Skeeter Klaus and “Red” Berry were two who gambled and ran cock fights in in the San Antonio area. Red Berry had a ranch over off Rigsby Street and ran all the fights on the east side of San Antonio while Skeeter ran the fights on the southwest side. In the early 1930’s Dad (Jesse Garfield James) got into cock fightin’ with Skeeter. The two were practicing with the chickens by holdin’ them and making them peck at each other to see if they were any good. Dad was out there in the chicken pen with Skeeter. Each had chickens in their hands when Dad got the idea to make the chickens peck at my (Jesse Columbus James, age 8) duck. They’d hold my duck […]
Growin’ Up
9 posts
In my case hair cut were free after the first one. Understand that I was my mom’s first child, Jesse Columbus James, born in 1923, and I had a head of what they called “handsome black curls.” You might imagin’ how much attention I got, but my mother got most of the benefit with friends ooh-ing over my black curls. Now my dad had a “thing” about long curls on a boy. In those days (the mid-1920s) my family di’n’t have a camera, so we only had word of mouth from relatives to prove it, but dad din’n’t need such proof. He could for his self what I looked like. JESSE C’S FIRST HAIR CUT One day he took me to Mr. Peterson’s barbershop in […]
I was born in 1923 and now that it is the year 2000, I got to thinkin’ back on my childhood in the 1920s. Maybe it’s a good thing that we don’t remember everything about our early years. Maybe it’s good enough that we learn about it from what others tell us. Much of what I learned about my early life and my cousins’ came from visiting our nine aunts and uncles. We visited them as often as we could. In each house there would be pictures – photographs – of each child, hangin’ or sittin’ on every empty spot. I wondered in later years just how many pictures of kids and then their grandkids they were given and just where they managed to put […]