Happy Days in Happy, Texas: The Joys and Advantages of Growing up in “The Town Without a Frown” After World War Ii

By Dr. Rickey L. Harman

It was the best of times; it was the happiest of times. Baby boomers, born in the latter part of the 1940s and into the 1950s, enjoyed an improved lifestyle after their parents survived the Great Depression and World War II. Parents could provide better lives for their children, especially for those who grew up in small communities like Happy, Texas, a small farming town in the Texas Panhandle thirty-five miles south of Amarillo and eighty-five miles north of Lubbock. The town’s moniker, “The Town Without a Frown,” really applied to these young people.

In Happy Days in Happy, Texas, author Dr. Rickey L. Harman recounts his personal experiences to describe the great life these boomers enjoyed. Because of their parents’ improving financial conditions, kids in town and in the country experienced new modern conveniences such as telephones, indoor plumbing, central heat and refrigerated air, television, automobiles, and maybe their own bedroom.

Harman examines the founding of this small community, describes what it was like growing up in Happy in the 1950s and 1960s, and discusses its gradual decline in the latter twentieth century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Aug 2, 2019
• ISBN: 9781480878600

Dr. Rickey L. Harman

Dr. Rickey L. Harman was born and raised in Happy, Texas, and graduated from Happy High School in 1964. He earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from West Texas State University and his doctor of education from Texas Tech University. Harman spent forty-four years in education as a teacher, school administrator, and college professor. He and his wife, Judy, have been married fifty-two years and have a daughter and a grandson.

Book preview

Happy Days in

Happy, Texas

The Joys and Advantages of

Growing Up in "The Town Without

a Frown" after World War II

Dr. Rickey L. Harman

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Copyright © 2019 Dr. Rickey L. Harman.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This book is a work of non-fiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author and the publisher make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and in some cases, names of people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.

Archway Publishing

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ISBN: 978-1-4808-7861-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-7859-4 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-7860-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019908570

Archway Publishing rev. date: 07/19/2019

This book is

dedicated to, most importantly, Judy, my loving wife and constant companion of over fifty years; our daughter, Janna, who has given us so much love, pleasure, and support; my father and mother, who supplied my every need; my brother, V. H., who continues to be such a joy in my life; all of the people in Happy, past and present, who helped instill in me values that have lasted a lifetime; and all of my Happy classmates and companions who made growing up in Happy such a blast—and many of these same people who continue to be such a big part of my life today.

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Background

Chapter 1   From Founding and Expansion to Survival and Steady Growth

Chapter 2   The Perfect Storm

Chapter 3   The Sons of the Pioneers

Chapter 4   Small Town Life in the 1950s and 1960s

Chapter 5   That First Lie

Chapter 6   Respect for Parents and Authority

Chapter 7   Learning Those ABCs

Chapter 8   Those Growing-Up Years

Chapter 9   Famous People

Chapter 10   The Town Doc

Chapter 11   Salt-of-the-Earth People

Chapter 12   Stories About Three Men in the Happy Community

Chapter 13   The Santa Fe Depot

Chapter 14   The City of Yellow

Chapter 15   Next Door to the Buffaloes

Chapter 16   Junior Coffee Didn’t Attend Texas Tech or WTSU

Chapter 17   The Lick’um–Stick’um Stamp Club, Skunks Baseball, and Other Summer Activities

Chapter 18   From the Rocket to the Mustang

Chapter 19   From a Donkey to an Elephant

Chapter 20   The Happy Jokesters

Chapter 21   Watching a Chicken Run Around with Its Head Cut Off

Chapter 22   When Happy Became Sad

Chapter 23   Developing Friendships for a Lifetime

Chapter 24   The Crazy Weather of West Texas, Including the Coldest Day in Texas

Chapter 25   Santa Claus Comes to Town and Other Happy Memories

Chapter 26   Ghosts and Firecrackers

Chapter 27   Exciting Times in FFA

Chapter 28   The Most Memorable Years

Chapter 29   Teamwork and Competition

Chapter 30   The Beginning of the End

Chapter 31   The Gang Substitute

Chapter 32   Family

Chapter 33   Eat to Live

Chapter 34   The Early Days of Television

Chapter 35   John

Chapter 36   Come Along and Be My Party Doll

Chapter 37   The Ten Commandments

Chapter 38   Give Me That Old-Time Religion

Chapter 39   Harman-Toles

Chapter 40   The Ladies Next Door

Chapter 41   Great Teachers

Chapter 42   The Cold War Comes to Happy

Chapter 43   Kids Yesterday and Today

Chapter 44   The Other Side of the Coin

Chapter 45   Conclusion

Works Cited

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Preface

It was the best of times––it was the happiest of times. This is the tale of the baby boomer generation growing up in small towns immediately after the end of World War II. Children should have a carefree life with no adult worries, and the children in Happy, Texas, grew up this way. They enjoyed a warm bed, food to eat, and clothes to wear. Most came from very stable households with a father and a mother. Life was good!

Happy is a small farming community in the Texas Panhandle on I-27 about thirty-five miles south of Amarillo and eighty-five miles north of Lubbock. It has two great monikers: Happy Is My Home and The Town Without a Frown. Frowns were nonexistent in Happy during the fifties and sixties. However, this golden period was not unique to the small community of Happy. Nearly all small communities throughout the United States share a similar history.

Most people who live in small communities will identify with my experiences growing up in Happy during this great period. For those close to my age, I hope this book will bring back fond memories. For those who are older, it may serve as a reminder of living during a calmer period. Maybe the younger generation will receive some insight concerning how their parents and grandparents lived and gain a better understanding of their elders’ thoughts and actions.

Most people are prejudiced in favor of their own hometown, and I’m no different. I believe there exists no better home than Happy, and I grew up there during the best time in history to grow into adulthood. Those of you reading my book probably feel the same way about your hometown. We’re all loyal to our roots and share the pleasant memories of the good old days as children growing up in this great country.

The world always seems better during our younger years. I cannot help but idealize the past. Even the ancient Romans longed for a rural life that had already vanished for them. The phrase the good old days appeared in print as early as 1726 (Rushin 2015, 124). So it is not unusual for me to feel that this era immediately after World War II was the best of times.

Some of you reading this book might remember the town of Happy from the movie Happy, Texas, released in 1999, about three prisoners escaping from a chain gang. Two of them run away to Happy, where they pose as the gay organizers of a beauty pageant. They put on a show with the small girls of the town while hiding from the law and waiting for an opportunity to rob the local bank. Most of the people living in Happy and those of us from Happy were not very pleased with the movie, as it did not cast our little community in a very favorable light. Happy did receive some publicity, but not the kind of publicity any of us really appreciated. This book will give you a much more accurate picture of life in my beloved childhood home.

Most of the material in this book is based on my own experiences and impressions as a child and adolescent. For details and background information about Happy, Swisher County, the Texas Panhandle, and West Texas A&M in Canyon, I drew heavily from newspaper articles and history books written about this period (especially Windmilling, a 101-year history of Swisher County edited by Poppy Hulsey). I also relied on several diaries I kept during my childhood and my mother’s diary. I used the internet to find many of the facts and figures quoted in this book.

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Acknowledgments

I want to thank my wife, Judy, who encouraged me and endured my many hours working on this manuscript while offering countless helpful suggestions. My brother, V. H., read through the manuscript and made some helpful suggestions. My childhood friend Martha Toles Frost, a retired English teacher, made very helpful suggestions for the manuscript. Another childhood friend, Irita Bowe Colson, assisted Martha with some of the corrections and also provided accurate information for one of my stories. Good friends Bob Robinson and Tom Moudy shared photos and reminded me of people and incidents that needed to be included in this book.

Peggy Purser Freeman, an author who lives in Granbury, started me on the road to a major revision of my first rough draft. Also, many thanks to the following people who supplied either photos or information for this book: Richard and Carolyn Bowe, Jim Schrib, Jonna Sutton Bradley, Hobie McManigal, Sally Murrell with the Swisher County Museum, Becky Stogner with the West Texas A&M alumni association, and lifelong Happy residents Carolyn Moudy Bloodworth and Jim McManigal. Tricia Hargrave Odom gave me permission to use the photo of the depot and elevators on the back cover that was sketched by her dad, Robert Hargrave.

Finally, I want to thank our good friend Calvette Haggard, who spent many hours editing this book. She has lived in Lubbock most of her life and taught high school English and journalism for many years. Her help and expertise made this final document possible.

Background

Who were the people who came to this area in the 1900s, built the town of Happy, and started farming virgin land? They had last names like White, Currie, Baggarly, Rahlfs, McNaughton, Bradenbaugh, Cobb, Cook, Overholt, Neff, Bandy, Miller, Evans, McManigal, and Whitman. People moved from all over the United States looking to better their lives by buying land.

Because of some extremely dry years in the 1890s, land originally priced at two dollars an acre per section was reclassified to offer buyers up to four sections for a dollar an acre with 3 percent down (Hulsey 1978, 10). In looking over family histories, most families came from either east or central Texas or from the Midwestern states like Nebraska, Kansas, and Missouri. Real estate agents seemed to concentrate on these areas as they advertised land for sale in the Texas Panhandle and South Plains (Hulsey 1978, 334).

The railroad served as a lifeline for new settlers and, as a result, determined the location of many towns in the Panhandle. Swisher County contains three communities, two of which relocated in the early years because of the railroad tracks. To the south of Tulia, the community of Kress grew out of the small community of Wright, which relocated to gain access to the railroad (Hulsey 1978, 60). The same issue caused Happy to move its post office two miles west in 1906 when the Santa Fe Railroad laid tracks from Canyon through Swisher County (Hulsey 1978, 53).

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Happy, Texas, 1921

The railroad made it possible for new settlers to ship their produce to the population centers in the East. With the railroad, they could leave some land in pasture and run cattle. Where no pasture existed, they could feed cattle the grain they raised. Many stock farmers populated the land in the Panhandle. They tried many different types of grains because no irrigation was available at that time, and they relied upon Mother Nature for moisture. Since annual rainfall in most of the Panhandle averages eighteen to twenty inches, not just anything can grow and make a crop.

With the help of the US Department of Agriculture, which established some experiment stations in the area, farmers soon determined that the soil and rainfall compared favorably to the great wheat-growing regions of southern Russia. Hard red winter wheat quickly became the crop of preference. The wheat crop provided grazing for cattle during the winter and early spring, and then farmers harvested it in early summer. Wheat normally brought a dollar a bushel, making it a great cash crop for these new settlers of the Plains.

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Happy, Texas, 1925

Early settlers in the Happy community laid out a township on a section of land in 1906, and Happy became an incorporated town in 1925 (Hulsey 1978, 53). The Santa Fe railroad runs north and south through town on the east side of the main business district, and US Highway 87 runs parallel to the railroad tracks one block to the east. Main Street goes west from the highway across the railroad tracks; it consists of five blocks of red brick paving laid in 1927 (Lee 2001, 87). During the fifties and sixties, Happy documented its largest population: nearly eight hundred people, not counting the farms in the school district. The economy kept growing, with grain elevators continually expanding. All the downtown buildings contained active businesses, and I do not remember any vacant houses in town. The Santa Fe depot stayed very busy, with two daily passenger trains coming through Happy for much of this period.

The enrollment in the local public school hit its highest level at this time, and civic clubs like the Jaycees and Lions supported many community activities. The five local churches accrued their largest attendance. Farmers did very well because of the abundance of water for irrigation and low energy rates for pumping it. According to Browsing Down Memory Lane columns in the Tulia Herald (2006), in 1956, Swisher County ranked among the top thirteen Texas counties in farm income, and even in 1965, the county ranked sixth in the nation in grain sorghum production.

The school district stretches about four miles north to seven miles south and seventeen miles west to the small community of Arney, and twenty miles east to the small community of Wayside on the edge of the Palo Duro Canyon. The district encompasses over 386 square miles in parts of the four counties of Swisher, Randall, Armstrong, and Castro (Hulsey 1978, 56). With a minimum of four people living on each section, at least 1,500 people lived in the Happy trade area who did not live in town. Through the years, the school population gradually grew from about 300 to 380 students.

Construction of the two major school buildings—one for elementary and the other for secondary—occurred in 1916 and 1928 (Hulsey 1978, 55). The red brick buildings both stood two stories high. The high school maintained an enrollment of 100 to 120 students in grades nine through twelve. The break between Class B and Class A schools was set at 120 students, so Happy always competed as one of the larger schools in Class B, although it did jump up to Class A for a couple of years in the late 1960s.

Five churches served Happy during this time. The Baptists and the Methodists both built two-level brick buildings with one level halfway underground. Each contained a long flight of stairs leading up to the front door. The construction of both buildings occurred around 1930. Catholics, Presbyterians, and members of the Church of Christ all worshiped in wood-frame buildings located on Main Street, one to two blocks west of the Baptist church. The Church of Christ built a new brick building in 1960 just east of the old one. The Baptists built a new modern church building at the far west end of Main Street in 1966. Families of other faiths would drive approximately fifteen miles to either Canyon or Tulia to attend worship services.

The school served as the center of the community and the major employer. The downtown area constantly buzzed with activity, especially on Saturdays. The town at the height of its growth hosted the following forty-five businesses and offices:

• four grocery stores

• three lumberyards

• four cafés

• a hotel

• a drugstore

• two barbershops

• three car dealerships

• five gasoline service stations

• a movie theater

• a dry-goods store

• two hardware and variety stores

• four grain elevators

• a farm-implement store

• a dry cleaner

• a hometown physician

• three beauty shops

• a meat processor

• a blacksmith

• a weekly newspaper

• the US Post Office

• city hall

• the Santa Fe depot

• a propane and butane company

• a bank

Sometime in the early thirties, Happy saw the construction of a major building: a large two-story structure always referred to as the Legion Hall. This building hosted several community events and served as the school cafeteria for the 1962–63 school year during the construction of the new school building.

The local Lions Club occupied the only wood-frame building on Main Street, as brick buildings had replaced all the earlier wooden business structures by this time. A few of the stores changed during the years, and as some closed, others took their place. For example, the Masons and Eastern Star took over the closed movie theater; an agriculture feed and supply store replaced one of the car dealerships; a pool hall replaced one of the grocery stores; a women’s clothing store replaced the dry-goods store; and a coin-operated laundry and real estate office replaced one of the hardware stores. An automotive repair shop replaced one of the gas stations. Even with these changes through the years, all of the storefronts remained fully occupied until the mid-sixties.

People living in Happy and on nearby farms could buy just about anything they needed in town except shoes and men’s clothing. Some services for which people traveled to Tulia or Canyon included a lawyer (which few people ever needed), a dentist, a hospital, and a savings and loan (which appeared in the 1950s). Happy residents also traveled out of town for amusement activities like bowling, swimming pools, outdoor movie theaters, and drive-in restaurants like Dairy Queen.

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Wheat harvest outside Happy, 1960

The busiest times in Happy were the two harvest seasons. The harvest ran from June 15 through July 15 for wheat and barley and September through November for grain sorghum. Harvest of the small amount of cotton grown around Happy happened during the late fall. Because of the length of the growing season and the maturity time required for cottonseed during those years, Happy was right on the north edge of possible cotton production. In 1965, a cotton gin operated just south of town for about ten years. As irrigation water went in a steep decline, cotton acreage disappeared. The Happy area never did raise much corn because of the large amount of water required.

Some of the land surrounding Happy remained as pasture. Ranching existed along with the growing of hay and silage for livestock. Large feedlots for cattle sprang up around the area in the mid-sixties. During harvest periods, the hotel filled with custom combine crews that moved through the area. The cafés did a booming business.

All the farmers still used Saturdays as the time to come to town to stock up on food and other supplies. The barbershops stayed full all day Saturday, usually closing after ten o’clock at night. From the founding of Happy in the early 1900s until about 1970, the town enjoyed a slow but steady growth. The most prosperous times occurred in the fifties and sixties with the availability and expansion of underground irrigation.

Happy, like most small communities, boasted a bustling downtown serving the folks in town and the surrounding area. The farming economy allowed most families to make a good living, which afforded them all the necessities and a higher standard of living. Times were good.

People are always interested in how Happy received its name. I have heard various stories, but no one really knows for sure. The first story states that Hugh Currie, in charge of the first post office, submitted the name of Happy Hollow to the government, but Hollow was disregarded; thus the final name of Happy. This story is recorded on the Texas historical marker at the site of old Happy. A second story goes back to the cowboys and their cattle drives. The draw that runs through this area always provided them a welcome relief and place to water the cattle, thus the name of Happy Draw.

Another story relates to a couple of cowboys lost at night in a blizzard when they spotted a light in the window of the Currie home. They were so happy to find refuge that night that the name of Happy stuck to this place. A similar story involves two freighters lost in a snowstorm who saw the light in the window. Also, there is a story that it was a stopping place on the north/south freight route; the Currie home became known as Happy Station or Happy Situation because it served as a welcome resting place.

One story says simply that when land promoters laid out the section of town two miles west next to the railroad tracks, they called the new town Happy. Another claims that Indians who roamed the Plains on a hunting trip in search of water came across this area and called it Happy Hunting Ground. Any of these stories could be true, but probably more people hold to the first story concerning the government disregarding Hollow as the most likely reason for the official naming of Happy.

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Old Currie Homestead

Chapter 1

From Founding and Expansion to Survival and Steady Growth

With the coming of the railroad in 1906 and the moving of the Happy Post Office a couple of miles west to be near the railroad tracks, the current town of Happy came into existence. The town site, known as Section 60, had passed through several owners before 1906. Early settler J. F. White owned the section in 1906, and he sold the section to the Talmage Townsite Company, which surveyed 160 acres of the town site into town lots (Early Account 1990).

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Happy in the mid-twenties

The Santa Fe Railroad built a permanent depot in Happy in 1908, and it stayed in use until the early seventies, when the railroad shut it down (History of Happy 1990). With the coming of the railroad, cheap virgin land, and the promise of a bright future, farmers and businesspeople from other parts of the country, especially the Midwest, began moving to the Happy area. Many of these early settlers probably followed the same path as my granddad Harman. A real estate firm from Plainview sent an agent to central Kansas to gather up a trainload of prospective land buyers and bring them back to sell them on the merits of this wide-open country. Granddad Harman bought a section of land about eleven miles southeast of Happy.

Some early settlers saw their opportunity in starting businesses to serve the many farmers moving to this new frontier. J. O. Bradenbaugh, L. F. Cobb, and H. M. Baggarly established the first business in Happy: the Plains Lumber and Grain Company. These families, all from Missouri, moved to Happy and eventually set up business branches in Tulia, Kress, Plainview, and Lubbock, with the headquarters remaining in Happy (History of Happy 1990). They represented the type of people moving long distances to begin new lives and cash in on a great opportunity in a new land that hadn’t been inhabited by anyone except the early Indian tribes and the cowmen who grazed cows on the native pastureland.

From the photos, it is obvious that wooden business structures sprang up in Happy over the next twenty years. Mose Wesley’s Auto Repair Shop, a one-hundred-by-fifty-foot concrete-floor garage, stood as the first brick building on Main Street, constructed in 1913 (Hulsey 1978, 59). In a few years, Alden Montgomery moved his auto-and-tractor-sales business into the building, so most people remember the building as Montgomery Motor Company.

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First brick building on Main Street.

The downtown really began to grow after several businessmen and area farmers officially incorporated the town on August 14, 1925 (History of Happy 1990). This action led to Happy building a water tower for the completion of a new city water system in 1928 (Happy Water Tower 1928). At this point, the town began the process of laying water and sewer lines. The downtown area was obviously the first part of Happy to receive these services because of the construction that took place from about 1925 to 1931.

All the following information comes from the March 13, 1930, special Swisher County Agricultural and Progress Edition of the Tulia Herald, in an article entitled Happy is One of Fastest Growing Towns in Panhandle. Happy received three pages in this edition, its authors bragging about all the progress taking place in the city just to the north of Tulia. The article said that for years, Happy had been known as the Biggest Little Town in Texas. Residents enjoyed electricity and natural gas along with an adequate water system and fire department.

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Main Street of Happy, Texas, 1930

The 1930 article stated that during the past few years, Happy had boasted of ten new business houses. These buildings, all of them brick, provided a framework for downtown for the remainder of the twentieth century. The new buildings included a two-story hotel with thirty hotel rooms upstairs, along with a lobby, coffee shop, and three other businesses on the lower level. Across the street to the east, the First State Bank built its permanent home (still in use today). The south end of the bank building served as the official US Post Office in Happy until the construction of a new post office around 1960. To the north of the hotel, T. L. Fore built a large automobile showroom and garage called Happy Motor Company, where he sold Fords. A large two-story building that housed a drugstore completed the four corners of this major downtown intersection.

It’s clear from the back of the 1930 Happy High School annual that other businesses were building in the 1920s, with advertisements including those for Burrow Lumber Co., O. M. Fowler General Merchandise, the Happy Theatre, White’s Café, City Tailors, and the Happy Herald (The Muleteer 1930). Many of these businesses remained open into the 1960s and 1970s. These new businesses built with brick fronts gradually replaced the wooden structures,