WHEN COWTOWN WEPT: Tragedies of the Great Depression

When the Great Depression tightened its grip on Fort Worth, Texas, it did not strike everyone the same way. For some it meant an empty pocket. For others, it meant losing everything that made life bearable - a job, a marriage, a reputation, a reason to keep going. TRAGEDIES OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION brings together twenty meticulously researched true stories of desperation, violence, and quiet collapse in and around Fort Worth during the 1930s. Built from primary sources - original police reports, coroner's inquest testimony, prison and court records, death certificates, and newspaper coverage recovered from historical archives - this collection reconstructs cases that have not been told in nearly a century, in some instances relying on documents that survive nowhere else. Inside these pages you'll find: - A freight agent who chose the eighth-floor ledge of his own office building over the shame of being expelled from his church for debt. - A traveling ink salesman whose fatal leap from a downtown hotel window followed a night of dinner parties, dance-hall women, and a company at the end of its patience. - A World War I veteran whose shotgun rampage against his own family was blamed, by his own brother, on wounds the war had never let him put down. - A hotel operator shot through the mouth during a $125 robbery - and the robber who spent the rest of his life shedding the name he was born with. - A county official who took his own life rather than face the ruin an affair and a lost office had brought him. - And fifteen more stories of ordinary Texans - railroad men, salesmen, veterans, con artists, and the families left behind - whose final days were shaped by a decade that gave almost no one a way out. Author Kevin Foster, whose previous true-crime work explored historical Fort Worth murder cases, brings the same rigorous archival approach to this darker, more intimate corner of American history: not the Depression of economists and historians, but the Depression as it was actually lived - and, for these twenty people, as it ended. A gripping, carefully documented, and deeply human addition to the true crime and American history shelf.