Hard years for Corpus Christi

80 years ago tomorrow — the stock market crashed. Shares lost half their value, then dropped to pennies on the dollar. Within days, $30 billion in paper value was lost. Then banks closed, jobs vanished, families lost homes and were put on the road, farms were repossessed. The financial depression became the Great Depression. Farm laborers lucky enough to get work made about 40 cents a day. Bank tellers made $17.50 a week. A fireman in Corpus Christi made $2 a day, and he was on call 24 hours a day. But steak was 15 cents a pound, pork chops 10 cents a pound; you could get a room at the Riggan Hotel for $3 a week; you could buy a new Erskine automobile at Winerich Motors for $895. Prohibition crime — bootlegging, smuggling, making whiskey — was big news. Pint bottles of “Old Hospitality” were sealed in flat tin cans to resemble insect spray and brought in by the shipload. Corpus Christi was the headquarters of cotton country. In cotton-picking time, fields of white stretched to the horizon. But in 1931, cotton prices fell from 18 cents to five cents a pound. Farm workers on Chapman Ranch west of Corpus Christi were let go. The first farmer in the country to get paid for plowing under his cotton crop was a Nueces County farmer, W.E. Morris. He went to Washington and was presented the “plow-up” check by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Ranchers were hit hard when calf prices dropped from 9.3 cents a pound in 1929 to 3.6 cents a pound in 1933. On Armstrong Ranch, Charlie Armstrong cut his salary almost in half and laid off most of the hands. On King Ranch, Robert J. Kleberg Jr. ordered 250 head of cattle rounded up to furnish meat for hungry families. The meat was distributed from the King Ranch warehouse in Kingsville...read more