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?