Category: Texas

Neck Tension

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I love posed player portraits like these. I always wonder if the strong, athletic years turned out to be their glory days and they wound up selling secondhand Pontiacs in Peoria. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

1947 Cactus
1947 Cactus

As you can see, there are no facemasks on these helmets.

“If you want to prevent concussions, take the helmet off: Play old-school football with the leather helmets, no facemask,” former Steelers receiver Hines Ward said. “When you put a helmet on you’re going to use it as a weapon, just like you use shoulder pads as a weapon.” (profootballtalk.nbcsports.com)

I don’t know nothin’ ’bout no football helmets. But, golly, don’t they look happy?

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Dust In The Wind, Part 1

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Two Baca County, Colorado girls cover their mouths while pumping water into a cup in March 1935.

The Dust Bowl by Duncan & Burns showcases images and stories from the five states affected by the “worst man-made ecological disaster in American history.” Below is what is considered the Dust Bowl during the 1930s.

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Wind, drought, and poor farming practices combined to create a perfect storm of “black blizzards” across millions of acres, lasting nearly a decade.

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Imagine 14 million grasshoppers per square mile descending upon parched fields, while millions of tons of topsoil blew away each year, seeping into every crevice imaginable.

Syracuse, Kansas shopkeepers kept their arms strong by continually sweeping the dust from their sidewalks. thedustbowl-002

This paperboy in Ness City, KS donned a dust mask and goggles in order to complete his job. One imagines the headlines maintained Living in the Dust Bowl Stinks.

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The Touch, The Feel Of Cotton

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Most of the yearbooks I collect have ads in the back. Rarely are they interesting beyond the typeset or logos of the times, but this 1955 Lion’s Lair yearbook shows student at the places of business.

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These students tried out the wheelbarrow at Allandale Hardware & Variety.

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This Piggly Wiggly image gives insight to mid-century grocery stores before big chains like Wal-Mart and Target served our grocery needs.

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Butter Krust was the best bread around; we used to cover our textbooks with Butter Krust advertising sheets.

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Isn’t this last one fun? I like how they spell Bubba as “Buba.”

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Signs O’ The Times

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Tossing out old newspapers today, I stumbled on to this choice (and timely) comic. In fact, I did toss the 7/14/1984 Dallas Times Herald into the trash, but not before scanning these ads.

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And what about a nearly $1200 Beta Recorder? Bet that was only useful for a few years.

Now this just proves boots have always been expensive.

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In another I Don’t Get It moment, we have an ad for Sofa Country, hosting wrestler Kerry Von Erich to sign autographs. WTH?

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I’d never heard of him, but evidently he was part of the Von Erich family of professional wrestlers. Here he is with you-know-who.

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pinterest

And lest you think cell phones were invented in this millennium, think again.

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Save $400?? Can you imagine what the starting price was?

Literal Downlow Conversation

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1937 Cactus

Today I got my hands on a 1937 yearbook. I’ve been collecting yearbooks for many years, and have found that yearbooks from the 1930s decade are virtually non-existent. Annuals from the 1920s, however, are much easier to find. I chalk it up to the fact that during The Great Depression, which encompasses all of the 1930s, people were more concerned with getting food on the table and finding shelter than ponying up the cash for a yearbook, if they even could afford a university education. I imagine demand was not great, so fewer were printed than in the prior decade. But that is only my wager.

In any case, celebration and decadence still existed for some, as evidenced by the Delta Theta Phi banquet dinner in these images. Holidays were still holidays, and life went on.

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And Then It Goes Kaboom

Yen and Noel Brinkley selling fireworks 1970s (Austin History Center)
Yen and Noel Brinkley selling fireworks, 1970s (Austin History Center)

A little detective work found this later blurb from The Anniston Star, March 9, 1980:

Yen has been in this country since 1968. She came here to visit friends, and that’s how it happens that Noel Brinkley, after 3 years in Vietnam, met the Vietnamese woman who would become his wife in Elgin. “And to think that I lived within a block of her during the last year I was in Saigon,” he said. When they decided to get married, Brinkley said, there was some opposition “not so much from my family as from hers. In Vietnam, you see. Americans have a bad reputation when it comes to marriage. Vietnamese have a saying that Americans change wives like they change shirts.”