Corpus Christi History by Murphy Givens

1920s came roaring back after storm

The storm hit on Sunday, Sept. 14, 1919. Hundreds of bodies washed up across Nueces Bay, covered with oil and naked as worms. Corpus Christi was devastated. North Beach was swept away. The downtown was demolished, with debris piled 15 feet high against the bluff. The 1920s found a city trying to recover from the worst disaster in its history.
   Corpus Christi entered the '20s with a no-storm-is-going-to-beat-us spirit. A civic fundraising campaign upped its goal from $10,000 to $15,000 after $9,000 was pledged the first three hours. This determination led to building the breakwater, the port, and the seawall. Tragedy brought dynamic change.
   Bootleg era
   The nation went dry on Jan. 16, 1920, but Nueces County had been dry for five years. It voted in Prohibition in 1916 after a potent campaign split the town. This began the era of bootleg liquor and backyard stills. Officers literally sniffed around, searching for the unmistakeable odor of leftover mash. Welding shops made portable copper stills that could be easily set up and moved. Tequila was smuggled across the border by tequileros and Mexico produced an ersatz bourbon named Waterfill and Frazier.
   On Nov. 2, 1920, women across the country went to the polls to vote in their first presidential election. This triumph took decades to accomplish. The Caller had been opposed to women's suffrage, but now wrote: "We see that we should have read the signs of the times as well as appreciated the justice of the plea. But all is well that ends well."
   The first traffic rolled across the "temporary" Nueces Bay Causeway on Oct. 21, 1921. This wooden affair built close to the water replaced the first causeway, a concrete structure destroyed in the storm. Some merchants tried to prevent building it, fearing it would take more business out of town than it would bring in.
   A fire on Nov. 20, 1921, destroyed the downtown power generating plant, leaving the city without electricity. After the fire, the Caller hooked up a Fordson tractor with a belt drive to the press and with careful "driving" got the presses to operating. This trick was learned after the storm. The city was without power for months. Four years later, Central Power and Light bought the power system from Gulf Coast Power Company. The Saxet Company in 1922 brought in the first producing gas well in Nueces County off Shell Road on the west side of the city.
   Harding signs port bill
   Wonderful news came on May 22, 1922, when President Warren G. Harding signed legislation authorizing the Port of Corpus Christi. A bond election that October to establish the navigation district passed 10 to 1.
   That news was overshadowed in October, 1922, by a sensational murder case. Fred Roberts, a prominent real-estate dealer who was believed to be a Klan leader, was shot to death in his car in front of a store. Sheriff Frank Robinson and three other men, two of them law-enforcement officers, were tried for murder; they were acquitted in a trial in Laredo. Sheriff Robinson, fearing Klan retaliation, never came back to live in Corpus Christi.
   Three years later, a shootout in front of a house of sporting girls also had Klan connections. The shootout at Bessie Miller's left four men dead and a fifth seriously wounded. The women in the house watched the shootout from bedroom windows. For weeks, people drove down Sam Rankin to look at where the bloody shootout took place.
   It was Nov. 9, 1924, when a train called "The Blackland Special" pulled out of Corpus Christi. On board were 105 farmers and businessmen, all wearing pearl-gray Stetsons.The group toured north and central Texas, promoting blackland farming of South Texas. They would parade through a town and rent a movie house where they showed a film called "Land of Plenty," which promoted carrots that make your hair curl and beets that put roses in your cheeks.
   This is the first of two columns. Part two will appear next Wednesday.
  
  
  

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