About two weeks after I had started the second grade in the school at Woodville, Oklahoma, we moved to Rylie, Texas. My father had preceded us to look for work and a place to live. He was making the trip by riding the rails, a way many people without much money traveled in the thirties, when he was arrested for doing so, and taken to the jail at Denton, Texas. Mom's brother, Dorsey, drove from Rylie to Denton to get him out of jail and took him to Rylie, where Dorsey lived with his wife, Velma and their children, Willard and Laquita. For a while, there was a bit of teasing about Dad being a jailbird and a bit of Dad telling the tale of his time in jail.
We moved into a house which, ever after, was known as "The Jones House" because our landlady was a Mrs Jones. It was the first of three houses accessed by a dirt lane off Rylie-Kleberg Road just across from the school. A railroad track ran across the lane, by our house and across Rylie-Kleberg Road on the other side of Mr DeHart's store. It ran on a built-up roadbed such that the tracks were about as high as the windows of our house, but they were at road level near Mr DeHart's store. On our side of the tracks was a narrow intermittent stream, basically a gully, through which water ran when it was raining.
The house had one board thick flooring and walls and was on stilts. When we had a lot of rain, the stream overflowed and flooded our place. Then we understood why the house was on stilts. The water never got high enough to reach our floor. There was the big room which had a double bed in which Mom and Dad slept and, I believe there was a crib where Catherine (and later, Joseph) slept, a smaller room which we used as a dining room and the back of the house was a room the width of the house, with the upper half of the outer wall being raiseable in sections to allow ventilation through screening that covered the exposed area. This is where our wood stove was and where I had a cot for sleeping. I really don't remember where Rosalie and Kenneth slept (if she remembers, Rosalie will probably let me know after she reads this). Our refrigerator was a #3 tub with a large block of ice and a heavy blanket to cover it to retard melting. There was no electricity -- we used coal oil lamps for light. Now-a-days, that would be kerosene and hurricane lamps....still the same thing.
There was a garage/shed in back of the house with two sides, a back and a roof. To the right of the garage, we had a fenced-in area which we used as a chicken yard. When nature called, there was a two-seater outhouse to the left of the garage. The path to our well led from the back of our house to the right, toward Rylie-Kleberg Road, past the chicken yard, then partway past our garden on the left and a patch of weeds on the right which covered the area over to the lane. We kept a clear area around the well so we could get to it.
The well had a windlass with a crank so that it could be turned to wind up the rope to which a water cylinder was attached. You would lower the cylinder down into the water, allow it to fill and then crank the windlass to bring it up. There was a two-finger trigger at the top of the cylinder which, when pulled upward, opened the bottom of the cylinder releasing the water; hopefully you had placed the bottom of the cylinder in the container where you wanted the water to go. All that was left, was to get the container of water to the house. At first, it was difficult and, it took a while, but I was eventually able to master the act of bringing the water from the well to the house. A little red wagon helped a lot.
One thing I couldn't figure out was, that the well water was hard and that rain water was soft. It didn't feel hard to me, but I accepted the fact; it didn't make any difference to me anyway. We had downspouts which carried rainwater into barrels at the corners of the house so that Mom's and the girls' hair could be washed in soft rain water. The barrels had lids which were placed on them after the rain.
Many things happened while we were living at the Jones House including the birth of Joseph, the fifth child of our growing family. I had my seventh and eighth birthdays, finished the second and third grades at Rylie Grade School, had the mumps and my first visit (that I remember) to a dentist. Rosalie finished the first grade and had her tonsils taken out.
As I think about it now, it doesn't seem like much of a home, but we had a roof over our heads and we made it O.K. Besides, it's not the house that makes the home. It wasn't any problem for me at the time and I do have memories of some fun times and experiences during the almost two years we lived there. The dog, the chickens, the snakes, the Graf Zeppelin, the pig, cow-sitting, the thirty-seater outhouses, the baby mice, the classroom thermometer, Woody Woodchuck, Shirley Ray Price...........but, more of that elsewhere.
You may have noticed that I haven't mentioned grass. Simple, our yard was sandy colored dirt from the stream to the weed patch, from the lane to the garage and through the chicken yard. Also, no electricty, no telephone, etc, etc.
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