10/10/2022
The Texas Quote of the Day:
"Nineteen forty, another time. The speed limit in Texas was forty-five miles per hour; Lyndon Johnson was serving his first term in the U.S. House of Representatives: Audie Murphy, 16 years old, was living hand to mouth with his disintegrating sharecropper family in Hunt County; Howard Hughes, a leading Hollywood film producer and holder of international airplane racing titles, was only a few years away from the cantilevered bra and his plunge into terminal weirdness; the future famous author Larry McMurtry was four years old; and the University of Texas had an enrollment of 10,969 students. Another place, Texas in 1940.
Sixty percent of the population lived in rural areas; cotton was king in the black waxy belt stretching from north of Dallas to east of Austin; babies were still sometimes born at home; and country doctors made house calls. It all sounds a bit like a Merle Haggard song about the way things used to be. One thing is certain; Texas in 1940 was a bigger place than it is now. It took a lot longer to get somewhere. The highway from Dallas to Houston was a narrow two-lane blacktop with bad shoulders or none. Travel by auto was still an exhilarating adventure, and going across the barren wastes of West Texas meant you needed a canvas bag of water slung over the radiator for the inevitable boil-over.
Culturally things were quieter then. No MTV, no Information Superhighway, no World Wide Websites ---- just radio programs and the movies. In 1940 everybody went to the movies, families to the general releases and kids to the Saturday matinees. Every town had its Dixie or Texas or Ritz theater and usually a smaller theater off the square where westerns and serials were shown. Country people had all day Saturday in town and returned to homes lit by coal-oil lamps and serviced by outdoor toilets. Rural electrification was still a very big deal in 1940. Hit less hard than some states by the Depression, Texas still hit hard enough, and in 1940 the Depression hung on. It would take the events set in motion on December 7, 1941 to put the economy in high gear and launch the nation on a course of industrial expansion unrivaled in modern history. Texas in 1940 was a bit like America before World War I; a hungry, provincial, isolated empire waiting to play a larger role on a larger stage."
----- Don Graham, "Giant Country: Essays on Texas," 1998. I highly recommend the book as it is a collection of learned but wry observations about Texas history and culture. I was thinking about this quote a few few days ago as I was picturing Russell Lee ---- who photographed Texas in 1939 and 1940 ---- and the (relative) hardship he had to go through back then to move around Texas with his camera. Just the GETTING from place to place with no A/C in your car, rough ride, rough roads, 104 degrees etc ... was tough.
Shown here: A law enforcement officer outside a liquor store near Bandera, 1940.
