James Lacy tells his daughter Jamie Breed about his father, Jim, who ran a general store in Comanche County, Texas, that prospered until the Great Depression hit and he was no longer able to pay his creditors.
Originally aired July 4, 2008, on NPR’s Morning Edition.
Jaime Breed (JB) and James Lacy (JL)
JL: My dad, he made me his little helper I guess, because I used to just follow him. Wherever he went I was there. He had an old Ford truck and he let me drive for the first time when I was six years old. And one time one of the farmers came into the store and said, ”Jim. I met your truck going the street there a while ago and there wasn’t a soul in it, I couldn’t see nobody.” Dad laughed, and he said, ”Oh that’s just James. He’s going out to the farm.
And dad had a good business, he prospered real well until 1929. And his downfall was that he extended the credit to the people around him, but he didn’t pay his suppliers as promptly as he should. So when the 1929 bust came along they moved in on him — repossessed everything he had. Some of his friends tried to get him to take bankruptcy. And he said, ”no I made these debts and I’ll pay ’em.” And he spent twenty years paying off the last bit of those debts. And my dad, he was loved and respected by everybody in his community. The editor of the paper there called him in one day and said, ”Jim,” said, ”I just want to tell you that I know you’ve had a hard life due to the bust when you lost everything, and you’ve had a hard time raising eight kids, but I want to tell you that you’re the richest man in Comanche because of the offspring that you’ve left us.
My dad lived to be ninety and I was fortunate enough to be holding his hands when he died. We thought he was gone, he was just laying there barely breathing and two of my brothers were sitting there and we were talking and we said something about something and dad opened his eyes and he said, ”no that’s not right. I’ll tell you how it happened.” And he was something else. He was a man to the last.
