A Child in the 1930's Wild West

I grew up in Fort Worth, where my father worked for the First National Bank.  My father, Byron Preston Pattie, grew up in Sidney, Texas, where his parents still lived when I was little.  Daddy went to see them once a month, and sometimes he took me with him.

Mother would take me downtown to pick up Daddy on Saturday afternoon.  (In those days all office workers were required to work from eight to five from Monday through Friday and from eight until noon on Saturday.)  Daddy would be waiting on the sidewalk in front of the bank.  Then we would take Mother and my little brother Lyle home before heading for the highway.

Our “Model T” Ford chugged along on the two-lane road, full of pot holes, through the little towns of Cressen, Stephenville, and other tiny communities.  Somewhere we always seemed to have a flat tire, and Daddy would get out of the car, and hand me his suit coat.  Daddy always wore a suit with white shirt and carefully tied tie.  He hated to get dirty.  But when a tire went flat, he would roll up his sleeves, knell down, and put on the spare. 

When we came to the town of Comanche with its domed court house, county seat of Comanche County, Daddy turned right, and we went west on a sandy, unpaved road, deep in the heart of Texas.  We came to two big hills, one on either side of the road, which Daddy called “Long Mountain” and “Round Mountain.”  The car rattled on wooden runners on the iron bridge across Jimmy’s Creek, and we were in Sydney.

Entering Sydney was like stepping back into a nineteen-century pioneer community.  My Pattie grandparents were pioneers, among the first “white” people to live there when they moved to Sydney in the early nineteen-hundreds.  The Comanches Indians, for whom the town and county were named, were hunters and raiders and never made permanent settlements. 

Sydney was literally “a wide place in the road.”  The road divided in two, with a middle of the division taken by a wooden building occupied by a general store.  Years later on a return visit, I stepped inside and was amazed to see a group of old men sitting around an iron, pot-bellied wood stove, just like I’d seen in Western movies.

As we drove into town – although it seems presumptuous to call these few buildings a “town” -- across the road on the left were the low, one-story school and three churches: Baptist, Methodist, and “Campbellite”(what Daddy called the church known properly as Disciples of Christ). 

In Comanche County, Catholics were as rare as black people.  Any Negro entering the county was told to be gone before sundown.  As far as I know any black person  coming that way heeded the warning.  I heard of no lynchings.in Comanche County.  That was how these white Southerners avoided racial problems.  Of course, that does not make it right, but that was how they felt at the time.

Back to describing Sydney:  Opposite the churches, on the road to the right, were two small buildings, similar to the storage sheds advertized on today’s television.  One was the post office, the other a one-chair barber shop.  Then came the entire residential area of the town: three widely separated houses.  In the first house, behind a rough wood picket fence, was the home of my grandparents, Joe and Ada Pattie.  And this was the community where my father grew up, God-fearing, Bible-quoting, yet fiercely independent pioneers who had come to Texas in the wake of the Civil War and in the 1930's still talked about the Lost Cause of the Glorious South.