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Thad Sitton (Edited by) : Harder than Hardscrabble: Oral Recollections of the Farming Life from the Edge of the Texas Hill Country

University of Texas Press, Austin, Texas, 2003

ISBN 9780292701991

8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall. S2 - A first edition (stated) hardcover book in good condition in very good dust jacket. Dust jacket has some scattered wrinkling, rubbing, scratches, crease and light stains/smudges, light tanning and shelf wear. Book bowed, cocked and with somewhat curled cover, some bumped corners, some moderate bug damage/chipping and some stains on the lower right corner of the front free endpaper, some bug damage/chipping on the page edges and middle hinge of the front endpapers, light discoloration and shelf wear. Number Six Clifton and Shirley Caldwell Texas Heritage Series. 9.5"x6.5", 297 pages. Satisfaction Guaranteed. Until the U.S. Army claimed 300-plus square miles of hardscrabble land to build Fort Hood in 1942, small communities like Antelope, Pidcoke, Stampede, and Okay scratched out a living by growing cotton and ranching goats on the less fertile edges of the Texas Hill Country. While a few farmers took jobs with construction crews at Fort Hood to remain in the area, almost the entire population - and with it, an entire segment of rural culture - disappeared into the rest of the state. In Harder than Hardscrabble, oral historian Thad Sitton collects the colorful and frequently touching stories of the pre-Fort Hood residents to give a firsthand view of Texas farming life before World War II. Accessible to the general reader and historian alike, the stories recount in vivid detail the hardships and satisfactions of daily life in the Texas countryside. They describe agricultural practices and livestock handling as well as life beyond work: traveling peddlers, visits to towns, country schools, medical practices, and fox hunting. Many of the anecdotes are from a world very different from today: a world where you asked the phone operator to dial "I-W" to reach your grandmother, where a mother cut and sewed the tough skin of an old basketball into a pair of shoes, and where people walked for miles to dance a "stomp" or "dose-e-doe." The stories also describe a fast-disappearing rural society. Modernization made kerosene lamps and mule-drawn ploughs less common and enabled the radio, automobiles, and the Sears catalog to become regular features in rural life. The Great Depression and the Works Progress Administration also left their mark on the isolated communities, until finally the military necessities of World War II required the entire area being supplanted.. Book Condition: Good. Binding: Hardcover. Jacket: Very Good

First Edition

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