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  • Texas | Columns | "Texas Tales"

    Stolen Bounty

    by Mike Cox
    Mike Cox

    Howard Campbell never lost his vivid memory of the only time he ever saw his parents cry.

    They lived in Jones County on what Campbell called a ranch, but his family did more farming than ranching. And on that sunny day in May 1920, their leased land had never looked finer. Almost-ready-to-harvest grain and row after row of corn covered 400 acres around their two-story house.

    “The barley, wheat and oats were all waist high and ready to bundle and shock,” Campbell later wrote in “Spotted Stripes,” a self-published family history. “The corn was also about waist high and had been plowed out two or three times. All the crops were extra good for that time of the year and the pasture grass was equally superior.”

    Campbell had watched his father and uncle move the broadcast binder from a shed to the shade of a large live oak. Soon it would be time to harvest their crop, the best they had ever raised.

    But grain and corn weren’t the only things growing that spring. Campbell’s mother was pregnant, and the country doctor she saw reckoned she would be having twins.

    “It looked as if nature had smiled on everyone and everything in that part of the state,” Campbell continued.

    Around 3 p.m. tall, dark clouds appeared on the northwest horizon. Back then, long before commercial radio, television or Doppler radar, the only warning most Texans got of an impending storm came in seeing its approach.

    When it seemed certain that they would be getting rain, Campbell’s father and uncle rolled up the binder canvas and put it under a shed so it wouldn’t get wet.

    Distant thunder soon gave way to close-in lightning strikes. The supercell thunderstorm towered so high, a bright afternoon turned nearly into night. Then a barrage of hailstones larger than hen eggs began coming down, followed shortly by driving wind and high wind.

    (Hail falling from 30,000 feet, a typical large storm height, reaches 120 miles an hour before it hits the ground. In addition to achieving velocity a major league pitcher could only dream of, hail can be up to baseball or grapefruit size -- the largest recorded stone weighing more than 1.5 pounds.)

    “Mom and dad, my uncle and another hired hand began putting quilts on all west windows,” Campbell wrote. “The front porch protected the windows to the south.”

    The blankets did little good. Hail beat out all the upstairs windows and even came crashing through their roof. When big chunks of ice started rolling down the stairs like so many giant marbles, Campbell’s mother grabbed a bucket and began trying to pick them up.

    The bombardment continued for 30 minutes, with wind and torrential rain going on for another hour.

    When the storm abated, the Campbell family rushed outside to see the damage. They could hardly believe what they saw.

    Dead chickens, their coop destroyed, lay buried in snow-like drifts of hailstones. The sheds and barns looked like they had been bombed. Most of their roof was gone and all exposed windows of their house broken out.

    Even worse, their fields “lay as flat and barren as desert.” What two hours earlier had been their best crop ever had floated off and now lay in large drifts against their fences and in the gullies.

    At least no one got hurt. In fact, only two fatalities have ever been attributed to hail in the United States. One of those deaths occurred in Texas, where a farmer caught out in the open near Lubbock died in a severe hailstorm on May 13, 1939.

    The Campbell place had been visited by what meteorologists call a hailshaft, a column of hail falling from a single thunderstorm cell. The area swept by a hailshaft, again in scientific speak, is called a hailstreak.

    “I saw my parents embrace and cry profusely,” Campbell wrote. “This made a lasting impression on me and [served as] a constant reminder that when it pertains to farming and ranching, one never has it made until the money is in the bank.”

    Campbell’s mother and father both shed tears, but they did not give up. Within three weeks of the hailstorm, they had re-plowed and re-seeded their fields in cotton, maize and grass.

    Those crops came in bountifully. And that July, as Campbell put it, the family had “two more cubs in the den.”


    © Mike Cox - May 15, 2013 column
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