“It was hard times, but we didn’t know it. We always had something to eat…if
it wasn’t nothing but biscuits, cow butter, and homemade syrup. ..We butchered our own pork…we
lived like kings.”
Murl Snody spoke those words just before
his 95th birthday, but the sentiments could have been uttered by most any family along Castor Creek. Snody remembers
times some people might consider rough, but he doesn’t. “We felt rich. Nobody else had anything either.”
As children, Snody and his brother had to walk four miles to school at Standard.
“We started out one morning,” he recalls, “and frost was on the ground. We only got one pair of shoes a
year, and we had worn ours out, so we were barefooted. We had some big old knitted caps, and we would put them on our heads
and run. Our feet would get so cold we couldn’t stand it, so we’d sit down and pull off our caps and put them
on our feet for awhile, then we’d put them back on our heads and go again. That morning,” Snody says, “Daddy
caught up with us just before we got to town, and he took us to Harris’s Mercantile and bought us some new tennis shoes.
“
Besides the Mercantile, Snody remembers there was a bottling
company, meat market, cotton gin, sawmill and a coffee house…“The owner of the coffee house would buy green coffee
beans in hundred pound sacks, then parch the beans and bag and sell’em. We lived two miles from Olla, and when the wind
was out of the north, we could smell them coffee beans parching clear from town.”
Families along the creek raised most of their food, ground their own meal and made their own syrup…using
what they needed, selling some and sharing some with neighbors. “We had it all,” declares Murl Snody, “We
was kings.”
Interviewer and writer: Marie Lizana and Virginia Lewis
