County, Texas. He talked to me about his childhood in Paris as
the son of a sharecropper and a carpenter.
Check out Leroy's Oklahoma experiences here!
This oral history has been edited to allow for better conversational flow.
We moved to Lamar county when I was close to school age, because Daddy
found work building Camp Maxey. We bought a house in Pleasant Hill, which
was a small town between Petty and Brookston, and I went to school there for
a while. The town is now a farm field - only the cemetery remains.
We didn't farm during the war, but we had some chickens and cows. After the
war, Mother sharecropped some land between Petty and Roxton to help feed
us kids - there were six of us. She grew cotton and corn, which we all picked
ourselves, and Milo, which was harvested with a thresher. Mother didn't sell
anything - the guy who owned the land did that. Probably cheated her, too.
We moved to Paris in the 50s, lived right by downtown. Paris had about 14,000
people then. Bois d'Arc Street by the South Depot still had bois d'arc stumps -
the road is now where the jail is. I remember the railroad being busy. There
were a lot of trains, lots of passenger service. The Main Depot and the South
Depot were connected by a trolley line. The Main Depot was on Bonham Street -
that's where the big trains went through.
Right where the police station and the Coca Cola plant are now, there stood a
large sanitarium, about three stories tall. A children's hospital was attached to
it by a long, narrow hall. Then there was Lamar County Hospital. The building is
still there, across from the Health Department, but it's not in use anymore. Dr.
Robinson, its benefactor, died and the county closed it because no one wanted
to run a charity hospital. Now, Paris is swallowed up by St Joseph, the only
hospital in town. I remember when St. Joseph was all wooden, with a large,
white, covered porch.
I loved the old schools - today's schools look like jails. All morning long, you
could smell the cafeteria cooking, and we'd have real food, like cornbread and
green beans, meatloaf or roast or fried chicken, and a tall glass of cold milk. I
went to First Ward in West Paris, then to the big Paris High School downtown,
where the bank now is. I loved the big, broad steps, the windows you could
open to listen to the birds and the sounds of the neighborhood.
In Paris, South Main, Pine Bluff, Bonham and Clarksville Streets and Lamar
Avenue were where the great houses were. They tore most of them down - it's
really sad. The streets were paved with brick, and trolleys and buses would run
everywhere. There was a Wall Drug Store, where we'd go after school to have
a soda. I remember the department stores downtown, like Belk's and J.C.
Penney. The sales clerks didn't have cash registers; they'd place the bill and
the money into a brass box, then used pulleys to send to a woman sitting in the
mezzanine, who'd' count out the change. I thought it was fun to watch."
- As told to Robin Jett
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