Barney Senior, Part 4

1. Barney McCoy Smith, Senior  (Part 4 of 4, Life in Texarkana, TX)

[These are the words of Barney McCoy Smith, Jr., recorded on an audio cassette tape, January 1999 in Macomb, Illinois.  The first part of the tapes describe his father, Barney McCoy Smith, Sr.]

[Words that are unclear are marked with "????"] 

[*Inaudible*  Speaking of the parents of Barney Smith, Senior??]  In 1923 she wrote a letter in answer to my mother’s request for information, and she said something to the effect of they moved around an awful lot and she just didn’t have any records, something to that effect. Jamie may know more our father’s family than I do. My father’s father we don’t know anything about more than what I said a while ago. I can give you some more information about my father’s brother and sister. I’ll do this in chronological order.

Uncle Claude, I guess his name was Robert Claude. His brothers and sisters called him RC[?]. His wife was Annie. I can’t think of what her family name was. They had one child, Robert Claude Jr. They lived in Tonka City, Oklahoma. I think he was a mechanic, and in later years he was in the banking business. During World War II they lived in New Orleans. They came to Beaumont when my actual father died, for my father’s funeral, and Annie later died and Uncle Claude remarried. Their son, Robert Claude Jr., that we call Bobby, was a….

[END OF TAPE 1 SIDE A / BEGINNING OF TAPE 1 SIDE B]

Name was, MacMickel? And I don’t know where she came from, probably from around Texarkana. Uncle Claude and Aunt Annie’s son, Bobby, was or is several years older than I. He graduated from law school. I don’t know which law school it was. In World War II he was a naval officer. I think he may have married and may be living in San Antonio. I’ve seen him two or three times but that’s about all.

Now going on down the scale, Uncle Onny[?] was next in line. He’s the next [????]. By the way I think Uncle Claude was probably born in about 1883, and I think each child came about once every year ago. Uncle Claude was probably ten years older than my dad… That doesn’t make sense, less than ten years.

Uncle Onny came next. I know absolutely nothing about him. I don’t even remember seeing him. He lived up in Oklahoma, and I think he was in the dry cleaning business. 

Uncle Bart was in the dry cleaning business. I don’t know anything about his marriage or his family or anything like that. He lived in California. I visited him in Colton, California in 1941. He was very glad to see me, welcomed me into his house. I think he was living with a mom and her daughter, sort of a strange combination. I visited him one Sunday afternoon when I was stationed at Emit, California, in primary flying school. He was very nice, very sweet, very welcoming, and I think he wrote to my dad and mother telling them of my visit, and he was very glad to have seen me. I don’t know whether he wrote someone or not.

But next in line, Aunt Neva was next. Her name was, well I don’t know what her middle name was. She was married three times. Her first two daughters were Maybel and Virginia. She had two other daughters by another husband, Neva Francis and Anna Catherine, and I think she had a son. I don’t remember his name. She lived around Temple, Texas in the 1950s. When you and I and mom and Doug lived in Houston, I visited one of the daughters. I don’t remember exactly what the details were, but I got to see them, and Aunt Neva, and had a nice visit. I went out to see them two or three times. 

Next in line was Uncle Wallace. Uncle Wallace never did marry. He lived in [Crat??], Kansas and worked for a dry goods store named “Black’s” I think. He was a musician. He played the organ in his church. I would think [????] married. He died ten or fifteen years ago. He died without a will, and all of his fortune was shared by the relatives. James and I got about a thousand dollars each as our father’s share of it.

Let’s see, there was Russell. Russell’s wife was named Alberta. Uncle Mills [Mules?] married I don’t know who. Uncle Crippy[?] I think married. Uncle Crippy lived in Edmond, Oklahoma. He was in the military in World War II. He came to visit in Chicago when our dad was sick. He was a very nice guy, and the youngest of all. That’s about it for right now.

Next post:  The Endsley family in East Texas.

Barney Senior, Part 3

1. Barney McCoy Smith, Senior  (Part 3 of 4, Early 1900s Entertainment in Texarkana, TX)

[These are the words of Barney McCoy Smith, Jr., recorded on an audio cassette tape, January 1999 in Macomb, Illinois.  The first part of the tapes describe his father, Barney McCoy Smith, Sr.]

[Words that are unclear are marked with "????"] 

This is Sunday morning, about 11:30, and here I am talking just to the black box again. It would be a lot easier if you [Ken] were here and I were talking to you and you could talk back or ask questions or comment or add your own ideas.  This is a new experience. I guess the closest we’ve come up to this time is talking to somebody’s telephone answering machine—kind of like when you call somebody up and they don’t answer the answering machine. *laughs*.  Well let’s see… Mom and I went to church this morning, got back. Now it’s 11:30. Tell me some of the thoughts you have....

I could list just the names of just about anybody in my high school graduating class in 1938, but I would have a hard time listing more than ten or fifteen of the names of students that I had in all the years from 1955 to 1989? There must be some reason for that. And it is applicable to what we’re doing right now. I remember a lot of details of the 1920s, 1930s, probably more than I remember from the 1970s, the 1980s, and I don’t know an explanation for that. I think it’s pretty commonly understood though. 

I think I’ve come across another great truth here. I was talking about the fact that this is not easy to do.  That there is the explanation why most people don’t do this. Most people don’t try to write down the entire family history… It’s too much trouble. They don’t have the time or don’t make the time. But some of the memories are too painful. The fact that it’s not easy is probably the explanation.

I was thinking… what did my father like to do for entertainment? 

In his lifetime there was no such thing as television. Radio became very popular from the 1930s, and up until the time of his death in 1945. Listening to the radio at night, you’d have your favorite radio programs, like the certain one that comes on at Monday night, and another that comes on Tuesday night. So it was pretty much like it was in Television for a while, although it’s not so much like that anymore I think.

I remember my dad liked the Jack Benny Program very much. He also liked Milton Berle. He found a lot of enjoyment out of radio, and of course he listened to the news at ten or something like that. I never saw my dad smoke a single cigarette. He liked cigars; he would smoke cigars now and then. After prohibition ended he would now and then drink a bottle of beer. He was not one to go out to a bar or to a cocktail lounge. Any beer he drank would be at the house. My mother didn’t approve of course. Whiskey was out of the question. In fact the word “whiskey” was out of the question almost. 

Speaking of curse words, my dad didn’t use foul language. In fact as I grew up nobody around me did. These kind of four-letter words that you hear so much of today were absolutely forbidden. The worst anybody here would use… now and then Uncle Eli would say “hell” or “damn,” and that was considered to be very bad. He shouldn’t do that. It was okay to say “durn” or “darn.” That was for “Damn.” It was okay to say “heck” for “hell.” “Gosh” for “God,” or “golly” for “God.” Even saying “golly” or “darn” or “durn” or “heck”… even that was considered not very nice.

Of course this reminds me… the society that I grew up in, which means my mother’s family basically and my fathers to a large extent I guess… They were not what you might call common people or low-class people. If they were poor it was financially poor, but certainly not poor in the sense that they were low-class people. They were  very high-class people in that, well for example, we were church-going people. We were very careful about our personal appearance. We lived on the right side of town. We had servants who would come in about once a week usually. We always wore clean clothes. Maybe they weren’t expensive, but they were always clean. It was a sense of pride that we had that low-class people just didn’t have. There was definitely a class distinction. We were not what was known as “poor white trash.” Poor white trash would use bad grammar, foul language. They wouldn’t bathe very often, things like that. We were definitely not in the [lower class.]

I was talking about the fact that my dad used to bring on, on Saturday night, the funny papers as we call it back in those days. Later we called them cartoons or the comics. I remember the names just about all of them—Mark[?] [????] and Little Orphan Annie [????] and so on and so on. Until James came in 1933, of course I was an only child, and my father was very attentive, very affectionate. I was awfully important to him. He obviously enjoyed having me around. He played with me. For example at night he would talk to me about things that had happened during the day. 

Since he’d just come back from World War I in the past few years, he used to tell me… he used to talk to me about the experiences in the war. Some of the things he told me I didn’t understand, and I don’t remember, but I do remember that he spent quite a bit of time telling me about his wartime experiences. I know he was in the medical corps. I don’t know what his rank was, whether he ever got to be a sergeant or whatever, but he was in the medical corps. He brought back from World War I… I remember a gas mask that he brought back, and he brought back his helmet. The tin hat they called it, that the soldiers wore in World War I. 

As I said he enjoyed spending time with me and talking to me, playing with me. At about this time, early 20s, airplanes and parachutes were becoming popular. He would take a big pocket handkerchief, and on each corner he would attach a string, and then to the four strings he would attach a rock of some kind. He’d throw it into the air and it would come down as a parachute. That was something I enjoyed as a little bitty kid.

He used to like… I guess it was special on Sunday morning, if he and mother were lying together in bed before they got up, he would like for me to come get in bed with him. Sometimes he’d make sort of a tent out of the covers, and we’d get under the cover together and play like we’re at a tent. In fact he… I guess one of my earliest Christmas gifts from him was a little prop tent that he bought and gave me. I kept it all… actually all my [????] until just a few years ago when I [inaudible]. It was supposed to be a little tent which we’d never gotten any use out of. It just shows his affection and the fact that he cared for me.

It’s sad that we know so little about my father’s family. 

Next post:  Family members and relatives from early 1900s in Texarkana

Barney Senior, Part 2

1. Barney McCoy Smith, Senior  (Part 2 of 4, homes in Texarkana, TX)

[These are the words of Barney McCoy Smith, Jr., recorded on an audio cassette tape, January 1999 in Macomb, Illinois.  The first part of the tapes describe his father, Barney McCoy Smith, Sr.]

[Words that are unclear are marked with "????"] 

It’s still January the 10^th, Saturday morning, 1998, and I’m sitting here a little after ten in the morning, and I’m glad I got this started.   This works out pretty well. After recording for a while I take a break. During the break I think about things that I’ve been talking about, and things that occurred to me that I forgot to mention. So next time I record I’ll make some notes.

I want to emphasize several things about my father and his relationship with my mother. The idea of fights, even verbal fights, even typical so-called fights that couples have… my mother and dad apparently had very very few. They seemed to get along very well. That’s one of the blessings, of course, that I had. 

My dad worked probably twelve hours a day, seven to seven, six days a week. Then on Sunday probably two hours on Sunday morning. That’s the kind of work schedule my father had. There was no such thing as a two-week vacation. Labor day was one of his big holidays, because he did get off on Labor Day. I guess it was the first Monday in September. He used to look forward to Labor Day. Of course he also liked typical holidays like Christmas and Fourth of July. He didn’t work on those days, but his holidays were few and far between. He was, like I said, a very hard worker, a faithful guy, and very much to be admired. As I look back I know I was blessed with an extremely good father and extremely good mother. 

I might find on here some of the places that we lived. When my dad got back from World War I in the summer of 1919, I think he and my mother must have moved in with Aunt Nora and Uncle Eli. They had gotten married in March 1918. Aunt Nora, of course as you will see later if you didn’t already know it, was one of my mother’s sisters. She married Uncle Eli March 12, 1918. She would have been about 33, and he was 37. Neither of them married before. They lived at Rosia[?] home, which was 508 West 29^th[?] Street in Texarkana Texas. The house is on the corner of West 29^th and Olive. It’s on the northeast corner. It’s been there since 1925. It was moved over from the middle of the block in 1925. It was built in 1876. I’ve been talking about that old house from time to time throughout.

That’s where my mother and father were living starting in 1919 when my dad got back from the army. Aunt Nora and my mother were always very very close. 

They were living there when I was born in 1921. Aunt Inez, my mother’s sister, was married to D.B. James, David James. Uncle David, as I always used to call him, worked for the Kansas City sorting railroad. 

In the 1920s they were living in Texarkana.  They had their own house down on Wood Street on the same block with the Endsley house, 1300 block. Did I say what I meant to say? On Olive street?

About the date Inez moved to Shreveport for a few years, that was very 1920s. In that period of time my mother and dad and I moved in to the house down on Olive [?] Street, 1300 block. We moved there for a few years, and then we moved back to [????], and that was when I suppose Inez and Eli were transferred back to Texarkana.

In 1925 my dad and mother built their own house down on Walnut Street, 3103 Walnut Street. It’s on the northwest corner of 31^st and Walnut. We moved into that house in the spring of 1925, and that’s where we stayed until we moved to Beaumont in the summer of 1930. 

When we moved to Beaumont we moved into an apartment at 1397 Liberty. Upstairs… two in the front went upstairs, and we lived there until the summer of 1931 when we moved out to South Park and Farmville Street—lived in a house that was owned by the principal of ???? School, Mr. Edmonds. In August or September of 1931 we moved to 1705 Liberty street in a downstairs apartment of a house owned by Mrs. Murey. 

That was when Mr. and Mrs. Mathews asked mom and dad to move back to their house and take care of their house while they went and lived on an [???? Iceberg/Alaska/IcePort?]. So that must have been 1932.

In the summer of 1932 we moved to South Park, and we lived at 3904 Ogden Street on the corner of Ogden and Brotmon street, and we lived there until the summer of 1935. In the summer of 1935 mom and dad bought a house at 2344 Avenue C., and that’s where we were living when my father died. So that summarizes the different places that we lived during my father’s lifetime.

Because my father had an education that didn’t go beyond the 8^th grade he was terribly handicapped as far as work was concerned, and it seemed to me that life should be better, could be better , if you had an education. So I suppose he could be considered one of the strongest incentives that I had to be successful in school and get a college education, which of course I did. 

It was not my mother’s best [????] my teachers that encouraged me to go to college. I think I realized that if I didn’t go to college I might have the same kind of [????] in his life, and I didn’t want to do that.

Next post:  What did Barney Senior do for entertainment in early 1900s?

Barney Senior, Part 1

1. Barney McCoy Smith, Senior  (Part 1 of 4)

[These are the words of Barney McCoy Smith, Jr., recorded on an audio cassette tape, January 1999] 

Two or three days ago I started very seriously thinking about this little project, that we might call our family history, and I’ve been experimenting with this little tape recorder.

So I’m going to start with my dad. As you know his name was Barney McCoy Smith. I think that name was probably picked up from the song that was popular back at the time he was born.  I read something a good many years ago in the Macomb Public Library. One of the songs popular at that time was Barney McCoy.

Unfortunately I’ve never seen the song. I don’t know what the lyrics were or how the song sounded at all.

My dad’s parents were a very good, solid people. They were not educated. My dad’s father was Benjamin Tillman Smith, named after a politician that was notable at that time I think. Governor of North Carolina or something like that. 

Benjamin Tillman Smith was the son of William Smith, who was probably originally named Wright, and he was the one who was adopted by the Smith family, and the Smith family gave him their name. That of course is why all of us are still Smiths. That’s an interesting thing to think about. I don’t know if anyone will ever get around to the search necessary to find out anything more about our background in that. I’ve heard of course that the Mormons have extensive records. I don’t know if there are any records on that or not.

[He is buried] in the same little graveyard where Lyndon Johnson’s father is buried, and a few other [??] Texans. My dad’s parents had nine children. My dad’s mother was Sarah Burns I think. Burns or Byrns, I’m not sure which. There are practically no records that show how it’s spelled.

Notable things about my dad’s family was that they moved around an awful lot. They must have moved at least once a year. They came from over east somewhere, maybe the Carolinas. They came across through Kentucky. The story is that they came across with Daniel Boone and settled in Texas. My grandmother I think was born in South…

I’ve always heard that my Grandmother was born in Web City, Missouri. 

My dad’s family as I said had nine children, and they were four boys and then a girl and four more boys. The boys were Claude, [Tony?], [Rod?], and then Barney, then Levi, and Erica, after that was Wallace, Russel, [Mills?] and Kurt. I think you probably have some of this information. 

Anyway, my father was born on July 15, 1893.  My father was born in central Texas. I don’t know whether it was Belton or whether it was near Holland. There are both stories there and of course it doesn’t make much difference. The family moved around and by the time my dad was in his teens they were living in Texarkana, Texas. 

His father, Benjamin Tillman Smith, put in time as a policeman. He was also a street car conductor, or a farmer, and without any particular skill or particular education I’m sure with a big family they must have a pretty rough time—much different from what we’re used to today. 

My father went to the eighth grade and by the time he was a teenager he was forced to get a job to support himself. His family moved to Oklahoma and left him in Texarkana. He’d say he didn’t leave his family or leave his home, but his home went off and left him. He found a job with Uncle Horace, my mother’s brother.  That’s the only kind of business my dad was ever in as far as I know. The dry cleaning business.

He must have met my mother probably about 1913 or 1914. When she graduated from high school in 1915 he asked her to marry him. She put him off for about three years. They didn’t get married until 1918. Every since I was a little kid I heard stories that my dad proposed to my mother the night that she graduated from high school. 

The main characteristics about my father, that I remember… he was faithful. He was a hard worker. His religion I suppose was Southern Baptist. He must have joined the church as a child or as a teenager. In fact I remember his saying that he sang in the choir at one time. So I think he was what you’d call a deeply religious man, but he was a very good man—a good family man. I have to give him credit for that. I never heard him curse or swear or use strong language. I never saw him drunk. He was always very careful about his personal appearance. He liked to wear suits. He liked to wear ties. In fact when I was a little boy he used to buy suits for me and dress me up in a full dress suit. I guess back in those days it was probably more common than it is today… 

In 1918 my dad was drafted and had to go off to war, World War I. He was first sent to a training camp called Camp Travis, near San Antonio Texas. I think it was called Leon’s Range, Texas. My mother went down there to see him in June, 1918, and they got married on June the third, 1918. He almost immediately was sent overseas and didn’t get back until August, 1919. After he got back he must have gone back to work for Uncle Horace. When I was born in 1921 he was working for Uncle Horace. Uncle Horace had this factory in [cleaning?] business on West Broad Street in Texarkana on the Texas side.

Uncle Horace’s family consisted of Aunt Hess, two children, Horace Jr., and Hester Carol. Unfortunately Hester Carol came with tuberculosis, and she died in 1925 at the age of about 15. It was soon after that that Uncle Horace left Texarkana and went out west. I think it was probably the result of a deep depression. He just gave living in Texarkana and moved west, I suppose, to try to forget Hester Carol and the terrible tragedy.

I’m not sure what happened to his business, but my dad might have been out of a job then. He got another job in the same kind of business, got two jobs, different places. Finally he tried to start his own business. I think that was about 1929. Things were bad though. He just couldn’t make enough money and had to give up. 

He thought that there was a job he might get in Beaumont Texas, and in the summer of 1930 he went down to Beaumont, took the job, and later mother and I joined him in Beaumont. My dad kept that same job from that point on until his death in 1945. He worked for Mr. Lindner, Lindner dry cleaning. That’s a very successful… where he lived longest as he… until his health got bad in 1944. Of course he died in June 1945.

So my memories of my father were a bit… He was very sweet. He sure cared an awful lot about me. I was his little boy. When he came home from work he would bring candy and all sorts of stuff. On Saturday nights he would always bring [sounds like “sure-prong”??] comics from different newspapers. Sunday comics. 

This seems to be working pretty well, and my voice seems pretty clear, and you should be able to understand it. This is harder to do though than I thought it would be. I’m sitting here talking to a little black box. I’m starting to get [tired?] I’m going to stop in a moment. 

 (continued in Barney, Senior, Part 2)

Introduction: The autobiography of Barney McCoy Smith, Jr.

The Greatest Generation was born at the end of World War I, lived as children through the Great Depression and then fought and died in World War II.  The Americans in that generation transformed their county into a world leader and, for a time, offered the solution to all the world's problems.  The Great Generation defeated Nazism and Imperial Japan, stood up to communism and the Iron Curtain, put a man on the moon and ushered in the computer age.  (They also ushered in rampant materialism, defended Jim Crow and immersed the US in the Vietnam War.)

My father, Barney Smith, Jr., was born in Texarkana in 1921 and grew up in Beaumont, Texas before spending one brief failing semester at the University of Texas in 1940.  Then he signed up to fight Hitler and spent most of the second World War bouncing around US army airfields.  At the end of the war, he returned to Texas, went to UT on the GI bill and graduated with a law degree.  Shortly after arriving in Austin at the end of the war, he met a young coed from San Antonio.  He married her 13 months later in her parent's home (with only her family as witnesses.)  Days after Barney walked in graduation for his JD degree, his young wife delivered their first child, a son.  (They named the child Kenneth Woodward after Barney's favorite professor.)  After graduation Barney practiced law (briefly) and then became a university professor, teaching at the University of Houston for 11 years before moving to Western Illinois University.  He died in July 2007, days before his 59th wedding anniversary.

Before he died, I asked my father to record his life story.  He did that on a series of audio tapes.  Here, as best as I have them (slightly edited) is his story.

The story is not particularly remarkable.  But that is the beauty of it.  It is the story of a "typical" member of the Greatest Generation, growing up in eastern Texas during the depression.  He worked hard, believed in "doing right" and lived a full life.  Education (and the GI-bill) changed his life.  His life was also molded and changed (for the better) by a developing sense of God's love, by the steadfast and patient love of his wife, and (eventually) the love and respect of his three children.

In the next post, I will start Dad's audio tape.  We will return to small Texarkana, Texas at the beginning of the twentieth century.