Question: When and where were you born?
Jerry Flach: At Santa Rosa Hospital in San Antonio, on April 3, 1954.

Question: Were you raised here in Comfort?
Jerry Flach: No. We lived in San Antonio until I was 12 years old, then we moved out here to Comfort. So, I've been here almost 40 years now, but I have ancestors who were some of the first people to settle the area.

Question: Tell me a little about those ancestors.
Jerry Flach: Well, my great, great grandfather's uncle, Heinrich Schladoer, and a Borner, were two of the founding fathers of Comfort. Heinrich's in-laws followed later. One of them was a woman with six kids. One of those kids was my great, great grandfather from that side of the family.

Question: What would you say has been the most important event in Comfort's history since you have lived here?
Jerry Flach: The most publicized one would have to be the 1987 flood. That's when a busload of children was swept into the floodwaters while trying to cross a bridge when the water was just starting to rise. nine of them drowned. The other 31 children had to be plucked out of the trees by National Guard and news helicopters. One of them was never found. So, for a few days Comfort made the national news, and the whole town basically turned into a media circus. I don't know if that's the most important event since I've lived here, but it was definitely the most publicized.

Question: Were those local children?
Jerry Flach: No, they were all from the Dallas area, staying here at the Pot-o-Gold youth camp that summer.

Question: What was life like for you in your early days here?
Jerry Flach: There really wasn't a whole lot to do back in them days. I basically went to school. Then after school, come home and help feed the livestock.

Question: Has livestock always been your primary source of income?
Jerry Flach: Oh, for about...about half of my life, yes. The other half was the grocery store that the family owned.

Question: So you basically helped run this family grocery store for half your life?
Jerry Flach: Yes, for 18 years full time, and 10 years part time. Twenty eight years total.

Question: What was the name of that store?
Jerry Flach: Comfort Grocery & Feed.

Question: What would you say is the primary source of income for most of the people who live here?
Jerry Flach: These days, I would have to say farming, ranching, and James Avery Jewelers. James Avery has two manufacturing buildings and one storage building. Before that, there was the Gousha Mapping Company. They employed about 100 people. We used to have Southwest Engineering, which was a telephone cable laying outfit.

Question: How much has Comfort grown since you've lived here?
Jerry Flach: Well, I know the school system has doubled in size. When I graduated high school, there was only 576 kids in the whole school. Now I hear that there's close to 1200 in the school.

Question: Is Comfort still a mostly German community, or is that just the way it started out?
Jerry Flach: The German community was prevalent until the late 60's to mid 70's. Since then, its basically been a mixture of everything.

Question: What role did Mexican immigrants play in the town's history?
Jerry Flach: Those Mexican families that have been here for the 150 or so years have mainly helped the more well-to-do ranchers on their ranches and farms. Back in the 20's, 30’s, and 40's, the Mexican families around here could speak German just as well as any German could. But back in the 50's and 60's, a lot of the outlying farms and ranches went into dairy businesses. They started employing the Mexicans because of the cheap labor. From my understanding, they only had to pay them about $4 a day, plus food.

Question: What do you know about the railroad that used to go through Comfort?
Jerry Flach: The railroad traveled from San Antonio, through Comfort, and into Kerrville bringing supplies. From 1907 to 1911, they built a Hermann Sons home for the aged here, and for 25-30 years after that, the railroad would haul coal from San Antonio to Comfort to supply the coal for the home. That was their prime source of heating fuel and cooking fuel back then. They would usually get four or five Mexican immigrants who wanted to work that day, and have them shovel coal from the railroad car onto trucks for them. I guess they did it that way for 30 or 40 years until they ran a natural gas system up there. The railroad stopped running through here in 1968.

Question: Did the railroad stop coming here because the I-10 Highway had been built by then?
Jerry Flach: It was that and the fact everything was going from railroad to the trucking industry. That’s when the Freightliner trucking companies started taking over back then. It was cheaper to do it that way, and get merchandise right up to the business door instead of having the business go pick their things up at the rail yard.

Question: In what ways has Comfort changed since the I-10 Highway started coming through?
Jerry Flach: Compared to what it was like before the highway, I'd have to say that it mainly keeps the trucking traffic out of town. Other than that, I don't think it has had too much of an effect on the town.

Question: The town was built right where the Cypress Creek and Guadalupe River converge. What can you tell me about some of the floods that have happened in Comfort over the years?
Jerry Flach: The first major flood I saw was in 1959 here in Comfort. The water covered about three blocks of town, but was only about a foot deep. In 1978, the river came up 48 feet, and in downtown Comfort, the water was over 10 feet deep in some places. In the years since that, we've had five or six instances when the water covered three to four blocks of town, but nothing as bad as the flood of 78. The last one happened in 2002. From what I understand, the record flood for Comfort happened back in 1870. It was actually recorded that the water came up five feet higher than the floodwaters of 78.

Question: In what ways did any of the recent floods affect you?
Jerry Flach: The 1978 flood reached our grocery store. We had seven feet of water in the store on the morning of August the 2nd. For about four hours that morning, the city streets were filled with big rescue boats instead of automobiles and pick-up trucks. Those boats would head off down the streets empty, and by the time they came back, sometimes they had as many as 20 to 30 people on them.

Question: Did any of the local residents die in that flood?
Jerry Flach: No one in town died in the flood. But in outlying areas about two miles north of town, there were three people that drowned there when they drove into water that was two to three feet deep. There were also one or two other deaths that happened when people were trying to get livestock out of the pastures, but got entangled in barbed wire fence and drowned.

Question: How much of the town was destroyed by the 78 flood?
Jerry Flach: It probably left anywhere from 90 to 120 families homeless from about August until they were able to rebuild by the next spring. We were able to reopen the store about a week before Thanksgiving, but we had to tear out all of the wooden flooring. After that, we laid down gravel and made it into a concrete floor. That pretty much happened all over the whole community. Nowadays you’ve got some people in the town building their house on stilts.

Question: Some townspeople have told me that Comfort had some men fighting in the Civil War. What have you heard about that?
Jerry Flach: From what I understand, there were about 15 men from this community that decided to fight for the Union. But back in those days, most of those German families had anywhere from eight to 10 children, so they didn’t really have any need for slaves. They had plenty of manpower within their own families to get the work done on the family farms.

Question: I saw an old building downtown that looked like it had just burned down recently. What can you tell me about that?
Jerry Flach: That was the Ingenhuett General Store. It was built back in the 1860’s by Peter Joseph Ingenhuett. They moved it to that building back in 1880. It has stayed in the family ever since. From what I’ve been told, it was the oldest continuous General Store in Texas. But it suffered a disastrous fire here on March 15th of 2006. For a while there, it served as the town bank, and the post office, until the town grew big enough to build places for those purposes.