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Rough and tumble days remembered
Published November 23, 2009
Kenneth Mashburn, a Freeport native, remembers when Dow Chemical was under construction in 1939 and the early 1940s, Freeport became a boomtown.
People were “coming in from everywhere with no place to live,” he said, and the tide of new residents increased even more when the United States entered World War II, since Dow was manufacturing items critical to the war effort.
“Dad and his brother built a small house in our back yard,” Mashburn wrote in Dan Kessner’s book, “Memories of the Brazosport Area from the 1940s & ’50s.”
Mashburn said his father and uncle “also closed in our garage since we didn’t have a car,” and his father rented both of those buildings to people with small families.
In addition, Mashburn’s father “closed off the front two rooms of our house and rented those to a family of five,” he said, adding “at one time there were 20 people living on our lot.”
He remembered many of the places that were kids’ favorites during that era. Among them was the Freeport Icehouse. “On the way to the movies on Saturday morning we would stop there and get a handful of ice sawdust,” he said.
This was made when the saw blades scored a 300-pound block of ice so the ice men could more easily chop it into smaller blocks.
“What it amounted to was a snow cone without the cup and syrup,” he explained.
Mashburn also remembered swimming across the Old Brazos River, and says he tells his grandchildren “how we used to swim from one town to another, i.e. Freeport to Velasco.” He doesn’t bother to tell them it was just across the river, though, and admits, “It’s no wonder they think I am Superman.”
Bill Murff wrote in Kessner’s book about his family’s move to Clute in 1947. During their first year in the area they lived “in a plywood shack” at Camp Chemical, he said, staying there until his father could build a small house in Clute.
The family later moved to a 2-acre tract on Kyle Road in Oyster Creek, where he and the Kyle boys — “Red,” Kenneth and Bob — spent some of their time shooting alligators from the creek’s bridge. He also remembered when grass was short in pastures, they worked pulling moss from trees to feed cattle for a Mr. Riley.
Zachie Evans, who grew up in Velasco, was another of the longtime residents of the area who wrote his recollections in Kessner’s book. He remembered when Dow began building its plant, his family, like many others, took in renters because there was virtually no housing available in the area.
In his youth, he and one of those renters, Tommy Griffith, hunted on land on which his father and Albert Fredrick ran cattle.
His family’s home was close enough so that once the Velasco Theater was built, Evans could walk to see the movies. “Usually on Saturday would be a western, or even a double feature, a continued serial, and several cartoons,” he said.
“Sometimes Mr. Brock would have a stage show with local talent. One of the local acts I remember was the Speed Brothers, Tom and Keith, tap dancing.”
This required “a lot of guts,” Evans said, “because their peers were in the audience and gave them a bad time.” All this entertainment was available for just 9 cents for those younger than 12.
“After the movies we would strap on our cap guns and fight the bad guys all the way back home,” Evans said. “The streets of Velasco ran red with outlaw blood on Saturday afternoon.”
Calvin Reed was an adult when he moved to Velasco from Lubbock in 1941, to take a job as a teacher. He remembered he was wearing an overcoat when he came from that much colder area, only to find local children going barefoot in November.
“I had heard of the town of Freeport” because it had “a one-man track team — Walter “Red” Cecil, who had eliminated our five men single-handed in the State Meet in Austin,” he said.
On his arrival in Velasco, Reed said, he walked down Avenue A, “carrying a suitcase and the overcoat … and thought, ‘Mama, what did I ever do to deserve this?’ A 20-year-old boy, afoot and in an entirely different world.”
Regarding Camp Chemical, he said, “I still haven’t found one address at night, with no lights and all houses made exactly alike.”
He remembered Midway — located halfway between Freeport and Dow’s Plant A — as a place that had “a cutting or shooting almost every night.”
This was not the only rough place in the area, he said. “Don’t forget First Street in Freeport. I saw many a sheet-draped body as I drove the bus over the combination car- and railroad-bridge over the old Brazos.”
Dan Kessner noted First Street was known at that time as Freeport’s “skid row.”
In teaching, Reed said, he found “overcrowded classrooms” with 30 to 50 pupils, “some with books, some with no place to sit.” Only eight years older than the oldest members of his classes, he was a self-described “rookie teaching rookies.”
Reed drove a school bus for $30 a month, and taught for $96 a month. For a time he picked up students living on the bank of the New Brazos River, where Hopper Field is presently located.
“You would be surprised that about half of my (bus) load of children came up the bank where they lived in tents and (in) opened barrels,” he said.
“Driving the bus was an experience. I got stuck a lot because I was not familiar with gumbo mud.” He remembered how helpful people were for the most part, though, noting, “We never had to pay a tow-in fee,” though some Freeport residents did make “remarks about the bus drivers from Velasco.”
Before the end of the school term, Reed learned that Dow was paying janitors more than he was making as a teacher and bus driver, and the janitors didn’t have to drive buses.
After his stint as a teacher, he worked for a total of 40 years at three different Dow facilities.
Marie Beth Jones, a published author and freelance writer based in Angleton, is chairwoman of the Brazoria County Historical Commission.
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