My parents, Jessie Ralph Stephenson and Ruby Lena Nelson were born in Double BAYOU, Texas. They married on 26 Oct. 1921.
Most families had at least nine children. In my immediate family, I was the eldest of four brothers and two sisters with one brother dying at childbirth. Our house consisted of kitchen, large living room with two day beds and two bedrooms and a porch made into a bedroom. My oldest sister, and I being the oldest, had a bedroom together. My oldest two brothers shared the bedroom on the porch. My younger sister and brother had the day beds in the living room. My baby brother slept in a crib in my parents' room.
We made pallets on the floor in the living room in the summertime, as we would rather sleep on the floor than in the bed. Mom would have to make us go to bed at times.
We did not have electricity where I lived. Smith Point did not have electricity until 1948 or 1949. We did not have indoor plumbing but had a little house out back. We did not have toilet tissue, we used old catalogues.
I was a teenager when we acquired a radio run off batteries and our music were records played on a hand wound Victrola phonograph. We did everything by hand, because we had no need for electrical appliances.
On a cold morning with no heat in house, Mom would kindle a fire in the kitchen in the wood stove. We had a tin heater in the living room that we called "Snuffin' Billy" because if it didn't get hot fast enough, we would throw in some paper and it would dance while getting hot. We would back up to the stove and burn on one side and freeze on the other.
We had running water when we ran with it! But, we did consider ourselves being uptown, because we had a pitcher pump and sink on a porch attached to the kitchen while others in the community got their water from a well, or had to carry it some distance from a windmill. If the house would have caught on fire the water bucket would have been the first thing to burn because it never had any water in it.
There were only thirteen families on Smith Point until the thirties. Our family pets were cats, dogs, chickens, and pigs. We had one pet pig that we called Porky and we rode it. Of course, my dad was raising it for meat. When we killed it my sister never ate a bite of Porky.
We never heard or saw any store bought games with the exception of jacks or marbles. So, we made out own playing cards out of cardboard. We would build kites with sticks, brown paper, and homemade paste of flour and water. We also had fun building stilts, then known as "Tom Walkers" and walking on them. We also built tin can wheelers by nailing a syrup can lid on the end of a stick. We also had old tires that we could roll around and make tire swings.
My name Linnie Evelyn is not used very frequently any more. I guess the funniest nickname I ever knew was what we called our oldest brother Willard at times. It was "Pill Jerk Pete." It came from my dad telling about a man named Pete, and he was told to take a pill three times a day. So he tied a string on the pill, swallowed it and jerked it back up, swallowed it again and jerked it back up. We thought it was funny and started calling our brother "Pill Jerk Pete."
Dad had a humorous side. When he was asked what my brother's Willard and Walter's names were he replied, "Poker Pete" and "Ekelie Zeke."
We had no grocery store on Smith Point until the late thirties, so our staples came by boat from Galveston.
I made bread when I had to stand on an apple box to reach the top of the table in order to knead the dough. Knead is to place your dough in a pile of flour and work the flour into the right consistency to make loaves or rolls. The you let them rise & bake. We made bread about three times a week and had homemade biscuits for breakfast. We even made our own yeast cakes with hops (Dad bought in Galveston) and cornmeal. We rolled them out, cut them with a biscuit cutter, and dried them. When they were dry, we would place them in a flour sack and hang then on the wall in the kitchen. If we didn't have the hops, Mom would pick fig leaves and boil them with Irish potatoes for yeast. We also made sourdough bread by saving a little dough for a starter. When the dough became where it didn't rise well, we would add yeast cakes to the dough.