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Simpler times, pleasures once prevailed here
Published September 21, 2009
In the late 1930s Brazoria County was a sleepy area in which agriculture had always been — and still was — the main source of livelihood for the majority of its residents.
The Freeport Sulphur Co. had brought industry to the county, but its reserves were nearing depletion by the time Dow Chemical Co. began building its chemical plant here.
At that time, most Angleton residents still remembered when the masthead of their weekly newspaper bore the slogan, “God Mighta Made A Better Country But He Surely Never Did,” which was a clear reference to the fact this was an area of farmers and ranchers.
By the time Dow arrived, Angleton was only about 50 years old. Unaware of the changes that were in their future, many of the town’s older residents looked back with both nostalgia and surprise at the changes that already had occurred during their lifetimes.
Mrs. Pearl Jamison Rucks remembered one of the items most in demand at the local confectionary during her youth in Angleton was baked sweet potatoes.
Others recalled an occasion when ice that was scheduled to come into town on the train for a birthday party failed to arrive as expected.
This meant the ice cream the hostess had planned to serve still was a liquid. The guests made the best of the situation, simply drinking the custard mix.
In the earliest days of the town, a Croquet Club and a Forty-Two Club were formed, each of them meeting regularly for the enjoyment of residents who enjoyed those pastimes.
And of course, there were the trains. Walking to the depot to watch the trains come in was a favored spare time activity for both youths and adults.
Everybody still knew everybody else in Angleton at that time. I remember as a child I would notice a stranger and ask my parents who that person was.
The answer was almost always it was a relative or friend of some local person I did know — and often my parents even knew the stranger’s name.
The grocery store where my family did business was called Ralph and Render, operated in that era by Fred Ralph, the “second generation” operator of that name, and one of the original partners, Noble Render. It was located near the middle of the east 100 block of Mulberry Street, a few steps from where the post office was at that time.
“Our” pharmacy was City Drug Store in the north 100 block of Velasco Street. It was operated in my youth by Joe Jackson, and later by his wife, Merle.
Any trip to town from our house, which was some 3 miles to the north of Angleton, was likely to involve stops at the post office and both these stores.
The general means of getting from one to the other was to walk diagonally from the corner of one of the town’s two banks to the other.
About the time of Dow’s arrival a blinking light was installed at that intersection, and the city council advised the public via the newspaper that anyone the city marshal caught jaywalking would be subject to a fine.
I asked what jaywalking meant, and my parents defined it as crossing a street in the middle, not at an intersection. To my 6- to 8-year-old mind, this was heresy.
Why would someone who wanted to go to a building directly across the street need to walk down to the corner to cross, and then walk back the other way to get to the proper destination?
And when I was told that “cutting across” at corners also constituted jaywalking, I absolutely knew the city council wasn’t living in the real world.
Walk from a bank corner to one of the corners where a service station was located, then walk from that service station to the other bank corner? If I had known at that age about Communist plots, I’d have been certain this was one of them.
I remember my folks telling me it was the law, passed for safety reasons, and I’d have to obey it. I argued it was ridiculous.
Traffic during that time involved one or two cars in each direction every five minutes or so.
And I distinctly remember when my parents weren’t watching, I stubbornly walked from one bank corner to the other and crossed the downtown streets in the middle for months afterward.
I don’t believe I finally quit until traffic increased to the point that it was very obviously dangerous to “cut across.” That increase mirrored the advent of Dow’s construction.
This would have been about the time that what is now Highway 288-B was being built from Angleton to the south. Previously, if you were traveling to Freeport from Angleton, the route was on the road that passed by the Brazoria County Fairgrounds. Freeport’s only other access was through West Columbia.
During those years, most residents did their primary purchasing of clothing, shoes and furnishings in Houston, where a greater variety was available.
Some also purchased large quantities of groceries — a barrel of flour or a 100-pound sack of sugar, or a case of a favorite canned vegetable, for example — from Houston supermarkets, such as Henke and Pillot, limiting their local purchases to smaller or more perishable items they needed immediately.
In those days, even the local newspaper, which depended on Angleton merchants for the majority of its income, printed “society” items about which of the town’s residents had been “shopping” in Houston during the preceding week.
Next week: Brazoria County’s “gold rush.”
Marie Beth Jones, a published author and freelance writer based in Angleton, is chairwoman of the Brazoria County Historical Commission.
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