In this interview, Merrifield describes the decline of small towns with the arrival of the interstate, the changes in small-town life, and his own military career.
Jessie Merrifield was born in Arkansas on July 9, 1933, but grew up in the small West Texas town of Ballinger. He served in the U.S. Marine Corps from 1953-61, and then returned to Texas for the rest of his life as a carpenter. He had a front-row seat to see the changes a global war and post-conflict economic boom had on the local level in smaller cities and towns like Ballinger.
Jessie Merrifield passed away in 2022.
Interview Excerpts
This segment comes from the edited transcript of Merrifield’s interview, pgs. 5-6.
ROEHRIG: Has it- has West Texas changed in your lifetime?
MERRIFIELD: Oh yeah. Oh yeah.
GRITTER: Mhm.
MERRIFIELD: Some of it doesn’t exist anymore.
GRITTER: [laughs]
MERRIFIELD: Several little towns, they’ve-they’ve got, you know their town name, but uh there’s nothing there anymore.
GRITTER: Mhm.
MERRIFIELD: But it’s still a town regardless of, it’s a ghost town.
GRITTER: Mhm.
MERRIFIELD: But the uh, thing about, especially where we are, we’re [sighs] as close to being I guess center as you can get nearly. Because if you gotta go south you’d have to go way down south to get to another city, actually to get past Austin.
ROEHRIG: Uh-huh.
GRITTER: Mhm.
MERRIFIELD: And going north, well, you hit Dallas of course. [laughs]
GRITTER: Yeah. [laughs]
MERRIFIELD: But, going west- you- you had El Paso or, or Texarkana, border another side so.
GRITTER: [laughs] Mhm.
MERRIFIELD: And thinking about it, until the interstate came in, it’s highway 90 running along there. And uh that’s where they lost a bunch of little towns was when they-
GRITTER: Mhm-hm
MERRIFIELD: Put the interstate through, they-they lost all those little off road-. They’re still there but you don’t see them unless you make a trip to see them.
GRITTER: Mhm-hm. Yeah.
MERRIFIELD: And you have to know what part of the country you were in and I grew up in that country.
This segment comes from the edited transcript of Merrifield’s interview, pg.24.
MERRIFIELD: Back then, nearly every little city had a National Guard.
GRITTER: Mhm.
MERRIFIELD: So naturally when the World War II started, those were the first guys called up.
GRITTER: Mhm.
MERRIFIELD: Cause they didn’t have to spend so much time training them.
GRITTER: Mhm.
MERRIFIELD: So, and they lost a lot of them too.
GRITTER: Mhm.
MERRIFIELD: Because they hadn’t had enough training. Uh [pause] oh, boys that were say, six years older than me.
GRITTER: Mhm.
MERRIFIELD: Probably only half of them made it through World War II. From my area, I’m talking about. Cause they would take them, as fast as they could talk them into going. And-
GRITTER: Mhm.
ROEHRIG: Our draft. [laughs]
GRITTER: [laughs]
MERRIFIELD: And draft- the draft coming along and then after they saw ones, they set a limit on what they could do, on that deal which they should’ve done a long time ago.
GRITTER: Mhm.
ROEHRIG: Oh yeah.
MERRIFIELD: But that’s somethin’ a lot of people didn’t realize how-how it changed from that point on.
