Sam and Bob Lasseter and a friend pose for a photo while in Santa Barbara, Calif., on a futile search for work during the Great Depression. TMP Photo Submitted.
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Think times are bad now, it’s nothing compared to the Great Depression.
People starved. Others lost everything they owned. Some hopped trains and crossed a desperate nation to find work.
Murfreesboro native Sam Lasseter was one of the many who struck out in search of work. His trek by rail took him from the oil fields of Texas, to the beaches of California, and back to his family farm in Blackman.
The unemployment rate may be at a 25-year high right now at 8.5 percent, but in the 1930s as much as 25 percent of all workers were unemployed.
“It started when I was young,” Lasseter said, adding he didn’t see how bad it was until he was out of school.
Even though he was president of his senior class and a standout athlete, Lasseter, now 96, was unable to find any work after he graduated from Central High School in 1931.
The Great Depression had started two years earlier on Black Friday, Oct. 25, 1929, when Wall Street crashed and the people of the United States panicked and ran on the banks, causing them to collapse.
“You would go up to the dinner table and have white beans and cornbread,” he recalled.
Beans and cornbread were all his family could afford.
When Lasseter was 17 years old and times got too tough, his father left the family in Blackman, leaving Lasseter to run the farm, where the MTSU Diary Farm is now, and take care of his mother and siblings.
“I stayed here when I first got out of high school,” he said. “I decided I’d go to work.”
But there wasn’t any work anywhere. So Lasseter hitchhiked from Murfreesboro to the oilfields of Texas with his brother Bob.
They stopped along the way doing odd jobs. They stayed on a farm for a few days, chopping wood by day and sleeping in the barn by night.
He’s still thankful to the man who gave him hot water to take a bath in Memphis.
After they made it to Texas, they worked in the oil fields and at filling stations for about six months, he said.
“Times got so bad,” he remembered. “My brother was down there with me, and we went to a place in Arkansas and we got on a freight train and rode it all the way to California.”
He said the train cars were packed with people looking for work, as many as 75 people riding in one empty freight car. He called it a “hobo jungle.”
And they worked together to eat. People would strike out on their own, find food and bring it back to the train yard to make soup.
The brothers rode the trains to Santa Barbara, but they still couldn’t find full-time work. Lasseter finally found a part-time job mowing grass.
They were so poor one man they shared an apartment with (of the six living there) found a job at a grocery store and was paid in beans to take home and cook.
Lasseter fondly remembers the time he and his brother spent watching polo games in Santa Barbara and the time he had enough money to see a Mickey Rooney movie.
“We didn’t have much money to go to the show, but we went to that one,” he said. A ticket to the movies cost about 50 cents then and hamburgers cost a nickel.
After about a year, the brothers decided to come back home to Murfreesboro.
“One day I told my brother we could get hungry at home just as easy as here,” he said.
The boys hopped on a train back east soon after.
“Coming back my brother got on the car, and I was going to get on right after,” he remembered, but as he ran after the rain, he got caught.
He ran from the police and hid in a well house. He could hear the police shouting and dogs barking as the other vagabonds were rounded up.
“They said they were putting them on the county crew to pick or cut cotton,” he said.
But he hid well and was able to catch a train back to Nashville.
That time in Little Rock was the closest he ever came to getting in trouble with the law, he said.
When Lasseter got home, he enrolled in MTSU (Middle Tennessee Normal School with a student body of about 500 at the time) and quarterbacked the Blue raider football team for two years.
While in college, he milked cows and worked at Cannon’s Quality Market.
In 1935, he was offered a job filing checks at the Commerce Union Bank of Rutherford County.
“I started filing checks and ended up chairman of the board,” he said.
Lasseter worked at the bank for 42 years, from 1935 until the 1970s, not counting the two years he spent in the army during World War II.
During that time the bank grew from $500,000 in deposits to more than $61 million, he said.
“I was a book keeper, teller, assistant vice president, head of the installment department,” he said. “I had done every job in the bank.”
Lasseter is a leader in Murfreesboro.
“I was on some kind of committee all the time for the city,” he said.
Lasseter was president of the Chamber of Commerce and worked to get State Farm to locate here. He also spent eight years on the Tennessee State Planning Commission and various other government boards.
He served as an advisor for Commerce Union for years after his retirement.
When asked what he thought of how banks were run now, he said corporations had “drained” them and he would never have run Commerce Union that way.
“It just doesn’t seem as bad today as it did back then,” he said.
Michelle Willard can be contacted at 615-869-0816 or mwillard@murfreesboropost.com. |
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