Waco History Podcast

This is Living Stories, featuring voices from the collections of the Baylor University Institute for Oral History. I'm Louis Mazé. For most families during the Great Depression, Christmas was not a time for extravagance. Money and jobs were difficult to come by, and it was all some families could do to keep food on the table. Retired Baylor physics professor Robert Packard remembers how hard times called for creativity. He describes a plan he came up with while visiting his cousins in the Temple area one Christmas during the Great Depression. Children looking forward to Santa's visit this year should not listen to the following: "They lived in the country. And so Christmas, when it came, we got no presents. We might get a bag of—an apple or something. So I told my cousin, I said, 'Why don't we kidnap Santa Claus? He's got all these gifts, and he bypasses us, but he brings us something.' So we went to bed on Christmas Eve early. The bedroom I was in—and I was the only boy, and my sister and then my cousins wer