By Pete Kendall/reporter@trcle.com

No place was a great place during the Great Depression, but Cleburne must have been a pretty darned good close to decent.

There was plenty of good, clean water ... Buffalo Creek. There was plenty of good, clean fun ... the Yellow Jacket football team romping successfully (or otherwise) at Rhome Field. There was even a fair amount of good, hard work to be had ... at the schools, the railroads, or through the city of Cleburne, which then as now invested heavily in state-of-the-art infrastructure such as pre-cracked sidewalks.

But if you were just flat down on your luck, didn’t have a dime, wanted to do something with your life but couldn’t hardly find the ways or means, or were a lazy, no good bum and just wanted a handout ... well, relief was available in Our Town.

All you had to do was hold out your hand, just like fat cats currently on the dole in New York, Detroit, Washington, D.C. and other vacation destinations.

Which if nothing else should provide us with considerable hope for the future of our country in the coming years, just in case Rush Limbaugh and Congressional Republicans are unable to turn the economy around on their own.

According to a story in the 1954 Times-Review Centennial issue, probably written by Jack Proctor, “The early 1930s saw the beginning of breadlines in Cleburne and Johnson County, but that was not the only activity in progress to relieve the sweeping depression.

“In 1933, the Civil Works Administration was getting underway, and 1,200 citizens received work. A daily payroll of about $2,000 was issued by the CWA.

“The Public Works Administration was created a little later, and it was through this organization that the Yellow Jacket Stadium was constructed in 1939-41. The structure cost about $80,000, with the school contributing $15,000 of the sum.”

Eighty-thousand smackeroos wouldn’t finance an iota of a bank bailout these days, but we digress.

“Softball fields, dams on Buffalo Creek, City Park picnic units and many other similar constructions were built through these organizations,” the story continued. “Native stone was used in most of the structures.

“Getting back to the soup lines, 59 persons were served the first day of such a line at The Church of the Holy Comforter on Jan. 2, 1933. Sixty-nine were served the second day and the following day, 116 stood in line.

“The next day, the bread supply was exhausted when 226 showed up, and two days later, 321 persons were in the soup line.”

It was the comedian Brother Dave Gardner who once quipped, “The first piece of light bread I ever ate was throwed off the back of a CCC truck.”

He could have been talking about Cleburne and Johnson County, where 2,250 acres and 44 farms were controlled by the CCC through soil conservation principles. That piece of light bread might have fallen in a row of black-dirt beets ... rendering the bread just as inedible as the beets.

The CCC had an annual payroll of $90,000 — which might make up the iota of a Wall Street bonus — to its 200 enlisted men and officers plus about 20 local workers. The Johnson County camp was reportedly one of seven soil erosion camps in the prairie district of Texas.

We don’t think much about the CCC these days, but we think constantly about Cleburne State Park and its picturesque lake, at which swim the biggest, fattest bream in North Central Texas .... and if you try to catch them on a fly rod like mine, they’ll just raise up and laugh at you.

Approval of the 500-acre Cleburne State Park came in March, 1934. The cost was about $60,0000, probably the equivalent of a 1.5-bedroom house in my neighborhood ... with or without loud stereos next door, feral cats in the lean-to garage and raccoons in the attic.

I hope you learned something today about Cleburne history, as well as national economics.

And if you didn’t ...