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 Texas : Features : Columns : "Texas Tales"

October Barrel

by Mike Cox
Mike Cox

Eight-year-old Viola Helen Anderson did not grasp that the U.S. stood on the brink of a financial crisis that would come to be called the Panic of 1906. All the San Angelo girl cared about was that her daddy had died.

On a cold, rainy day that winter, a big load of merchandise arrived at the March Brothers General Store on Beauregard. That’s where her father worked and no matter the weather, he insisted on supervising the wagon’s unloading.

Richard Anderson took a cold which developed into pneumonia. Back then doctors called it the galloping consumption. He died on Jan. 16 and they buried him in Fairmount Cemetery.

“He was a kind and gentle man and we really depended on him,” Helen remembered a lifetime later, “but Mama and I had to keep going, and we did.”

While Helen attended school, Minta Gafford Anderson supported them in the midst of a growing money shortage by sewing and taking in boarders.

Across the state, Lizzie Gafford Kincaid and her husband Jim -- Helen’s aunt and uncle – struggled to keep their dry goods store open in the little town of Lindale, north of Tyler. They sold everything from candy to coffins.

“Mama and Aunt Lizzie were very close,” Helen said, “but Mama didn’t have much use for Uncle Jim, who fought for the Union in the Civil War. Mama’s family’s farm in Mississippi had been destroyed by Yankees and more than 40 years hadn’t dulled her memory.”

When school let out for the summer, the new widow and her daughter packed their big trunk and took the train to East Texas. While her mother spent time with her sister, visiting, sewing and helping with the canning, Helen made friends with the daughter of the man who owned the hotel adjacent to the railroad.

Behind the hotel, Helen and the other little girl laid rocks on the ground to make the outline of an imaginary house. Finding scattered pieces of broken china, they used those to set an imaginary table.

“A train coming in would mean a meal was about to be served at the hotel, so we’d scoot in and collect all the food we wanted from my friend’s mother,” she recalled.

When her friend could not play, Helen spent time in her family’s store playing solo hide-and-go-seek and freely helping herself to the candy bins.

They stayed in Lindale most of the summer, finally making the long train ride back to San Angelo in time for the start of school.

Back in West Texas, Helen missed her friend and their simple playhouse, her aunt and uncle and the candy in their store.

One day in October, Helen happened to take her time coming home from school. She only hurried when she walked through the old cemetery, where they had been digging up graves to make room for a new high school. Jumping over the open graves, she tried not to notice the coffin handles and shoe heels in the piles of dirt.

“Mama was a little put out with me when I finally got home,” she recalled.

Then Helen noticed a large wooden barrel in the middle of their small kitchen. She assumed it held sugar.

“Mama made a lot of preserves, but I couldn’t understand why she would need a whole barrel of sugar,” she said. “Mama pried the boards off the top and I scrambled up on a chair to look inside. All I saw was peanuts.”

The arrival of a barrel of peanuts seemed even more incomprehensible. Her mother could barely afford the basics, certainly not a luxury like goobers.

“I was still puzzling over it when she fished inside and pulled out an apron,” Helen said. “Her next thrust produced a sack she handed to me. It was my favorite candy. Mama told me to help her and my first dip brought out a comb and brush Mama said I could have.”

Finally, Helen understood. Uncle Jim and Aunt Lizzie had sent them a treasure chest in a 55-gallon barrel. It held assorted notions and knickknacks, clothing, buttons, lace, powder jars, writing tablets for school, pencils, dime novels, fruit, preserves, sweet potatoes, ribbon cane, and persimmons – a veritable general store packed in peanuts.

“Every October we got our barrel from Uncle Jim and Aunt Lizzie,” Helen recalled. “Mama never had much money, but the October Barrel wasn’t charity. It was just understood back then that people had to help people. I don’t know how many times Mama got called out in the middle of the night when someone was sick, dead or having a baby.”

Of course, Minta did things for her sister, too. She even sewed for her Yankee brother-in-law.

The last October Barrel came in 1916.

“By that time,” Helen said, “I was married and pretty soon after that barrel came, my husband got a job with a newspaper in Fort Worth and we moved. Not long after that, Uncle Jim and Aunt Lizzie sold their store and came back to the San Angelo area.”

Helen never understood why her aunt and uncle chose to ship the barrel in October instead of before Christmas, but she knew what it meant to a widow and a fatherless girl.

For the rest of her long life, especially when the days got shorter and the weather turned cooler, my grandmother remembered the October Barrel and what it taught her.

© Mike Cox
"Texas Tales"
September 25, 2008 column
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