Real Estate in a Small Town
I grew up in a small town in North Texas. Bowie, Montague County, Texas. Although it was the largest town in the County, it was not the County Seat. There was another town almost as large. Nocona, Montague County, Texas. A big brooha was developing about whether the railroad was coming through Bowie or Nocona and that was supposed to be the deciding factor. There got to be so many shootings and killings over the argument that it became absolutely necessary to establish a County Seat so proper murder trials could be held. It was a dry county, there were no saloons to hold court in and it just didn't seem right to hold murder trials in a Church House.
That is the situation that resulted in the creation of a new town. Montague, Montague County, Texas. Montague was located almost exactly halfway from Bowie to Nocona. Easier to say 'right betwixt em' if I remember the lingo correctly. Anyway the railroad refused to move the line to come through Montague and it ended up going through Bowie. But Missus Enid Justin opened a boot factory in Nocona so it was a fair trade out. Bowie got the railroad and Nocona got the Justin and Nocona Boot Factories. Nearly everybody from Bowie had to drive to Nocona to work cause there just were not any jobs in Bowie except for hawking fried chicken sandwiches on the train when it stopped. In case you don't know what a fried chicken sandwich is, it is a piece of fried chicken and a big home made biscuit. Kinna like what KFC sells today.
My daddy owned a barber shop.
Was originally located in Bowie, but because everybody was driving to Montague and Nocona and hanging around the court house anyway, he opened up a shop that was open only on court days and all day on Saturdays in Montague. This came about because of a good friend named Bob Cox who was the local real estate agent for the whole country. He was the agent cause he was also the County Surveyor and stole every piece of land that became available anyway so it was just common sense for him to be the only Real Estate Agent in the county.
It just so happened that the land Bob sold the county to put the courthouse on (one full city block like most country court houses sit on) had a boundary on the north side that was just exactly one street width away from an old tractor shed Bob owned. This placed the shed just across the street from the courthouse. It would have been great place for a saloon, but like I said, Montague was a dry county and there were no saloons.
Now I don't want to mislead anybody into thinking my daddy was a bootlegger. He wasn't, he was a barber. But the Bay Rum they used for after shave lotion and the Jeris Hair Tonic they used for deoderizing heads so they could stand to cut the customers hair were nothing more than flavored grain alcohol diluted with a little branch water to cut it down to about 100 proof instead of 180 proof which grain alcohol normally is.
Now this fact of life, and the fact that Montague needed a place for everybody to sit and gossip while waiting around the courthouse, and the fact that he surprisingly had this nice big building already built across the street from the courthouse brought on the greatest barbershop in the history of Texas. Amon Carter who was owner and publisher of the Fort Worth Star Telegram was I think the first shoe shine boy there. Former Governor of Texas Alan Shivers had his turn on the shoe shine stand also. Their names were carved into the wooden frame of the chair and were still quite visible when I took my turn as the County Shoe Shine Boy.
Back to the story though, Bob Cox was the real estate man. He was close with a dollar and sure didn't want to waste any money on a real estate office where he had to hire somebody to be secretary and all that stuff. The deal he made my daddy was that he would put a store front on the tractor shed and daddy could put in a three chair barber shop. Three barbers were needed cause getting a morning shave was a big part of the social activity in those days.
Daddy could continue selling the take home size bottles of Jeris Hair Tonic and Toomey's Bay Rum. (My daddy's name was Toomey.) Bob Cox reserved a corner of the big room for his desk and telephone. He also installed a Coke cooler box and reserved the profits from the sale of the soft drinks and whatever else happened to be in there for himself. Part of the rent was the agreement that the shoe shine boy had to take care of putting ice in the cooler, keeping it stocked and keeping count of the money and delivering it to Bob Cox once a week. We also had to answer the phone and take messages for him when we were there. Mainly cause we could read and write which was not necessarily so with the barbers even when they were sober.
The telephone didn't ring much. Not too many people around there even had a telephone anyway. Anybody who wanted to buy or sell real estate knew where to go and would just stop by the barber shop. The shop had benches on two sides of the walls which seated maybe fifty people on a good day, so it was a really busy place. At the time I got tired of hearing it, and the response from most of the people sitting around would usually be a 'not again' type shake of the head, or the hiss you get when you tell the same old bad joke too many times. But now everytime I think about it, I just gotta laugh. People sticking their heads in the door asking, "Bob Cox here?" and my old man replying each and every time, "Nope, just shaves and haircuts."
Manny
6 July 1999