Woody Guthrie in Pampa

 One of the best descriptions of a Texas boomtown is by a guy from Oklahoma, Woody Guthrie.

When he was 17, Woody joined his father in Pampa, which is in the Panhandle. His father was managing a rooming house. Woody was to be the handyman.

Oil fields require a lot of workers to develop. Once the wells are running, the workers must move on. Housing isn’t meant to last.

In 1929, most of the town consisted of little shacks, thrown together with old boards and flattened oil barrels. People paid $5 a week for a three-roomer, a one-room shack cut three ways.

 

Women folks worked hard trying to make their little shacks look like something, but with the dry weather, hot sun, high wind, and the dust piling in, they could clean and wipe and mop and scrub their shanty twenty-four hours a day and never get caught up. Their floors was always warped and crooked. The old linoleum rugs had raised six families and put eighteen kids through school. The walls were made out thin boards, one inch thick and covered over with whatever the women could nail on them: old blue wallpaper, wrapping paper from the boxcars along the tracks, once in a while a layer of beaverboard painted with whitewash, or some haywire color ranging from deep-sea blue through all the midnight blues to a blazing red that would drive a Jersey bull crazy.

 

My grandparents left East Texas for the oilfields around Ranger during that era. They lived in a frame cabin with a tent top. They were attracted by the good wages my grandfather could earn. But they decided some things just weren’t worth it.

• Source: Woody Guthrie’s autobiography Bound for Glory was published in 1943.  I have a chapter on his days in Pampa, titled “Boy in Search of Something,” in Unknown Texas, edited by Jonathan Eisen and Harold Straughn; New York: Collier Books, 1988, pp. 199-208. The quotation is on p. 202.