THE INSTITUTE OF TEXAN CULTURES
ORAL HISTORY PROGRAM
INTERVIEW WITH: Kyle Hilliard
DATE: June 16, 1989
PLACE: Killeen, Texas
INTERVIEWERS: Walter and Janie Sargeant
JS: Were you born here in Killeen?
H: Yes, I was born out on the farm, about 3 and a half
miles out of here.
JS: And you were saying you wished your mother were alive
to be interviewed.
H: Correct. And she was not born here in this area but
nearby and she grew up down around Sparta and, Sparta being
north of Belton about 12 or 15 miles northwest of Belton.
And so she taught at the rural school that I attended. She
taught there in 1921 and then she taught there in 1931 and
in fact was my first grade teacher.
So, and then she married one of the trustee's sons. She
had roomed at my grandfather's house. He had a fairly large
house with four bedrooms and so the single schoolteachers
frequently had a room there when they taught - the school
was Palo Alto.
WS: That was not originally Killeen, though, was it?
H: Killeen was founded right here where it is now but Palo
Alto was a small community and I think at one time had a
postoffice and they moved - when the railroad came through
here they moved to Killeen, so, in other words it was
settlers out in the Palo Alto and Sugarloaf Area.
~
HILLIARD 2
H: sugarloaf was a little mountain of a hill, just looked
like a lump of sugar, came to a point, it was a pyramid or a
cone, and that was the community that Palo Alto was about a
mile and a half from it. So there was a church at
Sugarloaf and the school was Palo Alto. Anyway it was a
little community and they moved the community to Killeen, so
to speak, when the railroad came through here. We recently
celebrated Killeen ' s hundredth anniversary.
was '82, 1982, Killeen was 100 years old.
I believe it
WS: Your grandparents now, your mother came from over
there?
H: Yes.
WS: And where did they come from?
H: My father's parents are in Hilliard, and Clara Brock
Hilliard, and they came from the farm out here. They came
from a little place called Midway over close to Belton,
between Temple and Belton. There is still a Midway but it
is not exactly the same geographic location. But anyway,
Grandpa Hilliard's folks had come from Georgia originally.
And Grandpa Hilliard was one of about 11 children and his
father I think died quite young and the mother reared these
little children pretty much by herself. And, outlived a
good many of them.
JS: I wonder how she did it.
H: I don't remember. Maybe she took - supervised hard work
of the older ones and, you know, it was really the older
sons that did the work, . when that happened, a lot of times.
You know, no social security in those days. In fact, my own
HILLIARD 3
H: mother - my mother's father died before my mother was
three years old, and left his widow and two children. A
sister was about a year or two older than my mother so here
was Grandmother Kyle - that's where I got my name - with her
husband taken away and he was about 31 or 32 and died of
cancer. No social security, no welfare benefits of any
kind, she had no way to earn a living. She might work as a
farm hand.
So, she had to rely on relatives and friends to keep
going, and people helped people back in those days. They
pretty well didn't have a choice and I know s ome of our very
dearest friends all my life were the Sandlings who lived at
Sparta, which was this little community; very, very rugged
country. We used to go to see the Sandlings. They lived in
the Sparta Mountain and, of course, that's a hill to people
from the Rockies or somewhere, the Alleghenies or
Appalachian Mountains. But you could hardly get the Model T
Ford up that mountain road. It was a gravel road that
turned and twisted and, you know, deep, it was just rocky
and just barely passable.
WS: What kind of farming there---
H: They farmed - once you got up on top of that mountain it
was flat and the soil was fertile and they farmed cotton and
corn, and maize. Row crops, everything, I guess.
WS: Somebody earlier was telling us about they had a corn
shucker here in Killeen. Did you ever ---
H: I don't remember a corn shucker but I remember five gins
in Killeen. At one time Killeen had five gins just going
like a storm during the cotton growing season. That was the
HILLIARD 4
H: big crop back in those days, of course. The land was
virgin land then. I'm kinda rambling around a little bit.
There's different stories to tell, like the Sandlings. Let
me get back to them.
Mr. and Mrs. Sandling were merely friends, they weren't
even relatives. And, they sort of took my grandmother and my
mother and her sister under their wing and either kept them
at their own home unti l , you know, they could find some­where
else to stay, and gave them - first of all, the only
one th a t was old enough to do any work was my g randmother and
they let her chop cotton or whatever work to do in the field.
That was about the only labor that there was available that
anybody around here could do, would be farm labor.
And so perhaps knowing Mr. Sandling he let, you know, a
few years passed before she, my grandmother remarried, after
about 6 or 7 or 8 years. So, mama was a little girl, say 7,
she was trying to work in the field and I'm sure Mr. Sandling
was paying her at least something if not as much as the
adults and he would work hard and help her catch up when she
fell behind the group and, you know, just pet her and take
such good care of her and so this - and then there were
relatives that they lived with from time to time so that's
how - and then finally my grandmother remarried.
She married a nice gentleman and they had two boys and a
girl and had a family and somebody, you know, to support the
family. Then, so, back in those days it was hard to make it
even when you had both parents, but when you lost one you
were just dependent on good people.
JS: Then when did you move into Killeen?
HILLIARD
H: Let's see. We moved to Killeen in '41, 1941.
JS: Why did you move he r e?
5
H: Why? We moved to Ki lleen - my dad had - we were on a
tenant farm, we didn't own it. In contrast to my grand­father,
my grandfather was a very good manager. He was one
of the most successful farmers in the area north of Killeen.
Had one o f t he nicest homes. My dad frequently mentioned
that it was hard work on his part and his brother's part,
that enabled Pa to have one of the finest farms in the
country. And, he always seemed to think that Pa was an
awfully hard taskmaster, and that Pa whipped hard.
And, so, dad, I don't know just exactly how it happened,
but he was not a successful farmer like his father was. I
think he got real discouraged and just gave up. Couldn't
really do it, 's o , I'll just get by the best I can and have
fun. I'll have a good time.' He always believed in having a
good time. Neighbors of ours that were better off than we
were who owned their farms, who managed and really had some­thing,
had good equipment, good horses, good harness, they
didn't let their kids do the things that my daddy let us do.
We had more fun. We made ice cream more often; we went
swimming more often. So when you're real poor sometimes you
think it's hopeless to really get ahead so let's just live
and have a good time from day to day. And, I was a fairly
severe judge of my father for many years until I started
having reunions with these neighbors years later and we would
reminisce and I would brag on how their parents had such nice
homes and nice farms and nice equipment and everything, and
they invariably volunteered: But y ' all had the fun.
HILLIARD 6
S: That's interesting.
H: I respect my father more.
JS: Well, did he move into town to work here?
H: Oh, yes. I was gonna tell you. The reason my dad late
in the '30s he was that he was never gonna be able to make
anything farming. You know the land had gotten mOre poor .
It was worn out by cotton. I was gonna tell you - in the
early days my grandfather when he first moved to this - in
the early '20s cotton was 40t a pound. And he made a bale to
the acre and he'd have a 14-acre patch and he'd get 14 bales
out of it. If he'd had another patch over here with 16 ac r es
he would get 16 bales of cotton off that. A bale to the acre
with no irrigation and no fertilizer. And, that was in the
'20s.
But if you put cotton on that land every year , or even
alternate it with corn every year, first thing you know all
the nutrients are taken out of that soil and we never heard
of fertilizer back then. And so the land flat wore out and
by the time and them, and of course , my dad seen his dad make
40 ba l es of cotton on 40 acres and get 40t a pound for it.
Daddy was a cotton farmer the rest of his life. He never
got over that. The facts got considerably worse. For
example, he made a third of a bale to the acre or a fourth of
a bale to the acre and he got 7 and st a pound. In the depth
of the depression he got st a pound for his cotton but he
kept farming cotton. He kept on with the cotton farming
because Pa had made that good money back in the early '20s.
That was the early '30s and the middle '30s but he kept on.
But it finally became clear that you could never make any
HILLIARD
H: money cotton farming. The price never did get up that
good again, at least maybe it did during World War II .
7
But, he finally got a job working for the Austin Bridge
Company making 40f an hour . And the wages on the farm -
wages were 12.Sf an hour. So 40f an hour, $16 a week for a
40 - hour week, looked real good , and so he took it. And he
just stayed with that bridge company and we continued to
farm the best we could, my brother and I were in our teens,
and so we s truggled along on the farm and finally in 1941 we
moved into Killeen and daddy eventually got on a t Camp Hood
and even I, in the summer of 1942 when I graduated from high
school, was able to get a job as a carpenter helper building
Camp Hood, making SOf an hour. And the summer before I
chopped cotton for l2.Sf an hour. So I was making four
times as much money.
JS: You had lots of plans, earning that much money, on what
you were going to do with it.
H: Ye s. I wanted to go to college. My mother went to
college and my daddy, I 'l l give him credit, he had about an
8th grade education and he always said to us during the
'30s, during the depression , when everybody was struggling
to make ends meet, he said : Get an education. Don't do like
I did . Don't ever quit school . Get all the education you
can, and even though he didn't do anything to provide any
money for it, he planted the idea, which might have been
better than some money, in the long run. So , again, my dad
I gotta give him a lot of credit now that I look back on it.
WS: He's smarter every year .
H: Absolutely. He's getting smarter now that I'm getting
HILLIARD
H: old enough to be a grandpa and a great grandpa I'm
deciding daddy was a whole lot smarter than I thought he
was.
JS: Then where did you go to college?
H: University of Texas.
8
JS: Did you come back, then, to Killeen, when you finished
college?
H: Not immediately. Getting back to this - I never doubted
that I was going to college, and I was too naive to figure
out how or I would have balked at going . But I just said :
I'm going. And so I saved my money, lived at home and saved
my money while I was making this sot an hour, and in fact I
accumulated a staggering $200 in cold cash in the summer of
'42. And I took that $200 and a trunk and went to the
University of Texas.
And I wanted to play baseball. My high school coach was
a real good baseball coach, Coach Leo Buckley. And he saw
that I was a pretty good baseball player. So I went down to
Austin on the bus and without an appointment I walked from
the bus station to the head baseball coach's home in Austin,
which was about 4 miles , on August 10, 1942, and rang the
doorbell. He could have been in Colorado or any other of a
number of places. As my luck would have it, the man himself,
Uncle Billy Dish, answered the doorbell. And I introduced
myself and said: "I would like to come to the University of
Texas and play baseball." And he said: "Come right in , young
man, come right in."
He started asking me questions about where I played and
what my batting average was, and where I batted in the
HILLIARD 9
H: batting order in high school , what kind of grades I made,
and we would just be delig hted to have you come to the
University of Texas and come out for baseball. We 'll give you
every opportunity to play for the University of Texas. Have
you got a room reserved? of course, I hadn 't thought that far
ahead. After all, it was only the 10th of August. I said:
" No. " He says: "1'11 reserve you a room with some other
baseball players. " He says : "How are you coming down when you
come to go to school?" I said: "1'11 come on the bus." He
says: "Drop me a card a few days ahead of time and tell me
when you'll be at the bus station and I 'll pick you up and
take you to your room." He had never seen me play baseball.
Never seen me before. Never heard of me.
And this, I'll bet by that time he was 70 years old and he
would have been completely retired except that Bill Faulk was
a bachelor and the head coach had gone into the service in the
early years of the war and so Mr. Bishop come out of retire­ment
to coach the baseball team. And so , he did just what he
told me he would do. I dropped him a card and t old him when I
was coming and he was at the bus station himself and met me at
the bus s tation and took me to that room. A great man. I
didn't even realize i t then because in the small town of
Killeen everybody treated you nice like that, you know. But
big city, big time people didn't do that. He was a great man.
JS: What year was that?
H: This was '42, 1942.
WS: So you ended up playing baseball.
H: As a matter of fact, my roommate was on a scholarship, you
know, he had clippings, and he was on a scholarship. He did
HILLIARD 10
H: not go to class, and he would go out at night. I don't
know where he went, but he would come in late at night, 2 or
3 hours after I went to bed, and turn on the only light in
the house. We didn't even have table lamps. We just had a
ceiling lamp. Turn on that ceiing light and sit up in the
middle of the bed and read funny books until an hour or two
later. And then he would finally go to sleep and sleep until
10 or 11 o'clock in the morning while I was going to those 8
o'clock classes. He went home for Christmas and I have never
seen him again. I never saw him again. He went home for
Christmas and that was the last I ever saw of him.
JS: Do you think he flunked out, or ...
H: He didn't go to class - he never made a passing grade the
whole fall. Well, in the meantime, every pretty day we would
go over to the park field nearby. Mr. Dish had deliberately
put us in this house that was easy walking distance to the
baseball field. And so we went over and just informally
practiced, you know. We'd have batting practice and throw a
little catch and everything every pretty day and we would
choose up and have an intersquad game every once in a while
and so by the time this roommate of mine didn't come back
from Christmas holidays, Mr. Dish had already seen that I was
a good baseball player.
And so he gave me this guy's scholarship and at midterm I
got to move over with another boy that roomed there that
wasn't in Hill Hall but was on a scholarship from Sunset High
School in Dallas. He and I moved over into the athletic
dormitory and were roommates the spring semester of that
.year. So, we got out of the depression and with that $200
HILLIARD 11
H: and being put on that little scholarship where I got
paid $25 a month, I went to the gym and worked two hours a
day sweeping and with the help of that scholarship and that
room and board in the athletic dormitory, linens furnished,
and not having very many clothes or very many luxuries, I
hung in there for two years and got 60 semester hours of
work before I went into the Army for World War II service.
And so, I made it on $200. Of course, my parents, my
mother struggled and sent me a check of $20 or $40 every
once in a while. She helped me what she could which wasn't
really a whole lot but it was very very very, you know , a
dollar then was worth $50 now, maybe a hundred.
JS: Well, when you finished college, let's see, you went to
the military, you said.
H: Yes, I went into the service in '44, stayed 30 months,
and then I went back to school. I had the GI Bill, then.
And so I got a B.A. in '49 then I went to Edinburg High
School and taught and I may be using up valuable time on the
tape with some of these stories that don't have much to do
with local color, maybe, but , anyway it was my first year to
to teach at Edinburg High School and I taught all freshman
English and half of them were Hispanics. Half of those
people were Hispanics and I had never been to Edinburg in my
life. So it was their first year in high school and it was
my first year to teach and we grew up together. And they
are having a reunion exactly one month from today (it is
starting in Edinburg) of that class that graduated in '53
that I taught when they were freshmen and I wouldn't miss it
HILLIARD 12
H: for the world. Because we are going to have some fun,
in the midd l e of July.
JS: Could they speak English very well?
H: Some of them had quite a bit of difficulty. Well, now
they spoke it fairly well, and they understood it fairly
well, but as far as writing it, it was most difficult f o r
them. Many of them when they would write my name they wrote
Mr. Killer, K-i-double l-e-r, that's the way it sounded to
them, or that's the way it seemed to them. They would spell
it H-i-double l-i-a-r-d , K-i-double l-e-r. I don't think
they really me ant it l i terally.
I loved them. They were - some of them were very poor.
Many of them were the labor - farm labo r class - and they
would come into school real late in the fall and leave maybe
before school was out in the spring. You know, you just
didn't get a full year's work in. Some of them rode a bus,
I don't know, 40 miles one way. You know, they lived so far
- it was a large geographical area and it was very hard on
those that lived way out from the school itself; from
Edinburg.
JS: Then when did you come back to Killeen to stay?
H: I came back to stay permanently in - see I taught at
Edinburg, I taught one year, then I worked on the Civil
Service here at Fort Hood a year, went back and got my
master's degree, and then went back and taught at Edinburg
another year. That was when these kids that I had taught
when they were freshmen, they were now seniors, even though
I did not teach them, I saw them, many of them, every day,
and we could be friends more than we could when it was a
HILLIARD 13
H: teacher-pupil relationship. So that's one of the
reasons I've got such a warm feeling toward them , as I made
frie nds. We developed our friendship when they were seniors
and I would see them around on the campus when I was still
teaching freshmen, you know. So, I carne back to Killeen
after that second year of teaching down there which would be
i n the summer of ' 53 , and I taught at Killeen High School
two years , then went into the insurance business.
JS: Was this an existing insurance business , or did you
start it?
H: I started it from scratch . It was life insurance when I
started. You know , li fe insurance agents back in those days
especially , just officed out of their horne, and so that's
the way I did. I off iced out of my horne for at least a year
or two and then I got a very modest office in town and but
then I was still single and it's pretty hard for a single
man to stay in the life insurance business only. Just keep
on selling. You don 't have any family like you do at
faculty of the school, and I missed that school faculty
situation that's sort of like a family, and one of my close
friends was a middle school, junior high school principa l
and his counsellors were real scarce and his counsellor left
late in the summer, resigned late in the summer, and he was
having a difficult time finding a counsellor so he
suggested: Why don't you corne over here and be our junior
high counsellor.
I didn't have a counsellor's certificate but I had
several educational psychology courses and I could get a
provisional certificate for counselling and so I decided I'd
HILLIARD 14
H: better do that. I was sort of lonely and lost, being a
lonely commission salesman. And so I started in 1958, I
became a junior high school counsellor, and did that for
three years. And then, the first of those years I met the
lady that I married out here, and after 7 months of furious
courtship, her being in Galveston and me here, and I'd drive
to Galveston every weekend, which was no short trip, and so
we got married in '59 and then I did school counselling
until I resigned in '61 and went back in the life insurance
business.
I had a home now, and a family, and more stability and
everything, and so - but I stayed in the life insurance
business a total of eleven years and then in '68 I went into
fire and casualty also, and that's what led to this building
here being built.
JS: When you first went in with the life insurance, was
there much other insurance offered at that time? Commercial
insurance.
WS: Commercial insurance. Most of the stores and
everything had commercial insurance, fire ---
H: Yes, in other words, life insurance men, most live
insurance men in those days didn't comprehend going into
fire and casualty also. The fire and casualty people, they
were what we call general insurance, and they all had
offices and clerical help and they wrote homeowners and
automobile insurance and they wrote fire on commercial
buildings. They wrote liability and workers' compensation
and that sort of thing, and that is a very different thing
from the life insurance.
HILLIARD
WS: I was curious about - back again to your parents and
possibly your grandparents - insurance was pretty much
unheard of then.
15
H: That's right. I remember one insurance agent called on
my father when I was a boy at home growing up. I remember
one time, during the '30s.
WS: What did ?
H: I would imagine - I think after World War II a lot of
people - of course, the economy began to pick up. During
the '3 0s - I was born in '25 - so I don't remember anything
much about the '20s except what I heard. But it was such a
struggle just to eat during the '30s that most people didn't
worry about insurance. I don't think there was a farmer
amywhere around that had fire insurance in case his house
burned. If his house burned up he just started over. He
just tried to build a new one.
And, then of course, very few of them had any lif e
insurance before World War II. But World War II, about 4
million young men were in the military and they had $10,000
of life insurance. When they got out they had the option to
keep it. People started thinking about $10,000 of life
insurance was a good idea and so World War II and the
post-World War II period kicked life insurance off and it
made it acceptable, people began to believe in it, although
when I started in in 1955 in the life insurance business, at
that time we had just had an insurance scandal in Texas. A
company in Waco had gone broke and so life insurance had a
bad, bad name in Texas and it was a very bad time to get
HILLIARD 16
H: started, me being brand new, especially if the home
office of your company was a Texas company, which mine was.
But gradually more and more people began to believe that
owning life insurance was a good thing. But certainly, it
was not even thought about much before World War II around
here. We were a rural cotton-farming community and gradually
people went more into stock farming, raising cattle and that
sort of thing , but before World War II almost everybody
W5: Well, car insurance wasn't too popular before World War
II either.
H: No, back in the '30s you didn't have to have a driver's
license to drive. I drove a Model-T when I was 9 years old.
I went to town by myself when I was 10 to get ice. Put a
cushion, a pillow, something under myself to see over the
dashboard and I drove the Model-T by myself when I was just
a very young kid.
W5: That wouldn't apply to like Houston, would it, back
then?
H: I wouldn't imagine. The oldest agency in Killeen that I
can think of was founded in 1928. So there was a man who
started an insurance agency in 1928. Now he wrote small -
all of the businesses in town were fairly small - and he
wrote some fire and casualty insurance for those businesses.
But not very much life insurance was sold by anybody before
1940. Maybe a thousand dollar, maybe a $500, maybe a $250.
There were a lot of $250 policies, a lot of $500 policies,
and a lot of $1000 policies back then. There were burial
policies.
., .
HILLIARD 17
JS: I was wondering - burial policies were separate from
the life insurance policies . I was wondering how they would
bury someone who died, or where they would get the money?
H: I suspect that a lot of burials were done on credit.
But I wouldn ' t know this. This is a hunch. But I can kinda
tie it in with other things that - services that people had
t o have . For example, medical care, medical services. I do
know this for a fact. That doctors would, and Dr- . I the hero
doctor - , the small town superman when I was a little boy
was Dr. D. L. Wood. He was the only doctor in town. Oh , I
t a ke it back, t here was a Dr. Small, and there was even a
Dr. Walker. Dr . Walker didn't do much practice. I think he
was maybe older and semi-retired by the time I became aware
in the early '30s . Dr.Small had a reasonably good clientele
I suppose, but I think Dr.Wood was by far the busiest doctor
all around this area .
And along about 1933 or ' 34 he brought in a young man
named Dr. Fowler who grew up in Temple. And, I know that Dr.
Wood was the doctor on hand when my brother and I and my
sister were born in the middle '20s. And I daresay that he
did every bit of that on credit. I bet he didn't get paid
for any of that until later on and he might have taken some
chickens and eggs in on the bill. And I know that Dr. Fowler
did the same thing .
They made house calls. They'd go 12 or 25 miles out some
rough country road to deliver a baby and the people would
say: We'll pay you whenever we can . And he knew that they
would. And those doctors did that and they made it.
And, so, now getting back to the funerals, I daresay
HILLIARD 18
H: that a lot of fune~als we~e held - they didn't have any
insurance, and the people didn't have the money to pay cash.
They just paid it out o~ they t~aded some hogs in on part of
the bill, or some chickens, or some eggs or some butte~.
WS: I'm just asking about land values here back in the
1900s. Do you have any idea of it?
H: I don't know fo~ su~e, but I have a feeling that $25 an
ac~e was a high p~ice for land in the early 1900s. Might
have even been $10 an ac~e, but that's just a guess.
I want to tell you about my Grandfathe~ Hilliard that I
mentioned that had this very nice farm with four bedrooms
and a hallway right down the middle, and ve~y nice level
land, ter~aced, just ~eally a ve~y nice home. Now he wasn't
the only one around. There was a Mr. Jim Brown between
Killeen and his place who had a nice, nice fa~m as you went
out toward Palo Alto and Sugarloaf and Brookhaven going
no~th. M~. Brown's home was down a little bit below the road
you we~e on and then his farm was down below the house just
in a sort of a valley down the~e. Just a flat ve~y long,
low, smooth, no stumps, no Johnson grass, no flint rocks, no
cockleburrs like out on our farm.
I've often told people that I grew up on a Johnson
grass, cockleburr, flint rock, stump farm. We had stumps in
ou~ cotton patch and it's pretty complicated plowing with a
cultivator and mules and raising the plow so that it won't
hit that stump and break, you know, and putting it back down
when you get over the stump, but that's what my brother and
I got to cut our teeth on as far as farming, you know,
lea~ning to do farm work.
HILLIARD 19
H: But, my grandfather had that nice farm and it was his
pride and joy and he wanted, obviously, t o die on that
place . He had built that nice new home and had a nice barn
and everything, and so along came World War II and Camp
Hood, the Army decided that they would locate an army
training camp at Killeen. And so , my grandfather's farm and
my uncle, who had a farm right next t o his, they were among
the first farms to be taken for the government to build this
army camp. And, my grandpa would almost have rather given
his life than to have given his farm. Did Gra 'Delle Duncan
talk about this any to y ' all?
JS: No .
H: She knows the story real well because I talked about it
and she's written it up in the paper. But anyway, the first
time around the government did not pay those farmers
anything like as much as those farms really were worth.
They just pretty well stole those farms. And, the people
were naive and weren't as sophisticated as they are now .
For example, recently, a year or two or three ago, the
Army decided they needed 90,000 more acres out here, and
they started trying to get it from northwest of Copperas
Cove north and between here and Gatesvil l e. And the
landowners banded together and hired an attorney and beat
it. But back in World War II you would be accused of being,
there was a little bit of accusation of unpatriotism on this
deal, but very, very different from what it was in World War
II. So nobody would say anything. You just pretty well
accepted it, but they had rights that they didn't exercise,
HILLIARD 20
H: because the big manufacturers, just because there was a
war that didn't mean they didn't want a big, big profit out
of the work they did so why shouldn't the farm people have
been paid a good price for their farms.
My grandfather was deeply hurt, number 1, that he had to
move, number 2, that he didn't get anything like what it was
worth. The reason we know this is true is because later they
took some additional farms that just joined where they came
up to, and my grandfather was right in the edge what they
took the first time. When they came back a year or two or
three later and took still more land, they paid on farms that
we can compare with my grandfather ' s and they were no way ,
they weren't worth half as much , and they got paid higher
prices than my grandfather and he knew that and he was very
heartbroken over that.
Then he had to move to town , or he had to move somewhere
so he moved to town. He moved into a modest home over here
on ________ , and retired, in fact he was already retired. He
got his sons, he had a son that lived and farmed his land,
you know it was a sort of a tenant farm situation, but my dad
was on somebody else's place. Well, grandpa let one of his
sons work his place on the halves or whatever it was, and so
grandpa had already retired from actual farming himself.
He was about, when all this happened along about 1942,
grandpa , he died in 1945 and he was about 75, so he was in
his early 70s when he had to move , right around 71 or 72, I
guess, when he had to move, which was a bad time to have to
leave the home place. This is one of the greatest sacrifices
I think citizens can be asked to make, to move off of a home
HILLIARD 21
H: that you have made. He built that house himself. And he
improved that farm, you know. He made it what it was. He
and his sons.
JS: Now did you say that they had moved his home? I don't
know if we got that on the first side of the tape about them
moving his home.
H: Yes, they moved his home to Killeen, and it was just
right on the edge of the reservation, you know, something
that the Army, whatever the Army wanted to do with it.
JS: And he could see that.
H: He could see his home from his new modest home. That
was sort of ironic.
WS: A bitter pill to swallow.
JS: Well, do you think that that contributed to his death?
H: I think that any person is going to last longer if he
has a strong will to live and if he's happy, and I don't
think grandpa, when he had to leave that farm - I think that
it pretty well took the will to live away. I t hink it did
contribute to his - because there wasn't any serious illness
that he had, he just did not really try. He lost the desire
to live.
JS: His heart was gone out of it.
H: That's right. His heart had gone out.
JS: Well, can you think of anything else you would like to
put on tape?
H: I could probably think of some things.
WS: How about electricity. When did that first come in
here. That was before --
H: Oh, yes, electricity. The Rural Electrification Program
HILLIARD 22
H: started sometime during the '30s. I can't remember.
Electricity didn't come to our particular locality , just a
few miles north of Killeen. It was in the late '30s I
guess, but we didn't get it out here in this Palo Alto
community because I remember we got our first radio of any
kind, which was a battery radio, in 1939. We did not have
electricity when we moved in '41. We still did not have
electricity .
WS: They must have had it there
H: Yes. One little story about Killeen. You know what
kind of town Killeen is now, about 75 ,00 0, and there's quite
a lot of paved streets in Killeen now. Of course, this was
a long time ago. When I was a freshman in Killeen High
School there was not a paved street in Killeen, and that was
in 1938. There was not a paved street in Killeen. So
that's quite a different - of course, '38 was 51 years ago.
But in that 51 years there has been a tremendous amount of
growth here, as well as a lot of other places.
JS: What was the covering on the road? Just as it was
graded off, or was there some type of covering?
H: What we called gravel. It was sort of a shell, caliche,
gravel. There were these gravel balls. You could find in
somebody's pasture. You could find this very good - it
wasn't a paving material, but it was building material.
And now I can remember - here's another story. This is
something that will be, I think, of interest. Where we
lived, and that was the place I was born on and we lived on
until I was 16 years old and we moved to Killeen. We lived
about 200 or 300 yards from the public road that went
HILLIARD 23
H: through the country, you know, to connect up all of
these farms. So we called that - it wasn ' t the turnpike ,
but it was almost a turnpike, it l ed into the turnpike which
was still not a paved road .
And so, anyway , this road that was down by our mailbox,
that we went out of our pasture onto the public road, was a
dirt road and it was pretty much black dirt . It was just
good cotton- growing l and and it had a high crown . In other
words, it was high in the middle so it didn't wash away in a
heavy rain and it had deep ditches on either side , so it
stayed there wel l in rain during rainstorms , but it was just
dirt. It was not rock or gravel or anything else . And so,
when it did rain, it was almost impassable. Although a
Model T, that was back in the early ' 30s and nearly
everybody drove model Ts and the Model B was built in 1932
or ' 33 - the Model A was built in 1927 , ' 28 , so a lot of
people drove cars that were built in the early '30s. We
drove '24, '25 Model Ts, maybe '2 6 Model Ts . Then they
started buying used Model - nobody had a new car in those
days. I mean, I didn't know anybody that had a new car
until I was 20 years old maybe. Maybe I'm stretching that a
little bit. But anyway, those older cars , the Model Ts and
the Model As had larger wheels and smaller tires fortunately
for driving in the mud and they would tolerate sinking down
better than a modern day car would. And they
END OF TAPE I, SIDE 1, 45 MINUTES.
SIDE 2 .
.•. and they would, you know, you could make it, but the
HILLIARD 24
H: road was almost impassable and our closest neighbors
were the Halls, Mr. and Mrs. Hall, whose son became an Ed.D.
in education and became a school superintendent and served
as the national association p resident of the school
superintendents of the united States. His name is Dr.
Norman Hall. He is still a very close friend of mine.
Anyway, Mrs. Hall did the driving at the Halls. Mr.
Hall was several years older than she was and he never
drove. He didn't like, you know, he just •.• I admire that
very much. Somebody that didn't want to drive at all.
There weren't very many of them, but he was certainly not
gonna be running over anybody . He didn't have an automobile
accident, and so Mrs. Hall did the driving and she was
afraid to drive on that dirt road so she would ask my dad
who was quite a bit younger and, you know, he could do quite
a few things like that pretty well.
And so he would negotiate getting the car to town. He
would take Mrs. Hall to town; he needed to go himself, for
that matter, so he would drive. He would be the first one
that would pioneer, that would get through that road after a
rain and his tracks would be so visible up there right in
the middle of that road and they would be deep. I mean they
would be nearly to the axle. And then when it got dried off
and got real hard those ruts would just be deep and
everything so you would just move over and just miss them
and let them stay there. But once in a while just to show
off you would get down in those ruts and turn loose of the
steering wheel and just drive along real slow and they
weren't about to jump out of there. The front tires would
HILLIARD
H:' stay in those tracks, in those ruts , and you would go
right down the road just where you wanted to go .
JS: No steering .
H: That's right. No steering .
WS: Is that pretty slippery, or not?
25
H: Yes, it was slippery and you know, you could just very ,
if you didn't handle it just right you would get stuck . And
it wasn't uncommon for people to get stuck in those days.
It was just as common as it could be.
WS: Did you get the horses to pull it out?
H: Yes, we didn't have any tractors. Once in a while we
would, you know, get a pole or get something to lift the
wheel up and get it going. I don't know what all; we tried
everything . I can remember we got stuck a number of times
ourselves. You know, it was just a matter of everybody get
out and push and put a tow sack under the wheel. The right
rear wheel, to see if it wou l d work.
Also, in those days in the Model Ts and Model As, it was
very common to have a flat. I mean, you almost expected to,
and you had your cold patch and everything and you just took
it out and fixed it yourself . But anyway, later on , I think
it was in the CCC when the CCC was organized under Franklin
D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, one of the big projects they
did out here in the north edge of town was they put a top on
that black dirt that you couldn't drive on after a rain
unless you were especially skilled like my dad was, and they
came into our pasture , which we didn't own the land. I don't
think we even asked our landlord would this be alright. He
was away up in Waco, north of Waco.
HILLIARD 26
H: So we said: Yeah, you know, there wasn't anything out
there but weeds, anyway, so they just came in there with
these plows, mules, they had mules, and sort of a walking
plow thing that would just turn that all up, stir it up, and
it was limestone rock. Now our neighbor had some gravel pit
in his pasture that was caliche, it was shell gravelly stuff,
and it had some clay in it which was excellent material to
put on a road to make it a good hard surface road. But they,
for some reason they went into this rock and when they •.. no
it wasn't the CCC, it was the WPA, Works project
Administration, and this gave people who were out of work,
work. And they took their shovels and went out and would
load these rocks onto the truck. And so that mile and a half
or two mile lane that went out to the turnpike, passed the
Hall's house and went right by our mailbox, that the Halls
and us and our other neighbors went to town on. They put
about, I believe, that it was at least a foot thick, 12
inches, of that more or less, it wasn't crushed rock, it was
broken up rock, limestone rock, on that road. And some of us
thought they had lost their minds. And you talk about being
rough. Man your car just shook all to pieces riding on that
thing, no matter how slow you went. It was rough, for about
a year. It would rain and it would settle, and it would pack
and the cars would drive on it, and the wagon and teams, you
know, horses and what not. Once in a while a buggy.
And it did have a wonderful shaped bed with good ditches
on either side there wasn't any business of it running down
the middle of the road and washing it out. It had a high
middle, a high crown, and in about two years that became as
HILLIARD 27
H: good a hard surface road as anybody could ever find
anywhere. And it s t ayed there. It didn't have to have one
bit of work done on it until after World War I I was over and
Camp Hood became a permanent post. This land was now on the
military reservation, and they went in there and black­topped
that. They paved that very road I'm talking about,
and they didn 't have to do any foundation or base
whatsoever. They put some oil on it and it made a perfect
base and it is still, unless the half-tracks have ruined it
for some reason. If the army wanted to they could tear it
up, but it's an all- purpose road that would last just about
indefinitely. That was a wonderful job of paving that the
WPA did.
JS: What other projects did they do in the area? Do you
know of any? Or did the CCC?
H: I can't think off hand. I have some friends that went
t o CCC camp and they did some things. I don't remember
anything around here that they worked on but they worked on
some parks ...
JS: Well , I hate t o take up any more of your time. We
really appreciate this Mr . Hilliard.
H: I sure hope this will be worthwhile and I hope I haven 't
rambled around too much.
JS: Oh, no, it has been very valuable. We thank you very
much.
END OF SIDE 2 (275 on counter) - ABOUT 8 MINUTES.