Great Depression | Sage to Meadow ~ Jack Matthews

Tag Archives: Great Depression

April 3, 2011 · 8:34 am

Spring with Effie and Gywn

Effie Vernon Morris Parks (1900-1966)

I have written about my grandmother, Effie Parks, many times on the blog. Here is a photograph of her in 1919, near Bend, Texas. She cooked for chuck wagons on several ranches along with her husband, Jake, who managed cattle on horseback. During the Great Depression, she sewed for the Works Progress Administration. In her last years, she worked as a telephone operator in Lometa and Bend, Texas. She taught me the rudiments of dominoes, playing guitar and hitting a baseball. She and her husband were married by a parson in an onion field near the Colorado River in central Texas. In her will, she divided her property among her two children and me.

Gywn Matthews Hollingshead (1920-2003)

This is my mother, Gywn. This photograph was taken about 1938 when she was living with her mother, Effie, at Bend, Texas. She married my father, Jack, in 1942, shortly before he volunteered to become a parachutist with the 506th P.I.R. He was a member of Easy Company, made famous by Stephen Ambrose and Tom Hanks. Gywn worked for over thirty years for the Southwestern States Telephone Company and General Telephone. She helped pay for my college education and gave Brenda and me the money for a down payment for a $35,000 house in Mingus, Texas in 2000. She would come to Mingus and visit us, sitting in the kitchen and looking out on the vineyard I had planted. She always had a quote of some sort to throw out for the occasion. One I remember is: Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies. She was Irish mainly, and proud of it.

I have posted these photographs and short commentary of Effie and Gywn because it is April and Spring is upon us and I never can go through this month without thinking of how Effie and Gywn and I traveled the backroads to Bend, Texas, and San Saba to visit relatives at Easter. The flowers of April and May emitted the most beautiful perfumes imaginable in nature. They talked quietly about plants and cattle and loved ones that we saw and loved ones that had departed. I sat in the back seat of the car and listened to their talk and inhaled the scent of bluebonnets and paintbrushes all around.

Today, Brenda and I can travel the same road to Bend, Texas, and flowers spring up again. We can go down that road and crisscross the same roads I traveled as a boy with Effie and Gywn.

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Filed under Bend Texas, Life in Balance

Tagged as 101st Airborne, 506th PIR, Effie Parks, Great Depression, Gywn Hollingshead, Jack Matthews, Jake Parks, Lampasas, Lometa, Texas, Works Progress Administration

July 18, 2010 · 10:12 am

Sharing the Trail? Guest Post by Ruth Karbach

[Ruth Karbach of Fort Worth, Texas, is an historian whose most recent work are two chapters in Grace and Gumption: Stories of Fort Worth Women, TCU Press, 2007. This is a comment she wrote in response to “Upper Llano Redoubt,” a recent post on the blog. Ruth’s statement brings out issues we will have to resolve in the outdoors.]

Lone Hiker (All Big Bear California)

Last year my generous friend loaned me her home in the mountains of southern Colorado. Solitude to commune with nature after a tough twenty months dealing with terminal illness of my beloved and grief with his death was the solace I needed. Alerts about armed robberty on trails in the last couple of years were discouraging to hiking as a single female; but my two Shelties came to the rescue. We traveled many a trail during our week of “Rocky Mountain High” and meet some interesting people and critters.

Unprecedented in forty years of hiking state and national forest was being nearly hit by a mountain bike as I was helping my dogs up a four foot vertical embankment to get off the trail. The two teen riders did not slow, move over or stop after I had to throw myself onto the embankment to avoid an accident.

Mountain Biking (All Big Bear California)

My husband was a naturalist at a nature center and refuge which prohibited this kind of traffic because of environmental damage, and Fort Worth supplies park rangers to patrol the largest city owned nature refuge in the Continental U. S. People unfamiliar with nature do destructive and unthinking things sometimes endangering animals and themselves.

With the present economy we are seeing more neglect and underfunding of the quality of life services such as libraries, parks and the arts. To me, this is the time when these services and talents are most needed. During the Great Depression greater wisdom in government caused a flowering of public arts, building of park structures and funding by local businesses and individuals of book purchases for libraries. Have we become too urban, too materialistic, too self-centered a people interested in immediate gratification? I hope not.