The Life of Me: An Autobiography

In the meantime, after we got back home to Hamlin, Papa gradually got into the trucking business. The truck replaced the horse in our lives and after a few years we sold our hor...

While I was running around I was getting a lot of experience, some knowledge, and perhaps a little wisdom. But I didn't seem to be getting rid of all my stupidity. Perhaps stupi...

A year or two after I quite high school I got married. It was either in 1928 or 1929. The stock market crash came in one of those years and I got married in the other one. I kee...

Well, the Great Depression was not something we would want to live through again, but all in all it wasn't so bad. We were broke, but then, so were our neighbors. We had plenty...

We, the Will Johnsons, owned this first farm 12 years. Then in the fall of 1910, Papa bought the Exum farm, just east of us. It was much larger and it fitted our needs better. T...

There were so many little stories unfolding simultaneously that I am going to be unable to keep them all up to date as I go along. While I have been telling about some of our wo...

As I look back I can easily see that all the ventures our family had been caught up in through the years added up to a lot of worry for parents with a bunch of kids to feed, she...

Throughout all these years, as our children were growing up, we tried to train them to work out their own problems, answer their own questions, and make their own decisions. One...

As you know, Frank was the oldest in our family, and when I was growing up, he was away from home a lot. I had long since become accustomed to his being away from home. He even...

Papa had two rancher brothers, Joe and Simpson, who had remained in the cattle business when all the rest of the Johnsons went to farming. And Papa preferred cattle ranching ove...

As I said earlier, I got along okay in school. But throughout school I was a slow reader. And this reading slowness has plagued me all my life. It even caused me quite a bit of...

So we moved back to our big farm near Lamesa and farmed there in 1919. Susie and Dode moved to Hamlin. They quit farming and Dode got a job in town.

The first farm we owned, the one where I was born, is still spoken of as the Flint place, because we sold it to a family named Flint. So at times I may refer back to it as the F...

We were about the luckiest kids in the world. We always had as much or more than the average kids in our neighborhood. And of course, we had each other. But most of all, we had...

While we had been working on the farm six days a week and resting on Sunday, there were millions in this country living in cities and working on Sunday. Then we moved to town an...

My Johnson grandparents reared nine children. Andrew was the oldest and was a half brother to the other eight. Joe was Grandma's first born, second was my father, William Frankl...

Wes Kennedy and his family lived about a mile northeast of Royston and they had three big dogs that had the bad habit of chasing automobiles and barking and snapping at the fron...

By the summer of 1919 things were looking somewhat better. Papa had ordered two new tires for the Reo. They had come in but there had been no hurry to put them on the car. They...

The dry weather still prevailed, and in spite of all our efforts to earn extra money, we were getting deeper into trouble month by month. By the summer of 1918 we were about fin...