The Great Depression; Interview with Ruth Ring Morgan. Part 2; Interview with Maggie Taylor. Part 1

TERRY KAY ROCKEFELLER:

OK, so you tell me that story.

RUTH RING MORGAN:

OK. Well, we lived there in Boynton, 1929. There was a family that lived out the edge of town whose, who didn't have enough money to buy shoes for the kids to go to school, and they had a boy my age. Well, Charlie came to the house, and he and mother decided between them that they needed to take some groceries out there and some money for those people, because they lived on a farm, and in the winter time, you know, farming back in Depression times, you know, they had practically nothing. And they had three or four children, I know. So mother gave me a little grocery list. And we go to the little grocery store around the corner from our house, I believe the name was Naphy, I think it was Naphy's Grocery. And this man knew that we knew Charlie. And mother sent the list in by me. I, I took the list, and just Charlie and I left and went to the store. And I took the list in, he filled it, put it in a basket, and carried it out to the car, tipped his hat to Charlie [gestures], and Charlie did the same to him. Charlie had the car running the whole time. He never shut the car down. And I'm sure it wasn't because it wasn't working mechanically. But anyway, we got in the car, and I showed Charlie how to go out there. We went out to the house, and it was one of these farm houses has a long porch, and you have to walk up a few steps to get to it, to get up to the porch. So Charlie carried the groceries and just set them. It was, I remember - can just see him today setting that basket upon that porch - so it was man height, you know, even with his arms, the porch was. And then he folded a bill in my hand, and he said, \"Now, Dink, give, when you knock on the door,\" he said, \"give this to the man, and tell him to buy his kids some shoes,\" his children, however he said. And I did. And the man thanked me, and I told him that mother sent him the groceries. And, and he thanked me and took them in that house, but I didn't go in. I stood at the door. And I remember saying \"Hi\" to one of the kids, but then I went on back to the car, because it was cold and you didn't want to just stand around. And I just piled into the front seat with Charlie and here went, he takes me back home. And...

TERRY KAY ROCKEFELLER:

So tell me some, now can you, thinking about those Depression times, tell me again how, how, how your family made it, what, what your mom and your dad...

RUTH RING MORGAN:

Yeah. And of course she sewed, and for groceries from this same little grocery store.

TERRY KAY ROCKEFELLER:

Can you start again and say, \"My mom\" instead of \"She,\" because [laughs]

RUTH RING MORGAN:

OK. My mother sewed, was a good seamstress, and she sewed for this Mrs. Naphy who, who was the wife of the store owner where we bought groceries. And she exchanged that for groceries. And of course when the Depression really hit hard, we were already built up in clothes, you know, because Dad had had a pretty decent job, and we had plenty of clothes and different hand-me-downs, you know, the smaller children, and when you have seven girls, and the oldest child is a boy, then all the girls can hand-me-down, you know. It isn't like having a boy and girl and a boy and a girl. So we made it fine on the clothing, and then I had a cousin who lived at the edge of town, and she and her family all had blackberries and plums and things like that. And they, they weren't hurting for money, they were cattle raisers and probably rustlers, too, if the truth were known. He later became an owner of the Fort Smith stockyards, so he's very interested in cattle, all mother's brothers were. And she would make this jelly and stuff and once in a while, when they'd butcher a hog, a pig, whatever you want to call it, they would bring over meats like that. And, of course, that really made the gravy a lot better, you know. But I recall one particular time - and I don't remember whether Dad was driving me or, well, yes - Dad was driving me to, and we saw a lot of people, you know, a lot of people, and my Dad told me that, \"Ruth, one of these days, this town is going to have a riot.\" They later did. But another time, too, a little story that I remember, was walking home from school with a teacher and seeing people with cups, tin cups. Because, you, I can take you down there now, and from school to my house you didn't have to, but, but it was more convenient to walk through a portion of the town. And that's where they fed the hungry. I don't know whether it was an organization or whether just people got together, but, because people did feed anybody that came along hungry. My mother fed every bum that knocked at the door, even in Boynton, and even more so in 1930 and '31, when we were living in the Haskell area, which is real close to Boynton, you know. It's real close. But bums would come to the door, and she, she would invite them in, you know. There wasn't any AIDS to be afraid of, then, you know, or anything else, you know. And she would invite them in the, I don't...

TERRY KAY ROCKEFELLER:

So was just, charity was kind of on a one person basis?

RUTH RING MORGAN:

Yes. Yes. We didn't have, if had, we had the Red Cross, and I'm sure they probably did some good, I don't know the extent of that, but I do know that it was neighbor-to-neighbor, and people-to-people. We, we lived in the country, in the Haskell area, in the 1930s, and even though you're not on a farm per se, you know, where you plow the field and raise things, my mother and dad always had a garden. And they were managers, and I just thank the good Lord in heaven, because my mother taught me how to manage. I may not have a lot, but I'm living, and, and you can't take a penny of it with you when you go. And she's taught me those things and said you can be anything you want to be if you want to be it bad enough. So—

[End of Morgan interview; beginning of Taylor interview]

INTERVIEWER:

So let's, let's start by just talking about your farm, and you were telling me that before, what kind of crops your father raised. Can you tell what kind of farm you had?

MAGGIE TAYLOR:

Well we just, it was general farming. Of course, he raised cotton, corn, capricorn [?], potatoes, sweet potatoes and Irish potatoes, peanuts, whatever a farmer could raise, plus cows, hogs, chicken, turkeys. All that kind of stuff.

INTERVIEWER:

And he raised cotton, too, though, didn't he?

MAGGIE TAYLOR:

Oh yes, cotton, acres and acres of cotton. We used to pick a bale of cotton a day.

INTERVIEWER:

You did, too? The, the kids?

MAGGIE TAYLOR:

Yeah, and people, people were asking, the people that lived there with us, we'd, you know, go to field and pick, you know. He'd take a bale tonight, and we'd have a bale when he'd come back tonight. Sometimes we wouldn't sleep about for three or four days, because he'd, we'd give a bale of cotton in the field and he'd come at night and he'd go and get that bale and bring it to the house, and we'd be sleeping. He'd leave the next morning and we'd still be sleeping.

INTERVIEWER:

And during the Depression, so we're talking about 1929-1932, I know some of the prices dropped. Can you tell me what happened when prices of different farm crops started to drop?

MAGGIE TAYLOR:

I just don't know what caused them to drop. I'm not all into that. I was, I was there. I just remember that cotton went down, and everything stopped getting as much to get for a bale of cotton, plus if you picked cotton for somebody, you didn't get as much, pick one hundred pounds, like you used to get. And the price markets just went over, I guess, and they stopped getting the money for it, as far as I know.

INTERVIEWER:

And what happened when the price of cotton started going down, and how did that affect the people that were picking it?

MAGGIE TAYLOR:

Well, it just, they would pick, see they would pick it, they knew it, they, they could hear it just like the rest of us folk could the prices were down. And of course it just means they had to pick more to get more money, I guess, and things like that, you know. And it was all over this area, and, you know, on the whatnot, and people, some people, began to go out Western Oklahoma. They tried to go where it was more cotton and more they could pick when that's all they would have. But, just, it was quite a lot of, see it was a lot of cotton. People were raising a lot of cotton, but it just wasn't for sale.

INTERVIEWER:

And did, so did people start leaving Boley? Or did they...?

MAGGIE TAYLOR:

Well, yes, for the most part right around here they left, and they, they began to just like anything else. They have cotton, see, if the cotton was here, and they'd pick cotton, and when we'd pick out what you had, pick with somebody else. And you'd begin to store up, spend less, and everything else, and you knew wasn't this much money going to be for cotton, and you had to store for the winter and whatever, whatever you're supposed to do. And some people would hear, especially kind of single people out over here, places over in Western Oklahoma, some other place where still was a lot of cotton and they were wanting cotton pickers, well they'd get on loads of wagons, or covered wagons, or cars, or whatever, what have you, and go over to that area, and pick it for a couple of months until it picked out, whatnot, come back home, and have a good time in the winter eating and sleeping and staying around home till the next spring come.

INTERVIEWER:

And during the Depression how did, how did your family fare? What did, how did, what did you do to get by?

MAGGIE TAYLOR:

Well, as I already said, my daddy, we had cotton, and he would pick the, we'd pick the cotton, everything. And he and my mother were very good providers for us. There were five children of us, and they would provide for whatever we needed, and we understand that. My mother sewed. I was sixteen years old before I wore a ready-made dress.

MAGGIE TAYLOR:

She'd sew, and we would sew, and the only things that we'd have—

INTERVIEWER:

Sorry, I'm sorry. I have to stop you.

INTERVIEWER:

OK, so, sorry I had to cut you off in the middle there. You were telling me what your family did to get by during the Depression?

MAGGIE TAYLOR:

Well, as I said, we just learned, I guess, that you worked while you had plenty, and then store up something for the rainy day, so to speak. And we always, the Lord was with us, I guess, with my mother and daddy. We didn't, we didn't suffer too much, and we always could help somebody else, you know, kind of round about us, because we just, just one of those things. And we knew the Depression was there, we just learned to eat less [laughs], wear less, and do those kinds of things.

INTERVIEWER:

Do you remember anything in particular that your mother did to help make things a little more comfortable?

MAGGIE TAYLOR:

My mother did about everything, and she would see that we did everything. She would raise the garden. We'd always have a garden. We'd always have a surplus garden, garden if we could share with someone else and \"truck patches,\" we'd call them, bean patches. We used to pick beans and peas and something like that by the cotton sack and then thrash them out, put them in a great big can, a can during the winter time, you see, like you go into the store and buy beans, like you go and buy bag of beans now. We'd just go in get out a cup of beans or something like that and put in something and cook 'em.

INTERVIEWER:

Could you tell me, we talked about this a little bit, but explain to me, your father, now he did, you were just saying he rented the land. Now, I'm a little confused here...

MAGGIE TAYLOR:

Leased. Leased, we called it leased.

INTERVIEWER:

MAGGIE TAYLOR:

Because leased. Land, the land that we lived on, as I understood after I grew up, mostly, seemed to've been Indian land, there's a lot of Indian land out there. And this, this, this Mr. Donaldson leased the land, my daddy leased the land from him, he leased the land. And Poppa had his own tools, had his own stock and everything and worked the land, and he paid so much for the lease each year, whatever the case might be. And we lived like we thought maybe we owned it, as far as we knew, we stayed there so long and grew up there. My—

INTERVIEWER:

So was he a tenant farmer, then? What's the difference between a tenant farmer and a sharecropper?

MAGGIE TAYLOR:

Well, a tenant farmer, I mean a sharecropper, like if you, you have, you have some stock of horses, cows, what everything, and I rent them from you and I go and work my crop with them, and we pay so much for you each year and so much for the crop sometimes it takes three fourths, if I make four bales of cotton, maybe two bales, one bale'd go to you, a half, whatever the case, whatever agreement we get, come up here, go to you and whatnot. Other than that, when you lease, you lease it for so much, and then you, whatever you make, you pay that, pay, pay that lease. And if you leased it for... more money, if it happen to come out you make more than that, why you were the beneficiary, I guess whatever, whatever the case might be. Because, long at that time, we didn't know all the details of it, because kids didn't mess in peoples', old folks' business. [laughs] You just went to work and did what they told you to do. And we never had, came something, do that. We'd ask them, our father, parents weren't mean to us or nothing like that, but, and they'd tell us anything we'd ask them, but we just didn't have a need to know. We just knew that we was gettin' along all right. We had cars, when people that got cars out in the country there, we had a car. My daddy had cultivators. He had mowing machines and had all other kinds of things that, that a lot of other people had down there that owned their land and was doin' everything else my daddy had, owned it. And we didn't, we were always accustomed to those kinds of things. We'd come to school over here, we, when school's out, we'd go home, go to work.

INTERVIEWER:

In—do you remember hearing about Pretty Boy Floyd during the Depression?

MAGGIE TAYLOR:

Not, not in the Depression. Pretty Boy Floyd, we heard, we'd hear about Pretty Boy Floyd along in 1932 when Birdwell was came in here, to this bank and things like that.

We'd hear about Pretty Boy Floyd

and those kinds of things, but we didn't ever,

and some other the outlaws, I can't think of their names now

,over here and down in Texas, that would be loose, and we'd hear about them. And

mostly we had to talk about

them, we didn't know about talking about all this sex and stuff kids talk about now.

We'd talk about that kind of stuff, you know [laughs], and get a lot of fun out of it.

INTERVIEWER:

What do you remember talking about, about outlaws?

MAGGIE TAYLOR:

We'd just hear that they was—now, if we had some relatives, you know, sometimes lived in some of the areas, they would tell about maybe they was down that area at one time and, and what happened down in that part of the country and so forth like that. And we'd talk about it sometimes like that, especially down in Texas. My mother's people, my mother and father's people were in Louisiana, and then we had some relatives down in Texas, and they'd, sometimes they'd hear from them and they'd tell them that Pretty Boy Floyd, some of those outlaws came through here the other day [inaudible] near us, something like that, you know.

INTERVIEWER:

Did you ever see his pictures in the newspapers? Or—

MAGGIE TAYLOR:

Not, when I, I think I started teaching when I saw, I started teaching in '32. I finished high school in '30, and two years after I went to college and got two years of basic work, I started teaching and going back to school, to college. And I didn't, I didn't, you know, lot, lot of things I would hear and read about then that I didn't read about before. And, you know, for a long time, we didn't have, we didn't have any TVs and that kind of stuff back in that time. We had radios.

INTERVIEWER:

Could you tell me the story, I know that you're saying that some, Pretty, Pretty Boy Floyd came into town one day to check out the bank, and some young—

MAGGIE TAYLOR:

Well, that's what they told us, Roland Floyd and them. Some of the young, young men that would be on the streets around, and they said that they, they, they, they were noticing strange cars, anybody would come into town, and kind of check them out, so to speak. And they said that someone came in town, and right down on the corner there, where, where the post office is now, it was a three story building then. And it was a café at the bottom, and the whole town was just really flushing and everything, and it was up and down the streets, and so they noticed that. See, the bank was, was right across the street from that. And they noticed any kind of strange car come in town, they'd always pay attention to it. They noticed this car had came and that it had a lot of mirrors. This man sat there, look in, focused these mirrors and everything and round about. And they began to say who it was, and they, and naturally boys, lot of times, from time to time, they'd pick up on pictures and whatnot, and they would know what the picture looked like, someone that they'd seen or heard about or whatnot. So they say that they thought that was him, that he came in that, and he was looking around, he was trying to see what the situation was. Well, I was out teaching when, when Birdwell and the group came in here. [inaudible]

INTERVIEWER:

Why do you suppose that everyone was so suspicious about a new car coming into town? Were people really aware of this bank, was it a bank robbing spree? Or—

MAGGIE TAYLOR:

Not that I know about. They just, oh, I mean, any time a car come in town it could be you or anybody else or just whatever different, a different car would come in town, the youngsters, they would just kind of notice it, really notice it, you know what I mean, pay attention to it.

INTERVIEWER:

Well, with all the bank robbing going on, do you think that anyone in Boley ever have a fear that maybe the bank was going to be robbed? Or did you ever feel that you might be part of that?

MAGGIE TAYLOR:

I didn't know about it. I didn't think so. I just remember Mr. Turner lived up the street up there. He just, just, you know, back in that time, sometimes you had some person that, oh, would just kind of look out like for the whole town, and was a banker and everything, and provide for the small man as well as the big man and so to speak and everything like that. And I hadn't never heard it whether he talked about it or not, because I don't, like I said, I was working out of town. I never heard him saying to anybody that they was fearing anything in particular about the bank robbing. But they prepared, he prepared for it, because he had the alarms, and he had a fellow by the name of John Owens who had been a policeman that he didn't, he didn't back down off of nobody, he just wasn't fearful of nobody. When he'd come through the countryside sometime, we would, riding his horses, they'd go bird hunting, several of them come out in the rural. And you'd see them coming, John, and they'd turn and somehow, get off the road, saying, like they did this kind of, "here come that man," you know how people, kids would say at that, that day and time. So he had a market up the street, and he had one of these alarms was in his place, and I don't remember right now, but there was a couple other places seemed like they had, their attachment was there. And way they had it, suppose they had it, were in the bank, was some money under this alarm. And the thing, if you pull the money out, the alarm would go off. It wouldn't make a lot of sound particularly there in the bank, but it would at that place, let them know something was happening at the bank. And so up the street there on that day when, when he asked Turner for the money, and Turner started, [inaudible] when he put a bag in there, when he started getting him, getting the money, he just reached over and he pulled, he pulled, he pulled this one alarm. He said, "You pulled that alarm." And Mr. McCormick, who lives there, and who lives up on that hill as you go out on the highway, that house that sits on the hill, straight on up south there, was givin', was in the bank. And he is always mindful of what was happening and what is going on around about him, and everything. And so when they pulled this, this alarm and whatnot, he just kind of—

INTERVIEWER:

Excuse me, ma'am, I'm going to interrupt you. Cut.