ONE SEPTEMBER MORNING IN 1914, NOT LONG AFTER LABOR DAY, Welborn Barton Griffith Jr.—Web to his fellow sixth graders—walked toward the two-story Old Reagan School near the center of Quanah, Texas. Up the street, a railroad engine waiting at the depot hissed steam, and horses clopped down the road pulling wagonloads of ranch supplies.
It had been less than a month since war had erupted in Europe. Just that morning the Dallas Morning News had reported that the French Army—with aid from six hundred taxi cabs helping move troops to the front—had counterattacked thirty miles northeast of Paris and forced a German retreat sixty miles to the Aisne River. But the young boy, not yet thirteen, had his mind on more local concerns.
Web’s schoolmates jabbered about the previous weekend’s family picnics, swimming at Lake Pauline, Lake Copper Breaks, or old Gyp Rock, and getting a chance to help their dads in the harvest and ride in the cattle drive. As they walked up the school steps, they were greeted by their teachers—Web’s aunt Ella Smith among them—who hoped a cheerful welcome would distract their charges’ thoughts from the war, which was already affecting Texas ranchers and its cotton and wheat farmers. The war represented change, something all too familiar to folks in Quanah.
Quanah had sprouted up as a railroad town in the north Texas prairie and marsh country below the Red River, east of what would become the Dust Bowl, where the Oklahoma panhandle joins the pan. Quanah’s 1,500 inhabitants voted it the county seat in 1890, when windblown native grasses, prickly pears, and scattered mesquite trees were the area’s primary vegetation. Web’s parents, Welborn and Lula, were originally from outside of Temple, where Welborn had sold groceries wholesale for W. A. Harkey, and had started their life together some 130-odd miles north of their hometown, in Dallas, where Welborn then sold groceries at the store of a friend, James Wilson. After a time, Welborn acquired a farm to the east, near Cobb Switch in Kaufman County, but he sold it a year later because Lula preferred living in town.
The Welborn Griffiths moved to Quanah in 1909 with Web and his two little brothers, Philip and Lawrence. There Welborn’s brother Fuller—who went by F. O.—owned a grocery he’d bought out from and operated with two brothers. Upon arriving in town, Welborn worked for F. O. for a year and then bought in as partner at F. O. Griffith & Co.
Now, in 1914, change was driving Web’s world. Familiar smells of cattle, horse, and sheep manure were being overpowered by coal smoke, fueled by the arrival of hundreds of settlers annually, enticed to Quanah by cheap railroad tickets and promotions for ranchland, principally promoted by the Quanah Tribune-Chief—run by Harry Koch, grandfather of the entrepreneurial Koch brothers. Quanah’s settlers tried to convert their farms in part by plowing ranch grass into fields for cotton or wheat, but many failed and moved on, hoping to sell later, seeking work in the interim.
That year in school, Web was readying for seventh grade’s serious learning: English, ancient history, and algebra. He was the oldest child in the family, which by now had grown by two girls—“Baby” Dorothea and “Tiny” Virginia Harrison.
Each day after school, Web would walk home on dirt streets lined with sidewalks and houses to the Griffiths’ home at 700 Cain Street—a two-story clapboard house his father had built for the family—with its painted trim, fruit trees, and row of whitewashed locust trees the Griffiths had planted, and two pine trees that shaded the front door. On one side of their fenced-in grassy backyard stood the Griffiths’ metal-and-wood A-frame swing, which offered a place for Web to talk alone with one or both of his parents, away from siblings, its pair of wooden seats facing each other, connected by a hinged foot platform.
Dallas—two hours away by train—was the largest of Texas’s few cities, but in 1914 four million Texans had spread across the state in five hundred towns like a layer of jam on toast: thin, but enough to taste. Each town occupied its own world—especially true of Quanah, home to three railroads. Quanah was becoming an urban marketing center for ranchers and farmers, with its new stone-and-brick three-story county courthouse on a tree-shaded block. Graded streets and residential neighborhoods a ten-minute walk from downtown had replaced the windswept dust and sparse vegetation.
Quanah’s four thousand residents were now experiencing growth and adopting modern innovations. Web could see his parents’ drudgeries easing somewhat each year, with public schools, telephones, a fire department, electric lighting indoors and out, and a waterworks under construction. Those who needed work could find it at ranches and farms, a cottonseed-oil mill, two cotton gins, packing houses, a wholesale dry-goods dealer, a flour mill, two grain elevators, and—in Acme, several miles west—twin gypsum-plaster and cement factories. Two wholesale grocery houses fed the town, together doing $2 million yearly, half of which was the business of F. O. Griffith & Co.
Web helped his father and uncles at the store after school and on Saturdays, which meant almost everybody in town who came to buy at the store knew the young boy and grew familiar with the Quanah branches of the extended Griffith family. Over a period of six years, Web clerked part-time—first with chores, cleaning, and restocking shelves, and then filling orders, riding delivery wagons, and learning how Welborn and F. O. ordered from suppliers. He worked alongside his brothers and cousins, including Orville (F. O. Griffith Jr.), who was six years Web’s senior.
Web’s world in Quanah was different from his schoolmates’; his experience in the store had taught him some things. The store did most of its trade with ranchers. Most goods came by train from Dallas, Houston, and Denver: produce, dry goods, coffee, and oil for lamps and heat. Working at the store meant Web encountered people from places all over, rural and urban alike; he heard talk of crop prices, costs of food and supplies, civic elections, and county fairs—with shows like Quanah Parker and his Indians returning from buffalo hunt at Goodnight Ranch. The store showed Web he could support himself and would give him opportunities to learn about the world outside of Quanah. And this—together with being the oldest of five kids at home—may have planted a seed from which his penchant for leadership grew. And it showed Web that his father had earned respect throughout town.
Around the time he started high school—taking further courses of English, along with medieval and modern history, Spanish, and higher algebra—with World War I waging on, Web’s attention turned from just the store, the town, and the things his friends liked to bigger things, like war and other lessons of an international nature. At the store, on breaks, Web would likely have read newspapers and overheard, or joined in, conversations about events reported in the Quanah paper and those of nearby Dallas and Fort Worth. His world was expanding beyond his hometown.
The Griffiths subscribed to The American Boy and other magazines and made books plentiful in the house, because they were eager for their kids to attend college, which neither Lula nor Welborn had completed. Welborn refused to read fiction but read every day. He said time and again that he would rather go to work without his trousers than without having read his Dallas Morning News. Welborn appeared a thoughtful man, his clear, focused eyes recessed beneath dark eyebrows, and his broad, unwrinkled forehead capped by a head of already-graying, wavy, coiffed hair, receding hairline, and shaved face—the gravity commensurate with his status as an already-mature businessman and civic leader. But Welborn now carried more concerns, conscious of a wider world. His friends were never in doubt about his convictions on current affairs.
Welborn shared with his son stories from his daily read through the Dallas and Temple newspapers and from the biweekly Quanah Tribune-Chief, which was likely the first paper Web read.
How would a young Web have reacted to its October 1914 story that reported from the war near Reims in France, where German and French lines were a few hundred yards apart? Fighting had stopped about nightfall, and German soldiers were entering their field kitchen for a warm meal. A French captain waved a white flag and mounted his trench. A German officer came to meet him. The French captain told the German his men were very hungry, having not eaten for days, and asked for food.
“How many are you?” the German answered.
“About a hundred,” said the Frenchman.
“All right, call out your men.”
So the French laid aside their arms, came over to their German enemy, and sat down to supper. For that night, they weren’t fighting. At the table, the French captain told the German officer his men were so famished they would not have been able to continue fighting without something to eat.
Could it really have been that way? I’ll have to ask Dad. Could it be that there really are just and honorable wars with commanders and soldiers who exercise restraint?
That December in another of Web’s magazines, The Youth’s Companion, he would have read about the shelling of Reims Cathedral:
Nothing . . . during the war has aroused more discussion than the partial destruction by German shells of the Cathedral of Notre Dame at Reims. . . . The beautiful woodwork of the interior is consumed by the fire, and most, although not all, of the stained glass is ruined.
. . . It is an old saying that the choir of Beauvais, the nave of Amiens, the portal of Reims, and the towers of Chartres would together make the loveliest church in the world.
And Web would have taken interest in a piece about British Boy Scouts serving in the war in France that appeared in the November issue of the same magazine:
Most of [the Boy Scouts] are only from twelve to fourteen years old; but they have . . . taken the gendarme’s place as a director of traffic and dispenser of information, for the gendarmes are most of them on the firing line . . .
I witnessed an incident in Havre . . . I ran across the most desolate . . . British soldier I had seen. He was perched on the top of a tarpaulin-covered ammunition wagon, drawn by four horses, and he was lost . . . after an all-night downpour.
“I sye,” he called, “you bloke on the sidewalk!” (I was the “bloke.”) . . . “Where is No. 4 camp?” I did not know, and said so. . . .
At this juncture, two Boy Scouts appeared. They knew all about No. 4 camp, and they promptly took command of the ammunition wagon. One of the boys mounted the nigh wheel horse, and the other perched on the driver’s seat in front. . . .
“Get under that canvas and go to sleep!” said the Scout in the wagon. “We’ll take you where you belong.” . . .
The lads are as resourceful as a North American Indian, and as ready to accept hardship as a veteran of four years’ fighting.
The Griffith boys did summer fieldwork at ranches, like the ranch of their father’s closest friend, John R. Good, along Groesbeck Creek, a half dozen miles from town. Good had built a house at the ranch and used an 1885 stagecoach building for his barn. He was a town father, game warden, gun-club founder, member of the First Masonic Lodge, and a musician in Quanah’s first band. On occasional weekends at the ranch, for Web and the other boys, trees and shrubs along the creek provided relief from the weekday dust and dry winds of Quanah’s streets and surrounding fields. Welborn loved to ride horses, and he named all of them John, in honor of John Good. He also hunted wolves and owned wolfhounds, which he kept at the Good ranch.
Welborn and his sons rode horses, hunted with dogs, and fished alongside John Good and Good’s four children. John’s second wife, Josephine, had died of illness in 1913, and her death opened Web’s eyes to what it was like for Sydney—her son and Web’s friend—to lose his mother and for John to lose his wife a second time.
During those summers, Web worked with his brothers, and they had their share of sibling quarrels. Once Web accused his brother Lawrence of not pulling his own weight in the fieldwork, harvesting wheat with a traveling crew and their horse-pulled thresher. Another time, brother Philip accused Web of the clumsy handling of a horse—“uncoordinated but determined,” Philip said—which Web took as a challenge. These incidents fired Web’s temper, which would be a notable trait throughout his life.
Congress created Junior ROTC in 1916, and Web would have read about it, but there was none in Quanah. His father was often working at the store or on civic projects, and mother Lula was tutoring neighborhood kids, substitute teaching, making bandages in her Red Cross home-land war-support group, conserving war materials, planting trees with her 1904 Club, campaigning for women’s suffrage, cooking for her family, baking bread, or skillfully making clothes for Web and his siblings. As a result, much responsibility fell to their oldest son. And even when his parents were not so engaged, Web’s plans might often be thwarted by an urgent customer order that had to be filled or a direction to watch over his siblings at home.
His friends, like John Good’s sons, seemed to be free, and cousin Orville, F. O.’s son, was preparing for college.
Web appreciated early the need for leadership, being the oldest of five and with cousins in an extended family. His store work and ranch work meant his intelligence and leadership were spotted by superiors, which, in some way, helped him develop a talent for planning. But tension between work and play—sports, hunting, and doing the things teenagers do—probably muddled him as much as anyone his age. As his responsibilities grew, he was—like other adolescents—focused on learning who he was, sifting through identities to find one that suited him. Web’s view of the world was probably changing, away from marbles, backyard ball games, and bike rides to a new sphere. In early high school, he was above average in his English and Spanish classes, his personal best being history class, his weakest early algebra. Writing did not appeal to him. He would rather talk—often fast—in his Texas drawl. Later, in his third year at Quanah High School, he excelled in advanced algebra and plane geometry and improved in English.
The outside world was encroaching, and Web was noticing it at school, home, and work.
After America declared war in the spring of 1917, cousins Fuller and Welborn J. Griffith, the former, Uncle F.O.’s son, and Web’s friend Sydney Good all enlisted. Welborn J. would sail from Boston in June 1918 with the 345th Field Artillery Battalion. Web wanted in too, but the war had come too soon for him.
That July, Web took the train to Temple for a two-week visit with his parents’ families, where he got to know his mother’s brother, Uncle Harrison “Tex” Smith, who had trained as a civil engineer at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York and formed a Texas company to build roads.
Back in Quanah, Web sat on the backyard swing, perhaps first with his mother and then with his father, and asked for their permission to move to Dallas to finish high school. He had bigger ambitions than working at the grocery.
In December, Uncle Tex came to visit the family in Quanah soon after Welborn had taken a trip with F. I. Hendrix and Charles Welch, two other Quanah business leaders, to inspect the plains across the proposed Quanah-Roswell highway. It’s probable Tex used the trip to discuss bidding for another highway-building project.
In August 1918, Web, suitcase in hand, boarded a train to Dallas, where he would live with the James Wilson family, friends of the Griffiths from their Dallas years. Web earned his keep clerking in the Wilsons’ grocery—the company for which his father had sold groceries at wholesale before the family move to Quanah—and meanwhile enrolled at Bryan Street High School.
Web had learned a kind of willfulness in Quanah—the gulp-your-sobs, hold-up-your-head kind of stubborn composure—and how to care for himself and to take care of his siblings and customers. Now he was opening a new chapter of his life in Dallas, where he would soon learn to lead men.