James Jarrell Pickle was born on October 11, 1913 in the West Texas town of Roscoe. He was the fourth of five children of the marriage of Joseph Binford Pickle and Mary Teresa Duke.
Joseph Binford (J.B.) Pickle had left his native Fulton, Kentucky in his mid-twenties, en route westward to Arizona and its drier, warmer air, in search of relief for his weak lungs. He arrived in West Texas sometime shortly after the turn of the twentieth century. He had made arrangements to stay briefly with relatives in the area. They had secured for him a temporary teaching job during his layover there in Miles, Texas (near Ballinger). Consequently, he met a comely young woman, Mary Duke, who was also helping out at the school. Soon enough, young Pickle had determined, in his words, that “Texas was dry enough!” He and Miss Duke were married in 1903, although they weren’t to “settle down” for many years afterward.
Whether it was from fear that his life would be short, or from his entrepreneurial nature, J.B. Pickle displayed a restless streak, moving his growing family from town to town across West Texas in pursuit of various business opportunities. One such “opportunity” was in Roscoe, Texas, where he and a partner, anticipating boom times in the wake of the coming of the railroad, opened a local newspaper, replacing a recently-failed similar enterprise. There, the family purchased a house and began to integrate themselves into the small community.
Age 13 yrs.
The paper always struggled, but J.B. had soon installed himself as a fixture of the little town and in due course was elected Roscoe’s first mayor in 1907. While in Roscoe, the family grew from their firstborn, Janice (born in Miles), to include Jeanette, Joe and, in 1913, James Jarrell, who would, as a boy, acquire the lifelong nickname of “Jake”.
The Roscoe sojourn ended with the inevitable demise of the newspaper. After a brief stay in Lamesa, where baby Judith was born, followed by a equally brief time in Seminole (where Jake attempted to trade little Judy for a neighbor’s pig), the family finally settled in Big Spring, where J.B.(now known within the family as “Pop”) had acquired an interest in a grocery store, which would flourish until running into the Great Depression.
The Depression was well-established, even in West Texas, when it became Jake’s time to go away to college. In an open-cab Oldsmobile, Pop drove him and a couple of other boys the 9 hours from Big Spring to Austin, where Jake was boarded at Little Campus dorm. It was 1932.