GIRLS OF ROUND TOP

This is the story of three girls who became women in Round Top. They were teenage girlfriends during the depression. They worked together, played together and raised families together. Today all three still live in Round Top and actively participate in the town’s affairs.

Delia Sacks and Evelyn Fricke are sisters. Delia was born in Fayette county not far from Winedale on Aug. 14, 1908. Her little sister Evelyn was born near Shelby on Dec. 16, 1916. Their friend, Leanda Schlabach, was born at Haw Creek in 1918. All three girls grew up in the country around Round Top.

Then in November of 1925, Delia moved into town, Leanda followed in 1932 and Evelyn in 1935.They tell the story in their own words.

Tell me about your childhood in Round Top.

Evelyn: I came to Round Top in 1935. I went to work for Edgar Fricke in the Post Office. My sister was going to have a baby and I took her place. She come to my daddy and asked him if he had another daughter that could take her place...so I had to leave the farm. Daddy thought, well, I was ready to get a job and make some money. I worked there for five years and I got fifteen dollars a month and I stayed with my sister and brother-in-law. I paid them ten dollars a month for room and board and I had five dollars to spend for clothes and whatever I wanted to buy...and I enjoyed it.

In those days you could buy a bar of candy for a nickle and a soda water for ten cents so it wasn’t bad. I got to meet all the girls around here and we got together Sundays and went places or did things together...riding with some guys or goin’ to Cummins Creek swimming or had picnics...always a dance somewhere every weekend...we enjoyed our parents coming and watching us dance, I even went with my sister and brother-in-law coon hunting at night...I did a lot of fishing. When there was snow, we had fun in the snow. We’d always walk to wherever we’d go. We never thought about driving.

Leanda-Well, I came here in 1932. My mother and father had moved down to LaSalle county. My sister that was three years older than me, that had the grocery store here, she said “ Let her come to Round Top and we’ll keep her and put her through the eighth grade. I never could grasp algebra...I was so used to making good grades and it hurt me so that I didn’t want to go to school no more. So my sister said “Well, we just let you work in the store for us.”

It was in the old store right over there on the corner and we had a cafe...I did all the cookin’ in the cafe. I made fifty cents a day for my labor. I worked for them thirty-seven years in all.

In fifty-two, I baked a cake and sent it to the Dallas fair and I won a Philco stove and a six months supply of Robin Hood flour.

Delia - I came in 1925 to do baby sitting for Edgar and Lydia Fricke. They had twins. Edgar became postmaster and he put me in the Post office as a clerk. The post office was down here on the corner where (the Round Top Visitor’s Center) is now. Then they moved it up in the bank the next year. I did clerical work in the bank. I had to record every check every night in the bank and money orders in the post office. I got married in November of 1932 and I moved upstairs at his mother and daddy’s. My daughter was born in 1936.

Then I started to make money by doing cosmetic sewing for people and I made my own designs and cut my own patterns. I pieced quilts and my mother quilted them for me.

At that time, there were animals in town. We had two cows in the lot. Everybody had hogs and butchered hogs during the fall. We butchered two hogs every year and made sausage and ham and bacon and smoked the sausage till it was dry. The hams were put in brine or put in hickory salt. Then you hung them up and smoked them. When it was a wet winter, we had a hard time, you always had to wipe the mold off.

Did you go to school here?

Delia - I went to school here one year in 1924 and went through the eighth grade.

Where was the school here in town?

Delia - It was a three room school.
Evelyn - It was where the (Bethlehem) church education building is now. I went out at Nassau Road in Austin county. It was three miles from where we had to walk or either ride a horse or drive a buggy. The roads were muddy. That’s what I say about people that complain about gravel roads, I thought they ought to have mud roads like we did. we always had to wear high top shoes. You could not wear slippers...or you would loose it. We took extra stockings so we could change socks at school. We had to cross Woods Creek and when it rained sometimes the water was a foot and a half high and we had to just walk right through it. There weren’t any bridges.

Many a time, I remember, in the winter the first one there would have to build a fire to get warm and gather the wood if there was none in the schoolhouse. Sometimes there was just five or six children out of thirty or forty children if the weather was real bad...but our Daddy would not let us miss a day. They just taught to the seventh grade and that’s a far as I got. Then I worked on the farm and then came to Round Top.

In 1940 I got married. We had a opportunity to buy a nice little three room house...and a acre of land...for $500 and so we did and that’s where I’m living today.

I did various other jobs. We went out pickin’ cotton... whatever we could do to earn money. They always come to us. “Do you want ta help us chop cotton...do you want ta help us pick cotton?” I was always ready. As a child at home, I hated it but when I got older I liked it...cause I knew there was money in it. We could do pretty good. It was hard work. It was something to do and we just did it..or else you didn’t have any money to buy something and do what you wanted to. At home we had to do everthing, choppin’ cotton, pickin’ cotton, pullin’ corn, choppin’ corn, haulin’ hay, milkin’ cows. I did my share. Before school I had to water the chickens. If it was cold, I had to break the ice. We had to draw the water out of the well. We didn’t have runnin’ water.

In 1960 I went to work for the bank. I worked for them for twenty-five years.

Delia - I started school when I was seven. I went to Nassau school. I had the ninth grade here in Round Top. Then I quit and went to Abilene to pick cotton. Then we came back. We had a hard time makin’ money. When I worked in the post office and the bank, I got a dollar a day. After that, my children and I went out and picked cotton to earn money because salaries were low. My husband made twenty-five cents an hour at first, when he started working’ in Columbus. The highest salary he ever got was $2.95 an hour. That was in 1965 to 1970...so life went on like that.

If there was one time when you were young that was your best memory, what was it?

Evelyn - One of my best times that I enjoyed as a child was when we’d get together at my Grandma’s...house at Christmas. All the children would come. She’d have a house full of people. Everybody would bring cakes and things like that and we children would get together and play. When Uncle John came, he would always bring a big box of peppermint sticks and we looked forward to that because a stick of candy was a big thing in those days. We appreciated it.

Then, when I went to school, there was another time that I really was happy. My teacher, Buster Brown, when I was in sixth grade, he took the school to the county Interscholastic League. in La Grange and all the schools would come there and compete. We trained. We played ball. we ran races...everything we could do.

He borrowed a truck from the Uncle that he stayed with and we rode on the back of that truck to La Grange. We loved baseball. We had a girl’s team and a boy’s team. We had five girls that could come. We played against Carmine and other schools and we beat ‘em all. We were the baseball champion.

I did declamation and I was scared to death. My sister coached me. She said “You can do it!” We had a big barn and so I would go in there in the evenings and practice that poetry. I competed against twenty-five girls and I won first place and I was happy as could be and my brother was declamed to and he won first place.

Anyway, at the end of the day, they add up the points and we won the silver cup. That was one of the most enjoyable days of my school days.

When I was little, my brother and I would always have to take lunch to my daddy in the field and we had a creek where there were crawfish in it...so our mother would give us a little piece of bacon and we would tie it on and after we give our daddy his lunch, we’d come back and sit on that bridge and crawfish.

We’d catch a bucket full of crawfish and take ‘em home and skin those tails and mother would fry ‘em and we thought that was delicious.

Leanda - Well, I was a regular tomboy. What I liked best of all was if my daddy would saddle an extra horse up and let me ride the ranch with him. He had two dogs and his cattle horse and as soon as he got that saddle those dogs would come.

My daddy made me some traps and he let me trap some quail. In winter, no matter how cold it was, I would check my traps. The I’d bring ‘em home and wring their necks and pick ‘em an dress ‘em and tell Mama, “Put ‘em away and we’ll eat ‘em some day.”

After I moved to Round Top, we’d go to the water holes. We’d go swimming a while, then we’d come out and have some lunch along and have some quilts and spread out our lunch and eat our lunch. You could’t do that now because of ants.

Down by Reuben Schmidt is where we used to go. (on Cummins Creek)

Evelyn- That was a beautiful place.

It still is...my kids are still swimming there now.

Leanda - Sometimes we’d go fishin’ there. That’s another thing I always liked to do...fish. Milton (her late husband) used to say “You’d stay here all day and keep sayin’ “maybe they’ll bite yet, maybe they’ll bite yet.”

Delia - The happiest days of my life was maybe on Sundays or when it rained. We didn’t have to do anything. In my school days, I made balls. I would rip those torn hose and take a rock or something...
Evelyn - ... a peach pit...
Delia - ...and I would roll those balls until they were the size of an orange and then I would sew some clothes on it and that’s the baseballs we would use...and I pitched most of the time. We chose sides and I would pitch.

What about boys?

Evelyn - I had lots of boy friends. and we didn’t want to get serious either. My daddy didn’t let me date until I was eighteen years old.

...but you liked ‘em huh?

Evelyn - Oh yes.

Leanda - I liked a certain boy one time and I really liked him and I thought he really liked me...but this girl was married to his brother and she liked this boy better than she liked her husband and she’d get real mad at me sometimes. She walked up to me one time at the middle of the dance hall in Warrenton one night and she had a beer bottle and she said if I didn’t get him out of my head she was gonna use that beer bottle on me.

He would never dance with me when she was there. She would sneak to the dances and leave her husband at home. I liked that boy so that I never did get married...until I was 43 years old.

How did you meet your husband?

Evelyn- I had several boyfriends. We wanted to go to dances, me and Annie Banik and we didn’t have any dates so we got Annie’s brother to drive us. It was at La Bahia...the dance one night and we went on in and danced with lots of guys. Some of the boys wanted to eat something and he was waiting in the car...at that point, he didn’t dance yet...so I went out to him (Annie's brother) and said “Warren, how about you, are you hungry? Do you want a hamburger?”

Well later he told his sister I was so nice to feel sorry for him and then he came and asked me out. I told him I’d think about it and after about two weeks, I wrote him a little note. He said he waited every day at the mailbox waiting for an answer. That’s how we got started.

Leanda- Well, he came into the store and asked me to go to the dance one time...and I said...”I don’t care.”

Then we started dating and he wanted to get married and he wanted me to move to Shelby because he had that garage in Shelby but I said I wouldn’t move because I had bought my mother’s place down here. So he said “My car will drive back and forth...let’s get married.”

So I said “I don’t care.”

Tell me about the hard times.

Delia - I raised turkeys. I raised ducks. I had chickens all the time. I also made cheese and sold my cream...you let the milk stand until it was clabber and you would cream off the top and then save it. I did my own baking.

Leanda - That was another thing my brother-in-law did too. He bought cream. He bought eggs. He bought chicken. He bought turkeys. Sometimes on a Saturday, we bought as many as a hundred cases of eggs...and there’s thirty dozen in a case. You have no idea in those years how many trucks drove down this highway that bought eggs and chickens and turkeys. Sometimes we had four and five trucks come up to the store at one time.

Delia - The people raised a lot of turkeys and sold them in the fall.

Evelyn - Do you realize how people gathered eggs from turkeys?

Well, the hen would do a cawking...caw caw caw caw...she be ready to nest or lay an egg. We’d let them out one at a time. So one of us children would have to follow that hen in the woods all day until she made a nest. You couldn’t let her see you or else she’d run off.
I can remember many a time I’d take a magazine and watch a turkey and it was sometimes a mile from the house. They’d be all over creation where they had nests...until they layed about fifteen eggs...and then they were ready to set.

Leanda -The business people in those days, they had these ledgers about this thick...where evertime you bought, it was put in there how much you bought and at the end when you harvested the crop...you came in and you paid the merchant.

That was when people were honest. You could depend on people payin’ you. You couldn’t let nobody have no food for a whole year now. They’d drag your whole store away.

Delia - My father started carpenter work when he was eighteen where he built a house in Walhalla. He worked for a dollar and a quarter a day. He was the architect for the old bank. He built the house where the Klines live. He built the Albers place (two story white house at White at 237). The Galveston storm came and they thought the house would go down since it was just built but it stood the storm. His name was Fred Weber.

Evelyn - He built the first garage for Don Nagel.
Delia - ...then it burned down and he built it again..
Leanda - My grandpa...built that little church at Henkel Square in 1872. (Haw Creek Church). He built that big store in Shelby.

Tell me about the Fourth of July.

Evelyn - When I was a kid at home we would come here in the afternoon at three o’clock. At the night we would dance. After I got older here in Round Top, the women made floats you know and I always enjoyed that.

Tell me about the Do Your Duty club an how it as formed.

Delia - It started in nineteen April, 1935...and I’m the last original member. I’m the last one left.

Why did you start it?
Delia - Because the grass was this high and it looked horrible. They started it to clean it up. The first president was Ella Sacks. There was a big cedar tree standing on this side that my sister took a picture of. It was snow that year. That why she took it. It stood straight up. She said “Don’t ever take my cedar tree down.”

She died in ‘64...Joe’s wife. Finally, I think it died and they had to take it down.

When you were girls, who was the prettiest girl in Round Top?

All three - Annie Louise Banik

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