Thomas O'Briant
Thomas O'Briant was born on September 19, 1932, which was his mother’s, Annie Pearl O'Briant's (nee Fitts), birthday. He was born at home, a two room-dirt floor shack in Ackerly, Texas. Tom was a young child during the Great Depression, yet has a clear memory of this period.
During the Great Depression Tom’s father, Thomas Lee O'Briant was a carpenter and farmer. “No one had money, had lots of hogs, chickens, livestock and stuff, but no money. Plenty to eat, but no money.” Since money was limited, the family traded goods for household items they needed. Every week they traveled into town where Tom’s mother sold butter and cheese made from fresh milk, and fresh eggs, (gathered by Tom), for profit. Farm communities were strong during the Great Depression, and neighboring families depended on one another. They gathered together for church services, to elect town officials, for entertainment, and especially when harvest time came.
Tom’s original intention was to become a farmer, as he owned his own small herd of cattle, but because of the drought, he worked with his uncle on an oil rig until he was drafted into the Army. He served for two years in the 11th cavalry during the Korean War. Throughout the years, as the economy flowed up and down, Tom moved around the country. He has worked with people from many different nationalities as well.
He married his wife, Wanda Herron, in 1969. Their sons are, Jeff O'Briant of Poteet, Texas, James O'Briant, also of Poteet, Dennis O'Briant and wife Nicole of Canton, Georgia, and John O'Briant and wife Lana also of Canton. They have three grandchildren, Katy, Zachary, and Reagan plus two on the way.
After Tom retired, they moved to Poteet, Texas and established their own water-well drilling company and service, called TWOCO (the Tom Wanda O'Briant Company). Two of Tom’s sons work with the company today. 
He and his family are wonderful neighbors, and family friends. Our interview took place "over a cup," in the living room of the O'Briant home.
How much was it to move? Did you buy the land?
No. Back then at that particular time there was not enough money made farming to actually, say buy land. There was a little bit bought and I think the folks made good moves buying it then, but what they did they bought it with the owner financing it and they’d give him so much per year and it wasn’t monthly payments or anything like that it would be so much per year at a certain rate of interest and if you had a bad year, drought which out farming you have a bad year, well you didn’t go repossess the land it was just you paid the interest and it was just added on further So if you say financed it for 10 years it might take you 15 to get it paid out, but in the meantime they drew the interest on it. And the interest back then was not very high, three, four, five percent was the a pretty good interest rate. But overall there was not a lot of land being bought if you owned a piece of land or several pieces of land you didn’t say farm it yourself a lot of times when you rented it out to a farmer there was a standard dollar amount depending on the crop that was decided, like cotton the land owner got 25 percent of the cotton on the grain he got a third of the grain and that was the pasture was just part of it then But that’s what paid the rent was a percentage of the crop like that and that is still that way today up there. There’s variations and so forth but its, that’s still pretty much the percentage that’s set there. So for you to come out with profit you had to put out money to raise a crop, sell it the whole bit, pay that 25 percent to the landlord and then you made a little profit in there normally and in today’s numbers if your looking at say profit well your looking at a pretty hefty profit that has to be made off of it. It’d be more like 40 percent profit that you’d be making except that you’ve gotta pay this rent If you owned the land, well you know you came out a lot better taxes weren’t as rough then not anywhere as rough as they are now. You hardly ever saw anyone get in tax trouble it the tax bill wasn’t that high and back then if you couldn’t pay it this year, well you paid it next year. An old boy that I worked for when I was a young man back during the depression he couldn’t pay his taxes, he was a rancher, as time went on, well he got so that he could and he got to be a director at the bank and as time went on, well his own father owned a big sheep ranch and his tax bill and stuff, it took him 20 years to pay out from the depression, after it got to a profit area there, after the depression sort of got over but they didn’t come down real hard on people back then they’d give them a chance to work out from under him so you didn’t have many farms being sold for taxes unless somebody just threw up their hands and moved off of it and left it well then that all they could do was put it up for auction and sell it for the taxes it was owed Whereas nowadays if they sell a place at auction they try to get a little bit more than what’s owed for taxes you know but back then they didn’t do it quite that way. We had a neighbor farm that did sell like that it was a good sized farm wasn’t good land in that direction but the old boy was just too lazy to work it that was the biggest thing had a big family and he just wouldn’t work and didn’t make many crops he just had a spot to squat for a while till he decided to move on to greener pastures when he did the place went up for sell it was a tax sale and I remember I think it was .70 cents an acre that was owed against it and I remember we went, oh, I was just a kid, I went with dad and we drove all over it to see if it was worth buying and dad decided against it, it just wasn’t a good farm and If you got it well you weren’t never going to make much off it so just don’t tie up it.
How many times did you move during the Depression?
During the Depression about three. From the spot I was born to a farm pretty close to grandpa and grandma and from there over to another spot that was still pretty close to them but it was a lot better farm. We stayed there till of way up into oh '42 or '43 when we bought a farm and we moved onto it. We still farmed that farm that we had a long time that we had rented a long time still farmed it. Things, times got better the war came on and everybody was working and you know a lot of men folks were gone and so overall times were better. We had sugar rationing I remember that, you could get sugar to can with like old farm communities, they canned their peaches and stuff and used a lot of sugar, you could get an allotment to cover that plus you got so much per head per family per month. That is where I learned to drink iced tea without sugar mom used up all of our sugar canning peaches and anyhow hot summer time everybody drank a lot of tea that was it you know and we didn’t have sugar so we just drank it without it and after a few glasses you kinda get to where it's not so bad, and to this day I don’t need sugar in my tea it just don’t taste right with sugar in it.
Things that you needed for the household, where they easy to find in town?
You mean like flour? Yeah when we carried our eggs and butter and that stuff and our milk money from the milk route when we went to town we picked up flour and sugar and stuff like that. That was plenty available and it didn’t cost a whole lot and our farm produce pretty much bought the groceries that we had to buy that we didn’t grow, so we were out very little money as far as living expenses like your talking about the sugar the flour the coffee it didn’t cost us much and the things that were in short supply was gasoline, again being on the farm we had an allotment for the tractor and then you got so much per car for a certain size of family they had little coupons or little stickers that went in your windshield like an A B or C well each one of those meant that you could just get so much gas if you drove into a station and needed gas you couldn’t fill the tank up you could just get five gallons or seven gallons or whatever coupon said you could use there. The tractors we normally had plenty gas for the tractors. It was a colored gasoline, I believe it was red but once in a while a cop would stop you on the highway and he’d run a hose in your gas tank to see what color gasoline you had and it better not be red you know because they’d fuss at you pretty hard, I don’t know of anybody who ever got caught oh and the speed limit was 35 on the highway that was again to save gas, but back then every one had Model A fords or some in that general age group and there was a few '40 and '41 model Fords and Chevrolet and they just 35 mile an hour was it and you just settled in and rolled the windows down and took a while you know. It really wasn’t all that bad back then. We look at it compared to now with 70 mile an hour speed limits, well people really didn’t go that far you know, they’d go to town and that’s really all the business they had maybe go see a relative 40 or 50 miles away but if they lived 100 or 200 miles away maybe once a year you know Christmas or Fourth of July or something but people didn’t go like they do now. It was a good way of life, I enjoyed a lot of it, I thought it was rough then but looking back and comparing then to now it's not a bad way of life. The one thing that helped back then was that families had large families. A lot of folks would have seven to 10 kids and the older kids by the time they got to say 10 or 12 well, they would help with the chores and with the little kids but you raised your own labor. Like picking cotton, there was no mechanical cotton pickers so the family or you hired someone to pick them and you raised your own cotton pickers and you kind of had to adjust your cotton acreage and a lot of stuff according to the size of your family and whether you could get hands in to pick it or not.
So during the Depression how many were in your family?
Four. Just mother and dad me and my sister. And I picked my cotton too.
When I was a little guy, oh I thought that was the worst thing in the world. You get used to it after a while, a few days of it, after the soreness works out, and you can get in there and shovel top into the sack pretty fast. I remember when I was 15 I was able to pull 500 pounds a day, you know gather it into the sack, weigh it and into the trailer, and it took 2,000 pounds to make a bale, so in four days I could get a bale, my sister she never could get much, maybe 100 pounds if she worked hard at it, but dad, man, course he’d been doing it for a long time, you know he grew up in that, he could get about 1,000 pounds a day. Mother she just kind of picked sporadically, she had meals to cook and a family to take care of, you know so she would sometimes come out and pull a 200-300 pounds, it would take us a good long day or over a day to get a bale, but we hired most of ours done. Dad would go down to Waco and he knew a black family down there, he was kind of a superintendent or whatever you want to call it but he was over a bunch of them down there and he’d gather up several families, you know 15, 20 people and bring them up, well when dad went down there he told them how many he needed and when they told him how many they could bring well then he’d go back home and start getting housing ready for them. Most of the time you’d have an old house down in the pasture or something and just whatever you could rig up that was decent housing and they’d come up with their families, you know the men, women and kids and pick your crop that was the best way to do it. While I was in high school, dad went up to Lamesa, Texas and there was a machine shop up there that he liked to trade at and they got together and built a cotton-stripper that you pulled behind the tractor and it would strip the cotton and put it in the trailer. And I remember it cost dad $600 for that thing. Well we didn’t get any hands from Waco that year, we stripped it with that machine. And we got through pretty quick, and we got our Christmas holidays off from school and dad told me I could take that machine and go strip for the neighbors, cause by Christmas it's time to be getting that on out of there. Man I worked every day, Christmas day and all, stripping for neighbors getting top down and it pulled about three bales an hour. So I was making money, I don’t remember what I was getting but I was making more money than I’d ever made in my life. But that cotton-stripper paid for itself that fall on ours, and then all the rest of it was just profit off of it. Then if you went to work on some fellow’s farm to help him plow or strip cotton or whatever, you’d be over there at daylight ready to go to work. The clock didn’t mean anything. When it got daylight you was there ready to go, and when it come lunch, you went to his house, sat down at his table and his wife would feed you good. She may not feed nobody else good, but she’d feed you good and you’d eat dinner and you’d sit around about 15 or 20 minutes kind of resting a little bit and normally take an hour for lunch, then you’d get back on there and stayed till it got dark. That was the day. There wasn’t any eight to five type of stuff out on the farm it was daylight to dark. You know some of those days in the summer get pretty long and it, we got it done. You know we had to work that way to get things done.
What did you do for entertainment? 
How much news could you get from just the radio, did y'all have newspapers?
Yeah, there was newspaper, that was one thing that dad always got, he had a daily newspaper, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, was his paper, the radio, we had wind charger, which there’s no electricity in the area, he had a wind charger that was a generator with a prop on it, on a tower like a windmill, and had a couple of lead acid batteries, this old radio, was about four foot high I guess and about three wide, with a big rounded top, and the back end of it had room for these batteries, and that wind charger kept the batteries charged up, if the wind blew, but every evening when he came in from work, plowing and stuff, and had supper, well he’d like to sit and listen to the news. Then course, when World War II came on it, he was really interested. Us kids when we came in from school, there was a lot of kids shows on, like Dick Tracy, and Superman and all that kind of stuff, well we’d come in and get a bite to eat and listen to the radio and there was a deal that told how the charger and the battery was, and if that charger was down a little bit, well us kids had to stop, cause dad had to have his news that night. And then at night they had shows that were a lot of fun back then Fibber McGee and Molly and Red Skelton and shows like that. And it was entertainment we had our chores in the afternoon, so we could listen when we first came in for a while, then we had to take care of the chores. We had to get the cows in and milked and feed the hogs, gather the eggs make sure all that stuff was taken care of and then in the days before the electricity and say World War II, nearly everything had come from a wood stove up to a kerosene stove and kerosene lamps, well the tanks on them had to be filled up each night, and that was just another little chore, just part of it, so we’d get the lights, the lanterns not lanterns, but lamps fill up with kerosene and then mother’s cook stove had a big old tank on it, had to fill it up, in the wintertime had a kerosene heater, it had a three or four gallon tank on it and every night well I had to fill that rascal up. I’ve got an old kerosene lamp that I grew up with, getting my lessons and stuff. It's on my desk, that metal one, its been converted into electricity but its an old keepsake, from the kid days. We had the wind charger and so we had the big radio, and I got up a little bigger, up 12, 15 years old, I ran some wire back to my room and rigged up a six-volt lamp and I could use it as long as the battery was good and hot, if that wind charger didn’t turn much, and the batteries were down I had to go back to my kerosene lantern.
Was there a lot of crime?
No. No there was, most of the crime that happened in the community would be when someone was coming through the community and they would say, just be passing through and steal something and go on. In the days as a kid, growing up it was hot summertime, we left on like a Saturday to go to town, we’d leave the wooden door open and the screen, in other words, it was open if someone wanted to come in, they could. They could and that goes back to the earlier days behind that, you left your doors unlocked because if somebody came along and needed something, they could come into your house and get it, and they’d leave you a note, tell you what they ate or what they borrowed or whatever it was and go on. And you did the same thing if you was going down the road and broke down and you had a neighbor’s house or somebody’s house there that was close by you’d go up there for help wasn’t nobody there, you’d get whatever you need, leave them a note, you know let them know where and what, then go on that’s the way it was back then. We never say locked the doors, didn’t need to cause nothing happened. I did lose my high school ring. We still left the doors open and everything, but there was a oh, I guess you’d say a transient family come through, I wouldn’t call them gypsies, but that type of people and quite a few people had lost just little stuff out of their houses, when they came through. When I left it on laying on the dresser when we went to town, then when I got back, well it was gone and several other little, things in the house was that way. The crime, the only one crime that I can remember that happened, an old boy about seven, eight miles away shot and killed three of his neighbors, he had a big field of maize and corn and it was fenced, and his neighbors had cows and stuff and they would go cut the fence, it was getting kinda dry and the grass, there wasn’t much grass and they’d let the cows in on his grain and stuff, and he would fix the fence, drive the cows out and fix the fence, and go tell the neighbors, you know, to keep them out. But that fence cutting is pretty serious business back then, you had to be intentionally harming his crops. That happened two or three times and this old boy wasn’t say a well-liked old boy he was not a bad guy, but say he wasn’t well-liked and he finally told that old boy with the cows, that if you cut the fence again I’m gonna shoot them right where I find them, and sure enough he woke up one morning and his field was full of cows and he just got his gun and went down shooting cows. The neighbor got all hostile about it and he went and got two or three of his neighbors, friends, and they came over there in the car with guns, they was going to straighten that old boy up, and that old boy left them laying in the yard, you know he did what he said he was going to do. He shot the cows and they’d come with guns to fix it, they went to trial and that old boy got three years probation, but back in those days he did what was allowed to do. You know, he was defending his crops and his stuff and they came with guns to his place so they got what they deserved in other words and that was all of it and I remember that. I was a kid, I remember dad got me in the car, he wanted met to go with him and we went over there, say after the shooting, and feelings was kinda off with that boy through the community, that the fellows, even though they were better liked they had done something wrong. They were going down there with guns to get after that old boy. That’s going back to the law of the west. Back in those days, if your wife started fooling around and the husband caught them, he’d shoot them dead, that was it, no investigation, they deserved what they got, no trials you know, it was just over with and things, lawyers have brought in a lot of regulation in now that have made it a little different, but those old rules were pretty stiff, they the rules were obeyed a lot better back then there was not near as much crime because the penalties were pretty swift, pretty just, they didn’t have a whole lot of hangings because people didn’t do the things that justified hangings they knew they’d get hung if they’d done wrong. Somebody robbed a bank, it was always someone passing through, a Bonnie and Clyde type of thing and they’d get after them pretty sought, and chase them as far a they could, so to speak with intentions of shooting them or hanging them when they found them. There wouldn’t be someone going to the pen, they got their just desserts where they found them. Rules change and we have to change with them. Old fashioned rules, if a person lived by them they lived a pretty good life, they don’t do anybody wrong and they take care of their own, no matter what, thats way it does it.
Most of the photographs taken from the Great Depression, are they accurate? You see photographs of families and things where they’re dirty and they’re in shabby clothes, was that more of a city thing or a farm life......?
Well I think that's more a stereotype thing, the old Grapes of Wrath type thing. The people didn’t have any money and in the cities they had no way to generate money like they did on the farm. The farm didn’t have any money either, but they still, once a week when their clothes got dirty it went in the wash-pot out back and they had their old lye soap that they made themselves they had clean clothes, they had food and those little pictures you see of smudgy-faced kids, who looked like they’re starved to death, that’s not the way it was and the kiddos, you’d think with no money or anything, their clothes would be raggedy, that’s not the way it was either. It, you’d have patches now, (If you got a hole or something). If you tore a hole, it’d be patched, you might, it’d be patched, but you’d have clothes, and the girls dresses and stuff, the flour sacks were made of real good material, the girls wore flour sack dresses, you know they’d be little flower prints or whatever, but they were nice. They weren’t shabby. In the summer time on the farm kids went barefooted. You couldn’t hardly wait till school was out to so you could take your shoes off and go barefooted, it was a good thing. And you’d get a new pair of shoes when school started and when you’d buy a pair of shoes, you’d buy them long, big enough to last you all year, you know so you wouldn’t grow out of them. and but I’d have to say that those pictures you see are not a true picture of how it was. There was no money, but people where still clean, and about the only place that people really, say really hurt was in an city type situation and they had soup lines in those, you know they didn’t have the opportunity or the ability to take care of themselves, but the country was a lot more rural back then. A lot of folks left the cities, went to live with their country cousins to make it. and then believe it or not, there were still quite a few good jobs that were going on, you know some folks were still making good money at different jobs. Folks like that had a lot of relatives to take care of, so to speak and they did. It wasn’t every man for himself, like the pictures a lot of times, you helped each other, you had all kinds of labor, if you, a family did get out of groceries, the family next door, in a farm situation, they didn’t starve, they’d either take them in, or give them enough to take care of them, nobody starved to death. May not have been as healthiest in the world back then, you know as far as today’s standard, but under the circumstances, it was a pretty good going.
Through my interview with Thomas O’Briant, I realized many things. Life during the Great Depression was hard. All members of a family worked to survive. People struggled, yet lived much the same as they had in the years before the Great Depression. Communities depended heavily upon each other. Though faced with economical hardships, people did not lose their goals in life. Families were emotionally and spiritually connected.
Since our interview, I have a greater understanding of what it was like to live during the Great Depression. An oral history such as this interview are extremely important sources to find out about our past history. Oral histories and other personal accounts help illustrate substantial periods of our history for younger generations, or for people who lived in different areas when these events took place.
History must be presented through many sources, documents, testimonies, and perceptions, so all may have the opportunity to know the truth about life during important times. I believe that my oral history interview with Mr. Thomas O’Briant enabled me to visualize a true way of life during the Great Depression, which I had not considered until now.
Bailey, Fonald H. The Home Front: USA. Time-Life Books Inc., 1978. Alexandria, Virginia. This book had many photographs of the transition into and workforce during the Great Depression and World War II. Here representation of home life was shown for the different lives of Americans. Racial and social classes were also depicted.
Glenco McGraw-Hill. Textbook Chapter 22: Texas and TexansCopyright 2003. This is an important web site, which discusses the prices of oil and cotton during The Great Depression. It illustrates the important role that governmental officials held in aiding Texans during the Great Depression.
Library of Congress. America from the Depression to World War II. Photographs from the FSA-OWI, 1935-1945. This web site is a huge data base of photographs taken during the Great Depression. Over 160,000 photographs are available.
Schwartz, Rami. The Great Economic Depression of 1929.Copyright © 1996 SIS. Revised: August 26, 1996. This web site describes the economic crisis at the beginning of the Great Depression and how other historical events affected farms. The major consequences of the Depression are listed.
Wills, Charles A. A Historical Album of Texas. The Millbrook Press Inc., 1995. Brookfield, Connecticut. This book highlighted the rural areas affected during the Great Depression. It contains photographs of family life in the state of Texas, during the Great Depression.
