THE INSTITUTE OF TEXAN CULTURES
ORAL HISTORY PROGRAM
INTERVIEW WITH: HARlE LOUISE and SAMUEL HOKE, (HLH - SH)
with NANCY OLSON (NO)
PLACE: CONROE, TEXAS
INTERVIEWERS: WALTER AND JANIE SARGEANT (WS - JS)
DATE: DECEMBER 9, 1986
JS: This is Walter and Janie Sargeant, and we're at Conroe,
Texas. The date is December 9, 1986. And we ' re interviewing
Hr. and Mrs. Hoke. And what is your first name?
MLH: Marie Louise.
JS: And what about you; what is your name?
SH: I 'm Samuel Thomas.
JS: And have you always lived around Conroe?
SH: In Montgomery County, yes.
JS: Were you born here?
SH: I was born out in the western part of the county, up
toward Montgomery.
JS: And you went to school up there?
SH: I attended grade school in a country school. It was a
one-teacher school. And we moved to Conroe in 1923. I
started here to school in 1922, and I graduated from the
Conroe High School in '27.
WS: Did they have 11 or 12 years then?
HOKE 2
SH: They had 11.
JS: Then what did you do after graduation? Did you go
on ...•• You live out of town. Are you farming?
SH: I 'm farming. And I worked for, at different intervals,
I worked for ..... ; not in one particular place, til about
'47. Then I went to work for Superior oil Company, and I
worked for them for better than 20 years. I retired from
Superior Oil.
JS: Did they come in ••••. I mean, was this the time of the
oil?
SH: No, this was after. They came here in about '41, in the
Lake Creek oil field.
JS: But you didn't do any farming for a living, just ....•
SH: Yes, we lived on a farm, and we had a ..•. ; it was more
of a stock farm. While I was working in the oil field I
couldn ' t do any particular farming. I mean, any crop
farming, and we had cows. We had about 70 acres in our
place, and we raised cows and we raised chickens, and that
was about all.
JS: Marie, how about you? Are you a native of Conroe?
MLH: I was born right out here in Leonidas saw mill, on
March 13, 1918.
JS: Spell that name.
MHL: L-E-O-N-I-D-A-S. Well, it was Leonidas; the community
was Leonidas at that time. And I lived there until I was
about five years old and then we moved to Goose Creek and my
HOKE 3
father went to oil fielding. And then we followed the oil
field until I was about 14 years old , and we moved back to
the old home place which was on the old John York Madeley
place. My mother inherited some acreage from my grandparents
and mother cut the timber off from the p lace and built her
house, a large house. And I went to Conroe high school at
that time.
JS: When you said your father was in oi l fielding, what
did •.••. did they follow the different wells around? How did
that work?
MLH: We moved from Conroe to .... well , I had an uncle that
was living in Goose Creek, and at that time, things was
really hard, and my uncle told him he could go to work , and
so we moved to Goose Creek , and daddy was a dirt man for the
oil company.
WS : Where is Goose Creek?
MLH: Bay Town. It got big and they called it Bay Town.
JS: I never heard that before.
MLH: Well, Goose Creek and Kelly was just on one side of the
creek and the other , right there together. Then Bay Town
wanted to hog it up, just like Houston wants to hog up
Montgomery county.
WS : Did Goose town get its name because the geese flew in
there quite a bit?
MLH: That I can ' t tell you. All my life it's been Goose
Creek.
HOKE 4
JS: Well, when did you come back to ...•• of course, Mr. Hoke
has always been in Conroe .....
SH: Well, she married, and I married, not to each other.
MLH: We were married previously. We lost our mates, and
then we married. We moved back to Conroe in 1932.
JS: Do each of you have children?
MLH: Yes, we do.
JS: And they went through Conroe school?
MLH: Yes.
SH: ..... graduated, yes. I have two and she has three.
JS: Then you were involved with Conroe from 'way back in the
time .....
SH: Yes, ma ' am. When we moved to Conroe it was in 1923.
WS: Was that when, you told me, it had about a 2400
population or something?
SH: Correct. There was no paved streets in Conroe. No
water .••••. it was a water system. They had no gas. Water
and electricity was all the utilities they had at t~ev ba~ at
that time.
WS: No sewer system or anything?
MLH: Oh, no.
SH: Oh, no. And the horses •.••. I worked in a store . It's
Cochran's now. It was Wahrenberger ' s then.
mercantile.
MLH: Hardware and grocery.
It was a general
HOKE 5
SH: And I worked in the grocery department, and if you ••..
there wasn ' t no cars; just wagons and buggies. And if you
parked your car in the back, not cars. If there were cars,
but I mean the general public. If you put your horse and
wagon back there and had some feed in it, the horse would
roam the town. You had to have a kid or something back there
to knock that horse over. (laughter)
MLH: Or they ' d eat all his feed.
SH: They would. They 'd tear into the feed and eat it. And
there was no general law against livestock in the town. My
folks lived in the north part of town and they had a cow, and
we lived next to a dairy that had the milking stalls right
there and I think he had about maybe 25 or 30 dairy cows, and
he delivered milk in there.
JS: Did you help him?
SH: No. We had our own cows. But as far as a stock law,
they didn ' t have one in town.
WS: We were talking to someone in Nederland, and it was the
same thing. They went downtown to the picture show to get
their cows. The cows had been down watching the picture
show.
MLH: The stock law came about in 1946.
SH: That ' s right.
this area.
It was when an oil company struck oil in
MLH: We fought it but we got it.
ROKE 6
JS: You fought the stock law?
MLH: Oh, definitely , because you see we all lived out in the
country , and maybe ten or 15 families lived in a 2500 acre
place out there. We lived out in the creek bottom. And
naturally, if they took the hogs and cows out of there,
brother, the brush come to you.
JS: Oh, that's right.
SR : Well , a lot of folks made ••..••
MLR: and snakes, and wild animals.
SH: their living by stock raising. That was hogs, cattle,
goats, horses. This was pretty wild country, ma ' am.
WS: Where did your folks come from?
SR: My folks .•..• my dad was raised in the northern part of
the county, up around Longstreet (?) He was born and raised
there, but his father came from South Carolina. They came
not as a colony , but as a settler . They settled up in that
area.
WS: What did they do for a living?
SH : They were farmers.
WS: I mean, what did they raise, crops or cattle?
SR: Crops.
WS : Cotton?
SH: Cotton was the money crop. And of course they raised
corn and other things. They had cattle, too.
WS : How big an acreage did they have?
HOKE 7
SH: I rightfully couldn't say, but it was up in the hundreds
of acres. They had, you know, they got a state grant, more
or less.
WS: Did they have to clear it, or was it creek bottom?
SH: Yes, it was timbered.
WS: Heavy timber?
SH: Heavy timber. And the reason they settled in these
timbered areas, they had building material.
WS: Did they sell their logs, or did they just burn them?
SH: Well, now, some of my folks had a saw mill up there,
later; not at the time that they carne , you know. But they
. .. .. now, as far as selling timber, I don ' t know about that.
NO: Do you remember somebody was telling you about an uncle
Nick, and I don ' t know, you may be too young to remember it,
but he was a bugler. He used to play .•.• there was a cafe
ac r oss from Mr . Gentry ' s , and this guy used to get out there
and Cedric Nutter used to write about this man that would
bugle at noon and that was time for people to corne and eat
lunch. I just read a tiny little thing about him and I
haven ' t been able to talk to anyone else who ' s ever heard
about this gentleman. SH: The only Nick that I knew in
this .•.•. Conroe, and like I say, we ' ve been corning to Conroe
a good long while; before we moved here we traded in Conroe ,
was Nick Carney. Was that his name?
NO: He never mentioned his last name. He just talked about
this guy named Uncle Nick.
HOKE 8
SH: Well, Uncle Nick Carney was an old man when I was just a
youngster, and perhaps that was who it was. And he was quite
a character. When I say that I don ' t mean he was out of line
very much.
WS: The tobacco industry--it was gone by the time that you
got into this area.
MLH: That was the northern part of the country ..•.. we
wasn ' t interested in that. (Laughter)
SH: This area, Conroe, was a sawmill town. They had large
sawmills here ..•••
MLH: Delta Lumber Company.
SH: Delta Land and General Company. They had lots of land.
And they ..•.• there was sawmills out east of Conroe and some
west--little bitty sawmills, you know, but the Delta
ran ...•• they had their own logging trains.
was a large concern.
Like I say, it
MLH: Wasn ' t there one at Leonidas before Delta come in
here?
SH: Yeah.
MLH: The one at Leonidas was the oldest sawmill, and they
built tram roads and logged the trains in. They had
"dinkies", they called them, to pull the logs in. In my deer
pasture I ' ve got two of those tram roads.
WS: Were they wooden rails or were they steel?
MLH & SH: No, they were steel.
HOKE 9
WS: I heard somewhere where some guys built a tram road and
put in about two miles of wooden rails.
MLH: Well, they had to pretty well put in substantial ....
didn ' t it sink in some part of that country out there?
SH: Like I say, Conroe ..•.• the Delta mill had approximately
800 employees. It was a large mill and Conroe was supported
by the mill.
WS: You think of logging mills and you think of big fires
from sparks. Did they have many bad fires at the mills?
SH: No. Well, they •..•.
MLH: Part of Conroe burned but I never did ..... do you
remember what .•..•
SH: That was about in •..•
WS: Someone said 1911.
SH: Yeah, it was about then. But that was in uptown, and
the sawmill was out south of town.
JS: They say that, when George Strake come in here,
sometimes they had to put a cover over his .•••. something
about natural gas causing fires, and they ' d put--I don ' t know
what they call it--some kind o f a scree n over whatever they
were, to keep •...•
MLH: Flares.
JS: Yeah, to keep the woods from catching on fire, and they
had a couple of fires from the oil and stuff.
MLH: They did, but •..••
HOKE 10
SH: Yeah, but the Strakes were out east of town several
miles. The Conroe oil field is out east of town. And at
that time they could burn a flare. But, you know, you can 't
burn a flare now.
WS: Let ' s get back to logging, because I corne from logg ing
country. They cleared this land--pretty much clear cut it, I
guess you would say , didn ' t they?
SH & MLH: Well, but then they farmed it.
SH: Well , let me tell you the way that they did timber
business here. They sold the stumpage, you see, down to ,
let ' s say, an eight, ten, or twelve inch stump, and that was
all. They wouldn ' t cut anything less than that. And this
was virgin timber in that time, and they had this log train
that carne in from ••••• it ' s a state forest now •••••
MLH: from up toward willis ...••
SH: Well, up the other side, around Huntsville and up in
there, and they ' d have maybe 25 cars of logs. They ' d have
people up there cutting these logs, and then they'd take
teams up to where they could haul them up on these log
trains. Then they'd bring them in here, and they had a pond.
I suppose it might have been 20 acres in that pond.
WS: I guess that was to float the logs to get the dirt off
the bark before they put the logs in the saw.
SH: That was to get the bugs out. You see, they'd roll them
in this water and it would get the beetles and keep the
lumber from turning blue.
HOKE 11
JS: What does that mean, turning blue.
MLH: It stops a stage of rotting.
SH: You leave it out there, and the first thing you know,
the beetles •..•. the sawyers ..•.• would get into it and the
bark would falloff, and inside of the log would be
discolored; it wouldn ' t be bright.
JS: These sawyers. That's an insect?
MLH & SH: Yes, it is, and they'll get in there ten days
after you cut a tree. They get into between the bark and the
tree, and then they tunnel into the tree itself.
JS: Well, Marie, I ' d like to get to you. Were your parents
from around here?
MLH: Yes, ma'am . My mother was one of the "Baby Madeleys".
My mother was Fanny Lee Madeley, the youngest of her family
of 11 children. Like I said, we moved around and then we
come back to Conroe. Well, I married on June 22, 1935, to
Johnny Puckett. And during our very early marriage, my
husband helped pave the streets in Conroe. And right where
Scott's drugstore is now, mud would be knee deep--red mud.
They laid boards for people to try to get across to the old
courthouse. And he also helpd tear down the old courthouse,
and store the things in different buildings around town, and
he helped move back into the new courthouse.
JS: The new courthouse is still standing now, isn ' t it?
MLH: Yes, ma ' am.
JS: Are they still using it as the courthouse?
HOKE 12
MLH: Yes, ma ' am. And they have courthouses allover Conroe.
They ' ve taken in the old hospital and the old bank building,
and .... for offices. So I ' ve been here a long time , too.
JS: You said something about your family had moved to the
United States and they settled in what you called " Little
Egypt"?
MLH: No, ma ' am, my great-grandfather was born in England,
George Bell Madeley. He was born in the eighth month, the
thirteenth day, of 1815. And he passed away the third month,
the 22nd day, of 1879. He married a woman by the name of
Helen Aileen Grant in 1846 ; I do not know the month or the
date. She was born .. . .• her father was a doctor. She was
born the second month, the 6th day , of 1821. She passed away
the eleventh month, the 10th day, o f 1897. Her father was
Donald Palmer Grant.
JS: Well, then, she was married to your father; were they
married when they came to the United States?
MLH: No, this is my great-grandfather. And they married and
moved over here, just, well , I ' d say, how far would you say
Egypt is from here?
voice: About ten miles.
MLH: About ten miles south of here , to a little settlement,
and he bought several hundred acres of land.
JS: Is that still in Montgomery county?
MLH: Yes, ma ' am . And well , they didn ' t have any name until
they had a drought , and a lot of the people around, over the
HOKE 13
county , did not make any reseeding, nor seeds saved. And
Grandaddy had an abundant supply of everything. And so they
got together and called it the " Little Egypt". That ' s where
they got the name , because that ' s from the Bible , you know,
Egypt was where it replenished everything. And he lived
there and he raised nine sons . . .•• do you want me to give
their names and birthdates?
JS: No, I don ' t think that ' s necessary .
MHL: And my grandfather was the seventh son. That was my
mother ' s father .
WS: This was , maybe, grain , they were growing?
MLH: Grain, and pecans . He had a huge pecan orchard over
there. And he made three trips back to England , and the last
trip he made over there he brought back a boatload of
vineyard wire . He made wine . He was a winemaker. And the
old Egypt , the old Madeley place is still there.
JS: He raised grapes over there, and made wine?
MLH: Yes, grapes and wine. And he bottled it and sent it to
different places •••..
JS: For sale , you mean? He did this as a business?
MLH: A livelihood. He had cows, and goats, run loose .
There wasn ' t any place to make money , other than what you
could raise, and save, and put up .•... can , you know , or
preserve in some way.
JS: Was that vineyard still in operation, or did •... ?
MLH: No, ma ' am.
HOKE 14
JS: .••.. someone take it up, when he passed on?
MLH: No, I really can't tell you what year that all
collapsed, but I do have some of the old vineyard wire.
JS: That's interesting.
voice: That ' s possibly the first winery in Texas.
MLH : Well, I don ' t know, but he sure had it right there.
JS: You'd think that someone else would have picked it up,
even not related to him; but would have seen that it was a
good business.
WS : Did he raise sheep or goats?
MLH : Yes, my first husband and I had quite a bunch of
goats.
WS: Angora goats?
MLH: No, just regular old goats. We called them brush
goats, short-haired.
WS : What did you raise them for, for the milk and meat, or
what?
MLH: To clear out underbrush. And we sold a lot of them for
the fourth of July barbecues, you know, for people to eat.
JS: Tell me what you told me about the fourth of J uly
picnics.
MLH: Oh, when I was a child, the ~ladeley fami ly and all the
neighborhoods, in fact, anybody that wanted to, would bundle
up their wagon, and everything , and we'd go down on Horseshoe
Lake and spend the week. We ' d take goats down there to
HOKE 15
barbecue, and fished, and everybody went swimming, and they
just had a wonderful time.
SH: They had no way of preserving meat, you see, so they'd
carry this live animal along and s laughter it down there.
W8: Well , the meat would be fresh, wouldn't it?
SH : Yes, sir. It would be fresh.
JS: Well, what kind of camping would you do?
MLH: We had a tent. Everybody had his own tent, and we 'd
spread quilts and things on the ground , and everybody would
sleep on the ground.
WS: Cars were prevalent then, and so you had cars?
MLH: Just a few rich people. A wagon and team was better.
JS: Especially on the muddy roads.
MLH & SH: You see , they had no highways then. It was just
pig trails, I ' d call it. Well, there were roads, but there
was no pavement. If they had gravel , they'd put it on there,
and if they didn't , it was just sand. Most of this country
through here is beach sand, and you couldn't drive a car up
and down.
WS: In the north country , we had problems with snow like you
had sand here; what cars there were, they usually had to put
up and use horses to get to town.
SH: Yes.
MLH: Well, when we moved back here in 1932, my father had a
car, a n old Chevrolet, and we went to Houston. And the sand
was up to the hubcaps going down what is now 45, used to be
HOKE 16
75, and man, I mean, we was all day getting to Houston, and
had to spend the night, do what we had to do, and come back
the next day.
WS : Takes about ten flat tires each way.
SH: Oh, yeah.
MLH: You carried several tires along on the back.
JS: Somebody told me that Bonnie and Clyde came here through
here. Do y'all ever remember ...••
MLH: I can give you a little bit of information about that.
We lived in Beaumont, on Sullivan street. Clyde Barrow's
brother lived on the corner of the block, and one morning,
when I was a teen-aged kid, they caught him. And of all the
shooting down there. They just powdered their old car. And
Mr. Barrow had a relative that lived here in Conroe.
JS: Somebody said that he lives ... he works at that filling
station in Willis, and I don ' t know if that's true, but they
said that they come through here one time, and camped out
underneath some old bridge, somewhere around here, running
from the police. And I ' ve asked several people, and they
tell me, "Yeah, my daddy told me that."
MLH: Well, this was my • •. I witnessed that. I like to died
when they kept shooting. They couldn't get Clyde and Bonnie
out of the house, so they just shot the car up good. And
finally, they did get them, but they got loose. They were
smart.
JS: And after they were .....
HOKE 17
MLH: apprehended, they didn ' t get them in jail. They
apprehended them, but they got away from them. And got back
together. Now that happened when I was in the fifth grade .•
..• just about 1930, no, it was earlier than that. It must
have been about ' 29.
WS: Tell us about the depression. Did it hit here pretty
bad?
MLH: Yes, it did.
JS: Did it affect you some?
SH: Yes, ma ' am, very much. I was right in the middle of
it.
MLH: Flour biscuits and gravy was mighty good back in those
days.
SH: When the depression hit us, I had just been married . I
was working in a store, and business was so slack, the
proprietor discharged me. But it was quite a while .••. well,
yes, you could get little jobs here and there; but as far as
getting any money--there wasn ' t any money.
JS: What did you make ..... what kind of a salary when you
worked at Wahrenberger ' s?
SH: Honey child, you'd be surprised at how much I got. I
got $60 a month.
JS: That ' s good money! Sixty dollars a month; that ' s $15 a
week.
HOKE 18
SH: That ' s right. And I went to work ••••• after that I went
to work up there for the school
anything •••••
_________ , making $65. But
WS : That was pretty good money in those days.
SH: Well , yes, then when I went to work for Superior Oil, I
made about twice that.
JS: Did you ever meet Mr. Strake, either of you when he
came ........ ?
MLH: Sure did.
SH: I was here when George came here.
JS: Because they said streets were not paved then ,
MLH & SH: Nooooo, ma ' am !
JS: They said when he struck oil this town just turned
around.
MLH: Well , it did turn around. When it rained , and we did
have quite a bit of rain, it was just mud, just red sandy
mUd.
JS: He had trouble with his equipment.
MLH: Oh, well , they had horses pull their equipment out, and
we used to •.••• they was always somebody would be in town, and
if any car come to town and they couldn ' t get through,
there ' d be somebody around the courthouse ••••• they had
watering troughs and rails to tie your teams to, and what
have you. And if anybody needed any help, they ' d go up
there and get them.
ROKE 19
SR: The winter that they struck oil out there, I mean when
the boom was on, you couldn't go out that way to the oil
fields in a car; you just couldn ' t get out there. And the
oil company, I believe it is Exxon, it was Rumble then, they
chartered a passenger train to carry the men out from Conroe
out to a switch----they had a switch out there. I believe it
was three times a day, or twice a day, and from there they
would transport the men out to the fields in trucks.
JS: Did crime go up after they struck oil? Did the town get
rowdy?
MLR: Well, they had a couple of beer joints, I'd call them.
They didn't call them beer joints then.
SR: It was beginning to be rough . If you wanted trouble all
you had to do was go out and wave your hand, and you'd have
it.
JS: Was he a local boy? George Strake, I mean.
SR: No, ma ' am.
JS: Row did he happen to find •.... was that a well in
existence, then?
SR: No. George Strake some way got in with a lumber
company. Re was a "poorboy", and he poorboyed this well.
What I mean by poorboy was that they worked for stock. And
this lumber company had a lease out here, and it was lots o f
land. And it was cutover timber. I mean , most of the timber
had been removed. And George got a l ease on that property
for drilling purposes. And he went out there, and the first
HOKE 20
well, I believe, he made a strike. And from there on it
snowballed. He could get money, but •....
WS: He was a wildcatter, in other words.
SH It was a wildcat, absolutely; there wasn ' t any
oilwells closer than Humble up here. And as far as a
seismograph crew, I don ' t know if they even had one out here.
And somewhere in my farback mind, the seismograph told George
he was just wasting time. But he made a well out of that,
and it came in a good one. And, of course, oil at that time
was about five dollars a barrel.
JS: And we ' re griping now at $12.
SH: That's right, you want $30. And as soon as he had made
this strike, of course, there were other companies that came
in also.
JS: Well, did he move his family? How old a person was he?
SH: George Strake was a young man. I don ' t know how much of
a family he had. I didn't know George personally, I ' d just
see him around. And at that time, we had an old mayor in
Conroe that didn't want any of that segment of people
associating with these folks here. Don ' t ask me why.
JS: Well, did prohibition come .•.. I guess it came
everywhere. Were there any kind of ..••.•
SH: Oh, it was allover Texas or maybe the whole United
States, I don't know.
JS: Were there speakeasies, or places you could go, or
people running moonshine?
HOKE 21
SH & MLH: Oh, my, yes. What are you talking about? We
still got it. They just broke a big moonshine down here at
New Caney.
JS: Oh, really?
SH: That ' s the biggest place of moonshine. You can get
moonshine down there all the time. They just broke up a place
out there ...•.
MLH: About three weeks ago.
SH: And out here on 1488, you know where that highway hits
45? Well, right kind of southwest of that, we had an uncle
that was in the hog business, and he ' d go by there. They
had a still out there, and it was a big one, man. They sold
that stuff by the barrel.
NO: I lived in Georgia, and I remember they had these
commercials on TV "Moons hine kills". Because we lived out in
the woods and you could see people; you knew what they were
doing. And I mean, they ' d find shoes in this stuff, and rats
and all kinds of things. This was bad whiskey.
SH: I don ' t know how bad it was. They drank it.
JS: Well, I was wondering about the law in this area. Did
they have a police department here?
SH: It wasn ' t no police nor FBI nor liquor control, or
nothing like that. But they ' d go down there, and catch this
old boy, and all they could do was ••....
MLH: take his moonshine, and then they ' d probably sell it or
drink it theirselves.
HOKE 22
SH: But, you know, the biggest thing about making whiskey
and selling it is the tax on it. That's what the government
doesn't like. Now we had allover the county, everywhere
they made whiskey. And I ' ll tell you what, folks would .•..•
You know, when you get hungry, you ' ll do anything to get
someth ing to eat. Now they accuse these Mexicans, and
Cubans, and all like, coming into the United St ates; well, I
don ' t blame those folks for coming over here if they ' re
hungry.
MLH: Let me tell you something. In 1938 I lived down on
Contrary Lake on Dan Madeley ' s ranch--the old Wahrenberger
place , they called it. And he had some registered Duroc hogs
there, and I was taking care of them. The sows were bred and
fixing to farrow, and so , one day, when feeding time come,
two hogs come in. And I couldn ' t figure out where they was
at. So my husband and my little girl, we walked out there,
and called, and we could hear one of them laying out there,
grunting somewhere, and she wouldn 't come to us. And we
found out they had eaten a lot of mash. One of our neighbors
had a still on our place, and he had poured out the mash.
And those old sows had eaten it up, and they were so drunk
they couldn ' t stand up. So we went back to the house and got
the horse and a sled, and we went down there and we like to
have never got those old hogs on there. They weighed three
or four hundred pounds apiece, but we had to roll them on
there and carry them up to the house and out of the sun. We
HOKE 23
put them under the barn so they'd be in the shade, and we
toted water, you know, drawed it out of the well and poured
it on them. Because you know, they was real heavy with pigs.
And, lordamercy, I like to never had figured it out, so
finally, we found some fresh pine tops cut over there beside
an old big dead log. And I told my husband, "You know, that
looks funny. Now that wasn ' t there the other day when we was
down here."
He said, "NO, it wasn ' t." We got over there and we had
24 gallons of the prettiest whiskey you ever saw in your
life, piled under there.
JS: Right on your property!
MLH: Yeah, on the property we were living on.
SH: They had a big spree then!
MLH: Well, anyhow, these people, I went to them and I told
them they had to do something with their mash, because we
could not afford to have these registered hogs come up drunk.
And he says, "What do you mean?" And I says, "Now, don't
tell me you don ' t know what I 'm talking about."
And then there was a pond down there by the railroad,
the pond's still right there. And they used to take it in
those lettuce crates, you know, big old lettuce crates, and
they'd sink it down in that water, so they couldn ' t find it.
But it was finally busted up.
SH: You know what she's talking about, don ' t you?
NO: Uh,huh.
HOKE 24
WS: Did they use grain for their mash?
MLH: Yes,sir.
And a lot of sugar, a hundred pounds at a time. Everybody
knew they was bootlegging, but nobody bothered them. But
they had to move the ir mash somewhere else besides our hog
farm.
SH : But the biggest trouble, well, it wasn ' t trouble; but
you go around one of those stills, and they'd shoot you. And
they didn ' t shoot just to scare you either.
MLH: They said, "Dead man tells no tales." But I asked
them please not to do it , and I was threatened. And I said,
"Well, I 'm not going to do nothing, unless my hogs come up
drunk again."
JS: What did you all do for fun? What did they do, like for
Saturday night?
MLH: We had square dances, and what we called old-timey
parties. You ' d give a dance this weekend, they 'd give one
next weekend, and somebody else would give one. We ' d all
gather up, and sometimes we didn ' t have anything but somebody
playing a harp.
JS: Did they do candy drawings? Have you ever heard of
that, where ..•..
MLH: Candy pullings, you mean?
JS: . .... candy drawings out of a box. Somebody from way up
east was telling me, where they ' d pick candy until the candy
matched, and it was boys and girls, and they kept drawing
HOKE 25
until they got the same color. And, of course, then they
could dance together. But the boy had to pay a penny every
time he pulled a candy out.
voice: I never heard of that.
voice: Do you remember that, Sam?
SH: No, we did ' nt have that.
voice, (?) WS: We used to have box socials. Did you ever
hear of that?
MLH: Box suppers?
(?) WS: No, box socials. The girls would take a box and
fill it full of goodies or something, then the men would bid
on them, and whoever bid the highest on a particular
box •.•..
MLH: We called them box suppers.
SH: We had that at the school, and I've seen some of those
old boys .•.• they'd get to bidding against one another and pay
30 to 40 dollars for a box.
MLH: Then he ' d get to eat supper with her.
SH: But our county has made lots of progress, since the
early days.
MLH: We had one bank here; it went bankrupt. The Mercantile
bank.
JS: Was that during the depression?
MLH: Just before the oil field come in.
JS: They had a war bond rally at the Creighton Theater at
World War II. Did any of you all go to that? I ' ve seen some
HOKE
photographs of the Creighton, and they were selling war
bonds and there was a big to-do out there.
26
MLH: Well, I bought one. But I eventually turned it back in
and got my money.
(This is the beginning of side 2 of the tape and obv i ously
some of the dialogue was not recorded.)
MLH: • ••••.. the whole family still lives here.
SH : I been knowing her a long time. Now I 'm going to tell
you something; I 'm quite a bit older than she is.
MLH: He ' s 12 years older than I am. I 'm not ashamed of it .
SH: But I ' ve been knowing her ever since she was a little
girl.
(They were looking at old photographs.)
MLH: Now hold this right here . You see this here? That
used to be a log cabin. See the logs? They heeled them out.
JS: Right in the courtyard there.
MLH: It's on the same property. NOw , see here? There's
your water trough here, and your hitching rail.
JS: You don ' t remember that as this picture is, do you? I
don ' t know when this picture was taken.
MLH: Honey, they didn ' t tear this down until I was a big old
kid. And we used to hitch our wagon and water our team
before we ' d start home with our groceries.
JS: Do you remember the log cabin?
MLH: Yes, ma ' am , they didn't tear that down until after we
moved back here.
HOKE 27
SH: I ' ll tell you some thing else about that. Out on our
farm, my father-in- law tore it down, and he got part of the
old logs and made him a little place about this big out
there, called it the "pear (?)" house.
JS: How big--about ten or 12 feet?
SH: It's about eight by ten feet.
JS: Is it still standing?
SH: Yes, ma ' am.
JS: Well, that ' s quite an old
MLH: You see right here, in the middle of this block here,
the old drugstore? That's where the old postoffice was put
in the drugstore.
JS: It was in the drugstore?
MLH: Uh-huh.
JS: What was the name of the drugstore, do you remember?
MLH & SH: Capitol, Haileys owned it. And the old postoffice
was in there and they just had a glass door to open from one
to the other.
JS: That's right across the street from the courthouse.
MLH: It was on the east side of the courthouse. See this
here--this is the east side, and this is the old
Warhrenberger building right here.
JS: What about the doctoring in town? When you spoke about
the drugstore it brings to mind, what about the doctoring?
SH & MLH: We had a Dr. Hooper, that ' s Lady Shaeffer's
father. And Dr. Ingram, he had the second car that was in
HOKE 28
Montgomery county.
MLH: Dr. Ingram delivered me and my mother both.
WS: Doctors are notorious for getting the first or second
cars in.
SH: That ' s right. And up in our area, we had our doctor,
who drove a pair of white ho rse s hitched to a buggy, and when
he bought a car, my father bought the horses from him.
JS: Did your grandmother or mother ever have home remedies?
You know, there are some things like, if you had warts, you'd
bury a rag in a stump ..•.
MLH: Oh, no. I'll tell you what to do. Count the warts
you 've got, and get a little fine piece of string, and tie a
little knot for each wart. Take it and bury it under the
eave of the house, and honey, I'll GUAR-UN-TEE you that, by
the time that string is rotted, you don ' t have no warts.
JS: Now who told you that?
MLH: Oh , my god, I don ' t know. And let me tell you
something else. If you have a baby that ' s got the croup,
you know, before they had all this up-to-date medicine, and
he couldn ' t breathe. Tie a black shoestring around his
neck. Old Aunt Millie, who was Grandpa's slave , told me
that.
JS: Did you have midwives?
MLH: I didn ' t use them. Old Dr. Ingram, he delivered my
mother, and then he up and delivered me, and then he
delivered my first child.
HOKE
JS: Well, I 'll be. He must have been
SH: Well, he was quite a character.
JS: What did it cost to have a baby?
MLH: Fifteen dollars.
29
SH: I remember going to a doctor for fifty cents, pills and
all.
JS: Well , did he also do dentistry , the doctor, or did you
have •••••
MLR: Old Dr. Mozique .•..
SH: I'll tell you how it was. When you got a tooth
hurting ...
voice: He took a pair of pliers and pulled it.
SR: No, he ' d take a nail and set it up against that tooth,
and take a hammer and knocked it out.
JS: OH ! No novocaine, no nothing.
SR: Why, no, if you wanted any stuff to settle your nerves,
you took a drink of whiskey.
JS: And you know, it hasn 't been tha t long.
NO: Well, I think we ' ve talked to you folks and tired you
out , and we ' d better end this.