Leroy Baker is a retired upholsterer who lives in Red River County,
Texas. He talked to me about his childhood in Paris as the son of a
sharecropper and a carpenter.

Check out Leroy's Oklahoma experiences here!

This oral history has been edited to allow for better conversational flow.

We moved to Lamar county when I was close to school age, because Daddy found
work building Camp Maxey. We bought a house in Pleasant Hill, which was a small
town between Petty and Brookston, and I went to school there for a while. The town is
now a farm field - only the cemetery remains.

We didn't farm during the war, but we had some chickens and cows. After the war,
Mother sharecropped some land between Petty and Roxton to help feed us kids - there
were six of us. She grew cotton and corn, which we all picked ourselves, and Milo,
which was harvested with a thresher. Mother didn't sell anything - the guy who owned
the land did that. Probably cheated her, too.

We moved to Paris in the 50s, lived right by downtown. Paris had about 14,000 people
then. Bois d'Arc Street by the South Depot still had bois d'arc stumps - the road is now
where the jail is. I remember the railroad being busy. There were a lot of trains, lots of
passenger service. The Main Depot and the South Depot were connected by a trolley
line. The Main Depot was on Bonham Street - that's where the big trains went through.

Right where the police station and the Coca Cola plant are now, there stood a large
sanitarium, about three stories tall. A children's hospital was attached to it by a long,
narrow hall. Then there was Lamar County Hospital. The building is still there, across
from the Health Department, but it's not in use anymore. Dr. Robinson, its benefactor,
died and the county closed it because no one wanted to run a charity hospital. Now,
Paris is swallowed up by St Joseph, the only hospital in town. I remember when St.
Joseph was all wooden, with a large, white, covered porch.

I loved the old schools - today's schools look like jails. All morning long, you could smell
the cafeteria cooking, and we'd have real food, like cornbread and green beans,
meatloaf or roast or fried chicken, and a tall glass of cold milk. I went to First Ward in
West Paris, then to the big Paris High School downtown, where the bank now is. I loved
the big, broad steps, the windows you could open to listen to the birds and the sounds
of the neighborhood.

In Paris, South Main, Pine Bluff, Bonham and Clarksville Streets and Lamar Avenue
were where the great houses were. They tore most of them down - it's really sad. The
streets were paved with brick, and trolleys and buses would run everywhere. There
was a Wall Drug Store, where we'd go after school to have a soda. I remember the
department stores downtown, like Belk's and J.C. Penney. The sales clerks didn't have
cash registers; they'd place the bill and the money into a brass box, then used pulleys
to send to a woman sitting in the mezzanine, who'd' count out the change. I thought it
was fun to watch."

- As told to Robin Jett  
Bywaters Park, Paris
Paris Boyhood
This is a picture of the East German
answer to the Ford Motor Company, the
Trabant. It has nothing to do with this
page, except that Mr. Baker once told
me he'd love to drive one. Since he
used to be the proud owner of two Yugos
(one for driving, the other one for spare
parts), I guess the Trabant's reliability
would be familiar to him. Gotcha!