Changing Times

At the Cluny Museum in Paris, David and I stepped back into the Middle Ages.  For an hour we shut out the modern city and tried to imagine when Paris was a small town.  Knights lived in castles, where they hung tapestries on the stone walls to keep out the cold.  Peasants lived in straw huts with dirt floors. 

By the 18th Century, when Ben Franklin went to Paris to represent the revolting colonies, Paris was a modern city.  David and I walked in streets still lined with handsome 18th Century houses.  In rural areas peasants still lived in huts.  And in Texas?  There were no cities, just a few thousand Caddo Indians living in straw huts.

My mother’s family came to Texas in the 19th Century.  In the 1850 census Dallas reported 160 residents. Rockwall was not established until 1854.  Our family’s first home was a log cabin. My grandmother said, “They were always glad when it rained, because Indians never came when it rained.”  They needed guns for protection against raiding Comanches. 

Conditions were not much better in rural Texas well into the 20th Century.  My father’s parents lived in Comanche County, Texas.  When I was little, my father took me with him on his once-a-month visits to his parents, who lived in Sidney, a “town” that consisted of a post office and a barber shop, each the size of the bathroom in our Fort Worth home, plus a school, two general stores, three churches (Baptist, Methodist, and “Campbellite” – no Catholics in that part of Texas), and four houses. 

My grandparents’ house was typical “dog run” style, with a wide front porch and a “dog run” separating the two front rooms.  The main room was a combination living room and bedroom.  At night my grandmother lighted a kerosene lamp on a little marble-topped table next to the fireplace.  Water was hauled up by bucket from the well outside the back door.  The toilet was a  cold walk, holding my grandmother’s hand, to the privy.  The yard was full of chickens, which were enormous and terrifying to a two-year-old.

We – my parents, me, and my brother Lyle – lived in the modern city of Fort Worth, with street cars, 250,000 people, indoor plumbing, and electric lights.  Yet the street next to our house was not paved.  Once a year Daddy hired a truck to spread oil on the street “to keep down the dust.”

During my life I’ve seen Dallas and Fort Worth grow into this giant Metroplex sprawling through five counties.  Millions of people are all crammed together in one of the largest urban areas in the U.S. . 

I live in Garland, a Dallas suburb.  People here are stuck mentally in the 19th Century.  They demand to own guns for protection.  Against whom?  The Caddos are extinct, and the Comanches, rich from oil wells, stay in Oklahoma.  Texans are paranoid with fear of the unknown.

Texans also are strong advocates of “less government.”  In the old days a single sheriff could provide law enforcement for a whole town.  A city with more than a million people must have many policemen.  It is simple arithmetic.

People who live in cities depend on government for a multitude of services.  We pay water bills every month without thinking that taxes paid for the filtration plants that clean lake water and the pipes that bring it to our homes.

Filtration plants were built with help from the national government.  Sewage plants, too.  Paid for by taxes.  Remember that the next time you flush the pot.