In its heyday, Thurber was home to coal miners and brick plant 
workers from Italy, Poland, and as many as fourteen other European 
nations, not to mention the many Mexican immigrants who came to 
the area. In this, her master's thesis, Mary Jane Gentry, who started 
the first grade in Thurber and graduated as valedictorian of its high 
school in 1930, records first-hand memories of the town's vibrant 
charm.

    Now edited and with an introduction by T. Lindsay Baker, 
Gentry's lively history of the rise and decline of a Texas coal town 
provides a unique window into a bygone era. Her narrative of 
rancorous labor disputes, corporate machinations, and the eventual 
shuttering of the plants and virtual disappearance of the once-thriving 
town will allow Thurber to live again, if only in the minds of her 
readers.

_________________________________________________________

MARY JANE GENTRY died in 1996, after a long and distinguished 
teaching career in Texas in Thurber, Springer Gap, San Angelo, 
Austin, and Odessa, where she retired from a tenured teaching 
position at Odessa College. T. LINDSAY BAKER directs Tarleton 
State University's W. K. Gordon Center for the Industrial History of 
Texas, located at the former town site of Thurber, and holds the W. K. 
Gordon Endowed Chair in History at the university. He lives in Rio 
Vista, Texas.


Number Twenty-two: Tarleton State University Southwestern Studies 
in the Humanities