said
I had a high fever. She put me to bed and gave me some medicine but I became
worse and they called the doctor. They put ice packs on me to reduce the fever.
I became unconscious and while this way I remember seeing a large brick
building with lots of big wheels, pulleys and motors turning round and round. I
remembered this for many years. After we moved back to Cleburne a few years
later, my father took me to the Water Department to pay the water bill, when to
my surprise I was looking at the exact duplicate of the things I had seen when
unconscious.
(Smaller version
of the water department in this picture.)
My
father must have taken me there when I was a very young child and it had left
the image impressed on my brain.
The events in this story took place probably between 1918 and 1922. George Washington Harless died on April 6, 1923, about a year after James Henry Myers moved back to Cleburne. He is buried in Hubbard.
I hope you enjoyed my dad's story.
James Edgar "Jim" Myers, Jr.
