|
oxsan
|
|
NAMES
As most of you know I fiddle around with genealogy strictly as a pastime and as a matter of interest. In doing so I have been amazed at how flexible and changeable is the thing we call ”name”. Back even as recently as the eighteen hundreds and seventeen hundreds names were much more changeable than they are today. There were far less government dictated records of births and deaths. Even as late as 1905 when my father was born there was no organized way to record that birth and name other than in church records (baptism, confirmation, marriage and death) or more reliable really was the family Bible which almost invariably had a page to record births and one to record deaths. I once read in a family Bible at my great grandfather’s home a family Bible which had a list of the children of J.A.A. Turrentine and Jemimah Dora Turrentine and listed a George Franklin Turrentine and gave his birth date identical to my fathers. I remarked upon it to my great grandmother and she said, “That is your father but he didn’t like the name George and kept only the Frank.” But family Bibles were themselves fragile. They were subject to destruction by fires and floods and sometimes they were simply lost. Many people of that time were born with no record whatever of their birth. When my father went to work for the Atomic Energy Commission at Oak Ridge Tennessee he had to have a birth certificate and one did not exist. He had one created on the testimony of two individuals who were “personally aware of the birth” and his name was recorded on this birth certificate as Frank Turrentine only. It is also true that many marriages were made and consummated without any lasting record of the marriage. I don’t know when marriage licenses became a requirement but I do know that many pioneer people met at a church social, had their marriage blessed by a minister of questionable credentials and that no government agency recorded that marriage yet in their society they were acceptably married. It is also true that literacy was not as common in those days as it became later (and I fear is disappearing again). People spelled things including names as they sounded to them and there was no standardization or check to assure commonality of name from parent to child.
Let me illustrate just a little how this can be a problem to the genealogist—especially to the amateur such as me. I dearly loved my great grandmother Mary Ann Dennis nee Shipley although I was very young when she died. She was my playmate and she died when I was just four years old. She was almost crippled by arthritis–rheumatism as she called it–and she dubbed me “Dr. Flathead” and I spent hours rubbing her knees with a magic elixir of windmill water with a few drops of red cake coloring in it. She guided my pursuit and slaughter of savage Indians out the dining room window and consulted with me on the proper materials for bows and arrows. She was my buddy and hers was the first funeral I remember ever attending in my life.
A few years ago I begin to try to trace her back a bit to see if I could identify her forefathers. I knew that her maiden name was Shipley and that her father’s first name was Sterling. It wasn’t too long before I identified a Sterling David Shipley born in 1821 which looked promising and who had married as his second wife a certain Laurania Tansy Buttram on the first day of September 1850 in McMinn County Tennessee. I was doubtful about this because family legend held that Mary Ann Shipley’s mother was named “Luvena” the marriage certificate in Tennessee definitely held Sterling’s wife to be named Laurania Tansy. Laurania was born in 1825 in Wayne County Kentucky and she died on 6 May 1860 in Marshfield Missouri—but there was another link to family legend. Mary Ellen Dennis Hamilton, my grandmother, had told me that her mother lived and died in Marshfield Missouri. So I kept digging and eventually came across a reference in which Laurania’s sister had told someone that Laurania had intensely disliked the name Laurania and demanded that her family and friends call her “Luvena”-So this fairly well settled the fact that I had the right person for my great grandmothers mother—but then I began having trouble with her father’s name. Her father was Noah Buttram who was born in Kentucky on May 7 in 1804 and died in Arkansas on July 10 in 1851. The trouble was that Noah sometimes signed things and represented himself as Noah Bertram and he married a woman named Ann Huffaker in Kentucky on December 27, 1821 who sometimes spelled her name H-u-f-f-a-c-r-e and other times spelled it Huffaker. Noah’s father was consistently Jacob Buttram and Jacob’s father was consistently William Buttram (he was born in Maryland in 1735) but William’s father (Lo and Behold) was John Butterum. So we progress from Butterum to Bertram in four generations.
Second marriages give one quite a bit of trouble also. Mary Ann Shipley was evidently the only child of Luvena Shipley nee Buttram during the ten years that they married ---yet Mary Ann Shipley had talked of “her brother” and both Mary Ellen and Rowena had at one time met this gentleman whose name I believe was Price Shipley—an unusual first name which raised yet another question that I have not been able to verify as yet. There was a rather famous Confederate General Price of some heroic proportions who gained his fame in the Battle of Vicksburg in the Civil War. This General Price was from Marshfield Missouri—the home of Sterling David Shipley–Luvena Shipley’s husband. The question raised is whether Price Shipley was named for General Price and if so why? Sterling David Shipley was born in 1821 so he would have been 41 years old when the Civil War started—not at all too old to serve—there were lots of Confederate soldiers in their fourth decade but also there is no indication that I can find that Sterling David did serve in the Civil War. But it is something for me to keep my eyes open about. Also I have not yet dug out Sterling David Shipley’s parents or other ancestors. And the question still remains—did Sterling David Shipley have any other children other than Price by his first marriage and any other children other than Mary Ann during his second marriage to Laurania Tansy (Luvena).
So these are given as just a very few of the problems encountered by the amateur genealogist when he or she sets out to course through history and look for their ancestors. I am sure this might be the ultimate of Dullsville to a lot of people but I find it exciting and exhilarating and I intend to clear up all these mysteries before I go on to meet these people in the great beyond—or those of a certain kind that is.
|
|
|
|
|
I think this will be the end of the listing of activities that I and my companions did for fun in those dim dark days of the early thirties. I will not have covered all of the things we did but I will have tired I presume of talking about them and go on to something else. Remember that the motivation for doing this is the conviction which I have that the children of this day don’t DO enough. They may be busy, or entertained, or occupied but if you look closely they are most likely WATCHING someone else do something which is a different thing from doing it yourself.
Below is another list of things that we children of the early thirties did to amuse ourselves.
HULLY GULLY — For some reason it became a matter of pride around school among us boys at least to be the possessor of the hardest pecan in school. For those of you who do not live in the pecan belt I will state that the most normal way to crack a pecan is to grasp two of them in the right hand and squeeze them until one breaks. Mostly if one is interested in eating pecans they have selected a pocket full of "paper shell" pecans but if you are interested in playing hully gully you carefully select a native pecan with a shell as hard as iron and if you want to be a champ at the game you go all over town and down to the creek and out to the farm and pick up native non-grafted pecans. Then you test them carefully to find the absolutely hardest one and you subject it to a series of tests and preparations and ointments calculated to make it even harder and more unbreakable. Soaking a pecan in 30 weight engine oil was believed to be helpful as was a good soak in asafoetida water followed by drying for a week or two in a cool dark place. There were some incantations also that were supposed to be helpful. Then you swagger up to some guy you don’t like at school and say "Wanna hully gully?" and if he agrees you each take say five pecans from your pocket and comingle them with five from his pocket and you then submit your "hully gully" pecan to the test with his "hully gully’ pecan by putting the two together in his hand (because you are the challenger) and letting him squeeze the two until one cracks. If your pecan cracks he picks up all ten pecans and goes sneering on his way and will tell everyone in school that he "hully gullied" you this day. Of course if his pecan cracks you do the same thing. Like many other ventures of my childhood I participated willingly but did not often succeed. My hully-gully pecans rarely lasted the day. Do your kids make hully-gully pecans?
HIKES — Just plain walking. We boys did a lot of hiking and walking. In Austin Texas it was nothing to walk out to Mount Bonnell and back – a distance of 14 miles from the Congress Avenue bridge. Trips to what was then called Tom Miller Dam up the north bank of the Colorado and across the low-water bridge and back along the south bank of the river were common — probably twelve miles for the round trip Even as late as the Fifties and Sixties my boys used to hike all over Irving, Texas either alone or in groups. On the farm near Plainview the nearest child my age was about two and a half miles across pastures and fields, and I walked that several times in a day after my horse was "lost". Walking just for fun was very common. I have the impression that if a kid is going to play soccer over at the edge off town these days that he expects his mother to take him over in the SUV and stop at McDonalds on the way so that he can tank up on Diet Coke in anticipation of the debilitating nature of the game. If we kids wanted to play soccer , or softball, or sandlot baseball or little league football, we could jolly well get ourselves over there and our parents didn’t often come for the game — and there was no such thing as Diet Coke or diet anything else. Now I will admit that in my generation there was an impression held by most west Texas males that anytime a man walked. anywhere he could ride a horse that he either had boils on his backside or was just a little crazy. This did not apply to boys however. Do your kids walk a lot?
HOMEWORK — Am I wrong or is there a general educational philosophy rampant today which holds that homework is bad and unfair? I have frequently stated that I attended twenty-six schools — let me emphasize that all of them had homework as a regular thing and during the school year there was a period right after the evening meal at my home when the table would be cleared and it was mine to do my homework. Normally my parents did not help me with my homework — nor did I have a computer with Google at my command. But for one semester after I had skipped the seventh grade and entered the eighth grade about three weeks late my mother helped me with my algebra homework. She was a whiz at it. All the other time though I had homework and I had to do it myself. Of course there was no TV then, and we did not have the radio on during homework time. Do your kids have homework?
SLEEP — There was a general consensus when I was growing up that children needed lots of sleep. As a rule although it varied from home to home children under 10 went to bed about 8:30 PM, children 10 to16 went to bed about 9:30 to 10:00pm on school nights and by 11:30 on any night. As a general rule high school students of 15 to18 could date on Friday and Saturday nights only and were usually in violation of curfew after 11:30 PM. Even college students had curfews. The girls dorms at the University of Texas had room checks at midnight. I remember being quite startled when I called my daughter’s dorm room one night and a man answered. But things have changed in the relative value of sleep and entertainment among teenagers and when I was growing up sleep was required. Do your kids have a bed time? Do they have a curfew?"
JOBS – When I was growing up I got no allowance. I was given money for bus fare and food at the school cafeteria and anything I needed–and much that I did not – I was given the money to buy. But I was encouraged to work when I was a teenager and did so I was an apprentice butcher at a meat market located at 12th and Chicon in Austin Texas and worked there every Saturday from 9AM to 10 PM under the tutelage and direction of Jim. Jim was a black butcher who had worked in the store for years. I went suddenly from being a kid who had never seen an African American until he was six or so and had seen darn few since to a work situation where both the patronage of the store and the employees within the store were 100 per cent black with the exception of the owner. Jim made a journeyman butcher of me and after leaving Austin I worked as the only butcher in a couple of other stores in Michigan and in Texas. Jim is long dead by now because he was ancient when I first met him but he taught me much not only about a beef carcass but about people. Incidentally I was known in the 12th and Chicon area as "Jim’s boy" and I walked from the market to my home on many a Saturday night all alone and had no worries about being bothered by anyone. I also had jobs mowing lawns when I was a sub-teen and picking up coke bottles at the cattle auction and a yearly job of delivering telephone directories that lasted about three weeks to a month and was quite profitable. After graduating from high school there has never been a period longer than two or three weeks that I did not have a job. Even when I was going to the University I worked at part time jobs. I think that jobs are very useful and educational. Do your kids have jobs?
EXPLORING – It was a lot kinder world prior to the 1960's than it is now. I know that statement will get some argument but it never-the-less is very true. Nothing impeded a subteen kid from walking all over town and being away from home all day or even hitchhiking ten or twelve miles over to the next small town if it appealed to you. As a generality I could go anywhere I liked as long as I was home before sundown. If I did anything unusual I was instructed to call "Central" who always knew where my mother or Dad was and report my plans. Sex crimes against kids were almost unknown in my part of the world . There were many poor and destitute during the great depression but generally speaking there was not a large criminal element. So I and my buddies spent a lot of time either singly or in groups exploring the very small universe in which we lived. Even small West Texas towns have cattle auction barns, cotton compresses, cotton gins, feed mills. grain elevators, cheese factories, telephone pole yards--all of which were wonderful places to play and watch our adult friends work. Blacksmith shops were terrific entertainment. Farriers (we just called them horseshoers) were entertaining for a morning on a hot day--especially if they had an obstreperous horse for a client. Courthouses were terrific to explore. The sherrif's office was there and we could sit quietly underneath the open window and listen to the deputies talking all about all the criminals and whores in the county--many of whom we knew on another basis. We had better sense than to report the news we picked up there at the dinner table. Or we might even attend a couirt trial. In Carlsbad I ran around with a bunch of Mexican kids and was amazed that they had church every day and at the oddest hours and went to several masses where we sat sedately on the back row of the chapel scared to death of the black-robed nuns who glared at us if we made a sound or moved. I never understood until many years later why we "unconfirmed" couldn't participate in the Holy Communion. The nuns would always have cold goat's milk for us if we came to the kitchen door at the convent. Since my parents were Protestant I didn't burden them with my Catholic adventures. By the time I was eight my parents would let me take four hundred mile bus rides alone. I don't think that today's kids have the freedom that we had at that age. Do your kids explore? Alone? At age six?
SMOKING – I didn't smoke tobacco until I was about seventeen and out of high school but we sub-teen and low-teen kids never-the-less smoked. Cedar bark, corn silk, dry grass, corn shucks and several other things made us feel appropriately wicked and of course we had to hide down in the cellar or in the bin of Uncle Curt's grain combine or on the barn roof so that our parents or grandparents wouldn't know about it---that was part of the appeal .Once I started smoking tobacco though it was 2 1/2 packs a day for the next 48 years and will probably be the reason I die young. I haven't used tobacco in any form now for 15 years come next month.
PIPE BOMBS – I hate to report this but we regularly made pipe-bomb hand grenades when I was in high school. We would get a piece of two inch steel pipe four inches long and threaded on each end and make a bag of explosive from potassium nitrate, powdered carbon, sulphur and whatever other new mix we wanted to try and would empty a five cent tube of BBs into the pipe , screw the pressure end caps tight and go throw it off a cliff at Campbell's hole about two miles upstream on Barton Creek from Barton Springs swimming pool. Ostensibly we were up there to hunt squirrels and each of us had a .22 cal rifle along. It was wild country then but is expensive mansions now. Was it smart? NO!
Our ring leader in this endeavor was Jack Williams who only a couple of years later was a US Marine acting as a demolition expert blowing up caves full of Japanese on Pelilieu. Those pipe hand grenades made very satisfactory noises
when they hit the rocks at the cliff base.Do your kids make pipe bombs? I hope not---it is a stupid thing to do!
BOARD GAMES – Cards were forbidden at my grandparents because it might teach we children to be gamblers but my parents and I used to play poker with matches for chips. But dominos, checkers and chess were common diversions. Monopoly came along when I was about ten and there were several other board games. Do your kids play board games?
TREEHOUSES – We didn't make tree houses where I grew up mainly because there were very few trees.
RADIOS – My cousin WD and my Uncle Willie Elven made a crystal set receiver and razor blade detector receiver in the barn loft of Elven Brown's barn. It was housed in a cigar box---each of them--- and we got a lot of static and just a few instances of intelligence from the ether from them. I remember thinking that they were geniuses and stood in much awe of them for years. Do your kids tinker with things electronic or mechanical?
That about ends the "What do Your Kids Do For Fun? quest. It is not anywhere near all we did, but I have plowed the memory field long enough for today – and tomorrow. But let me urge you to let your children be busy and to independently and alone develop their diversions and entertainment.I think that we hold our children too tightly now.
My mother used to say "We should hold our loved ones tightly – with open hands"
love
dad, granpa, et al
|
|
|
|
|
My good friend Tip has sent me a whole list of things that he did for fun when he was a kid and that occupied his time and kept him out of trouble—well nearly. All but about three of his things were things that I also did as a kid but that my advanced state of geriatric decay had kept me from remembering yesterday when I sent you the first list of things that kids used to do that I don’t seem to observe or hear about them doing these days and cause me to ask myself again, What Do Your Kids Do For Fun?
So here are some of the things that Tip mentioned that we can add to the list:
Annie-Over, Alley–Oop, Anti-Over — I’ve heard it called all of those names and probably some more – and there are many variations of this game – but it was universal throughout the five state area where I grew up. It was a form of catch and involved throwing a ball up on the roof of the house and your playmate catching it as it came down, or I have seen it played where one player is on one side of the house and his opponent is on the opposite side and the person throwing the ball over the pitch of the roof so that it comes down on the opposite side of the house where your opponent must catch it before it hits the ground. This version is best played with four persons in teams of two, so that you have members of both teams on both sides of the house to prevent lying and cheating by your opponent. There are a dozen ways to score this game also. Tennis balls, basket balls, baseballs and even your sister’s jacks ball can be used to play Annie -over. There were a dozen different little jingles that you yelled at the top of your voice before you threw the ball over so your opponent could be warned that it was coming — throwing before you yelled the jingle was dishonorable. The sound of the ball hitting the roof drives adults mad, which is another advantage of the game. Do your kids still play Annie-Over for hours on end?
Just Plain Catch – or Burnout – Two kids twenty yards or so apart with a baseball and each kid having a baseball glove that almost always started with each kid throwing the ball softly then progressively harder until someone yelled, "calf-rope,", or, "I give up". This version is what we used to call Burn Out. Do your kids play catch or burnout?
Firefly Lanterns — Catching fireflies and putting them in a quart mason jar and watching them close up lighting their abdomens was always a good July and August activity and I spent many an evening dashing barefoot through the lawn or garden trying to catch fireflies gently enough that they still retained their luminescent ability .Tip notes that fireflies are more rare than they used to be. I wonder why this is? We must protect a national treasure. Do your kids chase fireflies on hot summer evenings?
Digging Caves — The house where my kids mostly grew up sat on a city lot that was almost a full acre, and the back part of that lot had a few cedar trees and the ground there was good friable sandy loam. My kids referred to the very back of the lot as "camp", and they dug some pretty ambitious pits and caves and dens back there. I was not invited to go back there by them, and I respected their desire for privacy but inspected it when it was unoccupied to see if it was developing into anything that might resemble a coal mine disaster. As a kid who grew up entirely in rented houses where the landlady was generally on the premises I was usually forbidden to dig on the property, and I loved to dig in the dirt. My parents bought their first piece of property when I was in the Navy, and when I came home in 1946 mother handed me a short shovel and said, "You dig holes anywhere you wish." So I was attuned to the basic need of children to dig. Do your kids dig caves and dens and forts in the dirt? It is hard on clothes but it is much more fun than having one built for you.
Fighting Wasp Nests — There was a general belief among us boys when we were about six to nine years old that wasps wouldn’t sting you if you held your breath. We were brave – and not very smart – and tested that theory several times and always rationalized the reason that it failed to leave us sting-free. We reckoned that we picked the wrong kind of wasps and that hornets WOULD sting you but wasps would not, and we weren’t too sure about yellow jackets. I remember once in Carlsbad, New Mexico that I climbed up in a tree to attack a yellow Jacket nest, and I knocked it down and got stung repetitively and developed a rather high fever. Mother took me to a doctor, and when Dad came home from work he gave me the real low down on the "wasps won’t sting you if—" theory, but it lasted for several years. Do your kids fight wasp nests?
Making Paper Airplanes — We boys whiled away many an hour making paper airplanes and flying them competitively to see which boy had the plane that would stay aloft the longest. Boeing and Lockheed would have been envious of the design and modifications that we tested. And I am sorry to admit that more than one or two of us ended up in some trouble with the school administration for flying them in class while Mizz Struthers was writing on the board. Someone’s airplane went astray and hit Mizz Struthers rather ample posterior, and I had been stupid enough to use a piece of notebook paper with my name on it. Do your kids make paper airplanes in or out of school?
Riding My Horse – I got my first horse when I was five as a birthday present, and what an animal he was. His name was Popcorn. He was a paint stallion and was trained to herd and cut cattle. He came from the Pitchfork, Matador, 6666 and Swenson ranch country, and I am not sure which ranch he was foaled on. He was small for a cow horse, but he made up for it in meanness. That horse hated all adults – my Dad, my Uncle Weldon, my Aunt Rowena and the mayor of Lubbock’s daughter were all injured by that horse either biting or kicking them. He never offered any injury to any of us kids, and I rode him almost day and night for about three years. Once I attended a very rural school on the Plains called Bellview near Plainview and rode Popcorn to school every day and stabled him at the school and rode him home in the afternoon — about three or four miles each way. I always rode him bareback. I never had a saddle with him. I had a childish thought that Popcorn should go wherever I wanted to go. I rode him into Halsey’s drug store in Lubbock, tried to get him through the revolving doors of the Lubbock General hospital so we could visit my cousin Dick who was there but couldn’t do it. Finally he — and I — caused enough trouble around Lubbock that Dad insisted that we take him up to Plainview and retire him on Granddad’s farm — there Dad finally arranged for him to get lost. Do your kids have a horse to ride?
Crawdad Fishing — Tip added all of these. I have done my bit of Crawdad fishing but it was down in the Ellis and Dallas County area — the high Plains just isn’t crawdad country. But fishing for crawdads is something that every kid should do. No hook. Just a piece of bacon tied on the end of a string and swung into some shallow water and when you feel him pull just ease him out of the water and lift him onto the bank and put him in your bucket and you’ve got some mighty good eatin’. My sons were great crawdad fishermen in Irving in Dallas county. Do your kids spend hours fishin’ for crawdads? Someone said that the time a man spends fishing is not charged against him in the Book of Life. There was a sort of a slough of water over near the Rock Island railroad line and the boys used to fish for crawdads over there and bring home dozens of them You have taught your kids to fish for crawdads I hope...and how to cook and clean em? And teach them the crawdad song...you know..."Yonder come a man with a sack on his back honey—Yonder come a man with his sack on his back, Babe. Yonder come a man with a sack on his back He’s got more Crawdads than he can pack, Honey, Baby mine" Surely your kids know the Crawdad song — you have to sing that softly while fishin’ for them or they won’t bite.
Marbles — Every boy played marbles. Every boy sought and generally found a "cat-eye agate" or as we said then an "aggie" as a shooter or a "taw". Marbles had a complex and fluid set of rules that changed from one location to another and you had to be pretty good at it or you lost all your marbles pretty quick. I wasn’t too good at it but I was fairly lucky. Do your kids play marbles? Do they play for keeps?
Tops — Every boy had a top — one that was activated by throwing off a string wound around it and had a sharp metal point at the ground end which could be used to damage if not actually split another boys top while it was spinning on the ground — usually causing a fight. I wasn’t too expert at tops either but joined in on all tops contests. .Do your kids spin string tops?
Corn-cob Fights — I mentioned rubber gun fights but fights with corn cobs were frequent also. Those things hurt when they hit you, but they didn’t really cause an injury. None of these fights in my experience were racially motivated. Race was not a factor in my life until I went to the University or a little later. There were no African-Americans in West Texas and there were very few Latinos in the Panhandle. The fights we had were with boys just like us and that on some days we played with in perfect peace and that would be sitting next to us in history class at school next Monday. .Do your kids have corn cob fights?
Washers — Tossing washers at a line and scoring who could get closest to the line was what I thought the lines were put in sidewalks for until I was grown. And if there wasn’t a sidewalk nearby why just draw a line in the dirt. And if you have no washers use coins.
Now off Tips list that leaves Spool Tractors, clothes pin match shooters, match rockets that I am not familiar with and must get back with him on and about three more that I will put on the next edition of "What do your kids do for fun?"
One I must remember to discuss next time is "snipe hunting"
Love
dad, granpa, et al-
|
|
|
|
|
My parents and my grandparents were firm believers in the adage that an idle mind is the Devil's workshop. The concept of just sitting around twiddling one's thumbs just wasn't in their lexicon. My maternal grandmother, Mary Ellen, was perhaps the greatest proponent of staying busy and keeping our hands as well as our minds busy. Many of the things that we did as kids--very frequently joined by any adults around seem to have passed out of practice. It is difficult for me to determine what it is that kids do these days---and adults too really. My grandmother never laid a punishing hand on me but I believe that she would have if I had said "I am bored." Being bored was not allowed. Mary Ellen held that God had given us this great big wonderful world to live in and it was up to us to work with it, explore it, use it and preserve it to have a full and useful life. I was also an only child and spent much time alone or in the company of adults. To my parents and Marry Ellen this was no excuse for being bored---it was up to me to entertain myself. But adults in that day seemed to be involved in more things than they are today. Many of the activities I cite below were joined into with adults as well as attempted alone.
Let me list some of the things we did as children or as adults:
Making Kites – You know who taught me to make a kite? My grandmother, Mary Ellen. Not only that but she did a fairly good job of explaining the aerodynamic principles involved and why a tail was necessary and how the design of a kit was a trade off between weight and lift. I don't think I ever bought a kite in my life. I made simple kites, box kites, round kites – not all of them flew well. Many were wrecked on first launch but the value of making kites was in the making. Mary Ellen would always cheer from the kitchen window when I got a new kite up in the West Texas sky. Your kids make their own kites these days don't they?
Snow Ice Cream – Making snow ice cream was a ritual my mother introduced me to when I was very young and many times I wished for snow so that I could go gather snow off the ground and make snow ice cream. I believe that high plains snow (it is drier than hill country snow) and fresh Jersey cream separated a few minutes before (it has a higher butter fat content) make the best snow ice cream. But if you have a young audience snow ice cream made with any snow and any cream will be deemed delightful and occupy four-year-olds for hours. Do people still make snow ice cream and teach their kids how to find clean snow and separate cream from milk and how much richer Jersey milk is than Holstein milk? Your kids make snow ice cream don't they?
Button Whizzers – It has been a long time since I have seen a button whizzer. If you take a big button (I mean really big--like an inch in diameter or approaching that) from your Mother's button box (she has a button box doesn't she?) and put about a yard of string through two diagonally opposed holes on the button and then slip the string over a finger of each hand and saw back and forth with it you can cause the button to rotate at great speed and make a whizzing noise. This is a button-whizzer, and it is excellent for boys to use to chase a girl around the house threatening to get the button tangled in her hair and listening to her scream most appealingly. An excellent way to pass a rainy morning when you can't get outside. The little girls scream a lot, but they actually like to be chased around in the house by the boys. Do your kids know how to make button whizzers?
Making Cottage Cheese – I didn't know that they sold cottage cheese in stores until I was an adult; and then I didn't approve of it, for it was not nearly as good as my Aunt Rowena used to make and hang on the back porch to drain. Cottage cheese is easy to make and good, and good for you, and your kids will get a good feeling out of making some of their own food. It is almost pure protein and has almost no trans fatty acid content. Why don't you teach your kids how to make cottage cheese? Of course there is a problem now. All the milk you buy in a store is homogenized, reconstituted to a fixed butter fat content, and pasteurized so it really isn't milk any more. It is a manufactured drink. But maybe you know someone with a cow. If so, teach your kids to make cottage cheese. They will like to do it, it is simple, and it is good and good for you.
Making Candy – I probably can't sell this activity on a health basis, but we use to make candy at home about one evening a week. Fudge (loaded with pecans), divinity (loaded with walnuts), taffy (pulled until it was brittle almost), pralines (chewy and brittle), and the candy was not only good it was fun to participate in the making. You do make candy with your kids don't you?
Singing on the Front Porch – We used to sit on the front porch and sing songs. Actually my best contribution to music in any form is an attentive ear, but it was a get-together that was comfortable for children to be in and around. When I visited my Way cousins there was a chance that Uncle Ott would get his guitar and play, or they had visiting uncles from Snyder (one, a young man who always sang "Sippin Cider Through Two Straws”). Out on the farm there was only us for an audience (and the dogs), but we used to sing on the porch when we lived in town too and passers-by and neighbors would frequently stop and join in the sing-song. It was a relaxed, neighborly sort of get together and I am not sure we do much of that any more. Your kids have sing-songs on the front porch?
Apple Butter – My grandmother (Mary Ellen) used to make apple butter so thick you could slice it with a knife and pick up the piece. Over-spiced with cinnamon and nutmeg and held at 55 degrees constant by water from the Ogallala Aquifer running through the milk trough where it set in a crock jar – you talk about good slathered on a piece of homemade yeast bread or sourdough.
Papier-mâché Vases – If things got really dull around the farm – and they rarely did – my grandmother would say, “Why don't you kids make me a couple of vases?,” and this would keep us busy for several days. First, we had to find old newspapers or other newsprint paper and tear it into tiny shreds by hand and then put it in a wash tub with barely enough water to cover it. Then we’d locate two mason fruit jars and wash them clean. And then came the great day of putting the mushy papier-mâché cover on the fruit jars and making it stick and carefully and slowly drying the completed vase. We would artistically mold the papier-mâché around the jar and press depressions in it with our thumb in random patterns. Then after drying we painted them with water colors and this took several days. Your kids do get to make papier-mâché vases don't they?
Poke Salad and Dewberries – If I happened to be at my paternal grandparents in the early spring, I would be sent to the creek bottom to seek out Poke salad (or is it Polk salad?) and gather wild dew berries and blackberries. Your kids do know how to identify Poke salad and dewberries don't they.
Donkey Baseball and Rodeo – In the summer from the farm we went to church on Sunday morning and Sunday night and Prayer Meeting on Wednesday night, and attendance at other events was not too frequent; because, after all, gas cost 13 cents a gallon, and we had to drive about twelve miles to town and just couldn't afford to go to town that often. However, there was a traveling team of baseball players called The House of David team, and they were all bearded – it was a religious sect of some kind. My grandparents didn't take too kindly to any type of religious observance, except what Brother Apple led every Sunday at Aiken, but they did tolerate going to the House Of David baseball games when they either came to play the local scrub team or when they put on a donkey baseball game. In donkey baseball a batter after hitting the ball had to ride to first base on a donkey tethered near home plate. This donkey was trained to balk, buck, kick and be generally obstreperous, so it was actually a comedy routine. Also, rodeos around the Fourth of July were considered good wholesome entertainments. You do take your kids to donkey baseball games and rodeos don't you?
Swimming – I don't remember when I could not swim. The farm was a glorious place to swim. I swam in the exit pool of the irrigation well which was about 25 or 30 feet in diameter and about chin deep to a 12 year old in the center. The water coming into the pool was at a constant 55 degrees and entered at about 1200 gallons per minute straight up from the Ogallala aquifer. Wonderful place to swim. If I was at my paternal grandparents I swam (sans suit) in the clear waters of Ten-Mile Creek and had it all to myself usually. I was an excellent swimmer. If I was in some west Texas town with my parents there was rarely such a thing as a swimming pool but if there was a river or creek nearby I'd find a place to swim. You do send your kids off to the creek to swim don't you?
Bows, Arrows, Rubber Guns and Sling-Shots – Every boy I ever knew made his own rubber guns, bows and arrows, and a device which we did not call a sling shot but which served the same purpose as one. These were pretty sophisticated things by the way. There were rubber gun pistols, cannon, machine guns, sniper rifles all laboriously made with what tools one could steal from his father's tool box. Some of us made animal traps. The rubber gun arsenal has been sadly depleted however by the advent of synthetic rubber inner tubes which are not nearly as good as the old natural rubber inner tubes for making rubber bands to fire from these devices. Your kids do make rubber guns and have rubber gun wars don't they?
Sleepin' Out – When people came to visit there was rarely room wherever I lived to accommodate another family, so as a rule all the kids in the house were handed a blanket or a quilt apiece and told to go sleep in the front yard on the Bermuda grass or if it existed on the front porch. No tent. No sleeping bag. Just a quilt and space to spread it. I tell you there is nothing as clear and brilliant as a sky full of stars on a west Texas farm. It almost seems that you can reach up and touch the stars. Any kid who grows up without sleeping on the ground under a west Texas sky is missing something they can get no other way. Sometimes we kids would sleep out when there were no visitors. You do let your kids sleep out in the open once or twice a month don't you?
Political Rallies – I use to go to town in the summer with my granddad when he made his weekly trip to sell eggs and cream and buy "necessaries". It was always a hard decision for me whether to go to town on Saturday with granddad or stay at the farm with my grandmother. Saturday was her baking day – she didn't believe in baking on Sunday – and she made cakes, pies and about ten loaves of light bread plus buns. This activity offered great opportunity to boys to scrape the bowls and pans and to try the finished product to see if it was edible. On the other hand, if I went with Granddad, I could go to the western movie-show and get a hot fudge sundae and a bag of popcorn all for quarter. In addition, if it was an election year, I could go to the political rally at the court house square. I used to stay well up on politics and would discuss with Granddad who he should vote for on the way to and from town. Your kids do go to political rallies don't they?
In addition to these desultory little amusements we kids did have our regular chores. At home in town I had to wash dishes, make my bed, keep my room picked up and clean, and I usually had yard chores depending on when and where we lived. At the farm I worked at hay-baling time (usually driving the pick up rake), I rode the go-devil, I harnessed my own team and I milked one cow morning and night and separated all of the milk with a hand-turned centrifugal cream separator and then meticulously washed all of the multiple parts of the separator.. Now don't get to feeling sorry for me. None of that was back-breaking or even strenuous work, but it taught me a lot and gave me a pride of doing. I was also usually delegated to feed the pigs and calves. Your kids have chores don't they?
Do your kids ever go snipe hunting?
Well it just seems that kids these days spend an awful lot of time in watching things rather than in doing things. I am not sure that is good.
More soon on over-supervising your child.
Love
dad, granpa et al
|
|
|
|
|
I like to read what I call "small scale history". That is history that concerns some small or minor event yet is written with a great amount of detail that allows the reader to put himself in the place of the historical characters and assess if the outcome of the event would have been different if history had been required to deal with the reader—sort of a self-aggrandizing type of history. That is what I have been doing today in reading about some events with the Pawnee Indians in 1806.
In 1806 the Spanish authorities in Santa Fe got wind of a rumor which said that an American military officer was off on a patrol up the Red River of the South (now the border between Texas and Oklahoma) to explore the country and convince the world that the Louisiana Purchase did not have the Missouri River as its southern border but rather extended to the Red River. Now the Spanish didn’t agree with this at all and felt that Spain’s territorial right ran all the way to the Missouri at the very least and really should go beyond that. As a secondary mission objective Lieutenant Malgares was instructed to search out and make friends with as many Indians as possible and to assure their loyalty to the reign of Charles IV and to impress upon them their duty to obey the King of Spain and Almighty God as interpreted by the Jesuit priests which were to accompany him.
The Spanish authorities in Santa Fe therefore sent a rather strong body of troops—6oo men–under the command of Lieutenant Don Fernando Malgares to the Pawnee and Comanche country of the Red River with orders to keep a sharp look out for an advancing group of American soldiers and if they could be found to order them out of Spanish territory and jolly well see that they went. Their advance up the Red River was an obvious affront to the sovereignty of the territory of His Most Catholic Majesty Charles !V. In order to provide Lieutenant Malgares with the necessary mobility and make his task easier the officials gave the Lieutenant a remount remuda of 2000 healthy Spanish horses.
Now it seems a little odd that The Spanish officials would put such a large group of men—battallion strength—under the command of a mere lieutenant. Not only that but Malgares
was for the duration of the mission to be in the status of "a man alone". There was no way that Malgares could communicate with his superior offices and the accomplishment of the mission as well as the safety of his troops was to be his responsibility alone. Malgares would get no advice from the head-shed while on this mission.
So Lieutenant Malgares and his 600 men and 2000 horses rode off to the northeast until they struck the Red River and journeyed down it putting out scouts by day and pickets by night to assure that they were not surprised and overcome by the vast horde of Americans which rumor said were surely there—but Malgares spent the whole spring and summer riding around Red River Valley and never saw even one American soldier nor trace thereof and Malgares decided the rumor was just in error—there was no American military body in the area. So he proceeded to devote the last few days of his patrol to the secondary objective of the mission—making friends with he Indians and assuring their loyalty to Spain. His scouts had already located the main camp of the Pawnee which numbered about 1300 adult Indians and he rode into the encampment and hailed the chief of the Pawnees and made a long speech in which he assured the Pawnees that they were sons and daughters of Charles IV and that every Pawnee owed loyalty and servitude to the King of Spain. Malgares told the Chief of the Pawnee that there was rumor that an American detachment was on its way to the land of the Red River and that the King of Spain would be grateful if the Pawnee killed the lot of them when they showed up. As a token of their loyalty to Spain Malgares presented them with a flag of Spain and a staff and suggested that it would be wise for them to fly this flag at all times to show their loyalty to Spain. We actually have no record of exactly what the Chief of the Pawnees replied to all of this but we do know that he accepted the flag and lashed it to the opening serving as an entrance to the tepee and probably remarked that it was a colorful and beautiful addition to the decor of his home and "thank you". And with that Lieutenant Malgares made his way back to Santa Fe and everyone patted themselves on the back and said what a wonderful thing they had done to scare off the Americans.
But the Americans were not scared off—they were just late in leaving St. Louis and they reached the Pawnee village about two months after Malgares left. They were a bit of a different body of men. There were 20 of them plus their commander Lieutenant Zebulon Montgomnery Pike and every one was afoot. There was not a horse in the group. There were no priests and the twenty men were obviously living off the land because there were no wagons or carts to carry provisions. Lieutenant Pike was aghast at seeing the Spanish flag flying from the Chief’s teepee and to hear the tale of the recent visit of the Spanish. He gently lectured the Chief and told him that no son can have two fathers and that the father and protector of the Pawnees was not some King distant in Europe –"across the great waters"–but merely just down the road in Washington DC. Whatever he said it changed the hearts and minds of the Pawnee. They tore down the Spanish flag and presented it to Pike and he found a US flag just as big and it was lashed in place at the teepee entrance. The Pawnee were back in political place and Zebulon Pike had done with twenty men and no horses what the Spanish could not do with 600 men and 2000 horses.
Lieutenant Pike went on to a successful career in the Army and is best noted for having Pikes’s Peak named after him and for stealing California and the whole Pacific Coast from Mexico. Pike was killed in the War of 1812. In April of 1813 he was blowing up a British powder magazine in
York Ontario (now Toronto) when a rock from the magazine structure hit him in the head and killed him.
Now how I would have done it if I’d been there....Gotta go feed the dog.
Charles Turrentine
|
|
|
|
|
So It Is Columbus Day
Today is the second Monday in October and that officially in the US is a holiday—my question is why? For most of my life I have thought that the Saint Christopher of Catholic veneration , the patron saint of travelers and bookbinders was one and the same with Christopher Columbus. Such is not the case. The Saint Christopher of Roman Catholic veneration was a sanctification of a Samothracian named Offero (Offerus) who in the third Century AD was martyred by Dagnus of Samos—a minor Roman under-king. How or why he was killed I have not been able to determine. Offerus was quite a person all right. According to Jacobus de Voragines he was twelve cubits tall and according to the conversion factors in my "Marks Mechanical Engineer’s Handbook" that is just barely short of 18 feet tall. As a result of this stature Offerus made a living by carrying people across a ford in the river which was just barely a ford but which served as one for his eighteen foot height. Once while engaged in this occupation he was approached by an infant who asked to be carried across the ford and Offerus obliged him but as he advanced into the river the weight of the infant became more and more heavy until Offerus just barely made it across and then asked the infant "Why are you so heavy" and the baby replied "I am Jesus Christ and the weight of the sins of the world are upon my shoulders". I am unable to find out which prior pope canonized Offerus and changed his name to "Christophorus" (which is Greek for "Child bearer" but it was way back there in the early history of the Catholic Church and carrying Christ across the river was the miraculous event that was necessary to canonization. Now I am not Catholic and I didn’t know any of this until this morning when I got to wondering why we have Columbus Day and I thought that the Columbus Day holiday and the Saint Christopher observance were one and the same thing—taint so. Saint Christopher was decanonized by a twentieth century pope and declared not to be a Saint but rather a run-of-the-mill martyr because Dagnus had him put to death. I presume that this disqualifies "Saint" Christopher from being the Patron Saint of travelers and bookbinders (which seems to be an odd group together) and makes me wonder what is happening to the world supply of Saint Christopher medals for travelers. Why travelers AND bookbinders?
In 1792 a bunch of Italian immigrants (probably illegals) got together in New York City and decided to celebrate the life and death of Christopher Columbus (not Offerus of Samothrace). Again in 1869 there was a rump celebration and the Italians in San Francisco who were protesting the number and prominence of Irish immigrants in the area (my ancestors were Italians who came to the US through Ireland so I don’t know where they fit) threw a party. In 1937 Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared 12 October to be Columbus Day honoring the Genoa born Italian who was working for the King and Queen of Spain and blundered into an island in the Caribbean–he never actually set foot on the mainland of the US I am told and he was decades if not centuries behind the Vikings and maybe even the Irish and a few years behind the Chinese it now appears in discovering America.. Bear in mind though that FDR did not declare October 12th a holiday–he just declared it to be Columbus Day. Congress on the other hand in 1971 declared the second Monday in October to be an official Federal Holiday and earned the lasting appreciation of Postal Clerks, bank tellers and maybe school teachers in areas densely populated by Italian-Americans and so I can blame the Congress of 1971 for why I don’t get any mail today.
I am not a Catholic as previously stated, I am not an expert theologian , I am not a historian and I am sorry if I have messed up some of the info above—but I did want to find out why the mail; person was not coming around today and I have to drive all the way to Dennis (six miles) to mail some bills due last week and that I had calculated could be held for payment until this week without major consequence and now they won’t even go out of there until tomorrow ---it is a cruel world.
Charles Turrentine
|
|
|
|
|
This Bed Of Roses
(Or–Where Are The Thorns?)
Here in the middle of my eightieth year on this beautiful blue planet I have been considering my life and wondering at the manner in which I have been blessed and the almost total absence of adversity in my life. I have surely and truly had an easy life with an almost complete absence of the thorns that are so prominent in the lives of some of my friends and acquaintances. Let me tell you about it.
HEALTH–I have had a remarkably disease free life especially for one who has had such a cavalier disregard for the rules of good health. I have had only two bouts with ailments. In 1974 I had a serious case of malaria contacted courtesy of the Anopholes mosquito population of Central African Republic and the Plasmodium they injected into me. This malaria wasn’t helped any by the fact that north Texas doctors did not recognize it as malaria until my third day in the hospital, but once it was recognized it was controlled in record time of two or three days and I have never had a relapse. Then at Christmas time of 2001 my heart decided it was time to quit all this nonsense and I had eight heart attacks in two days and I would have died right away were it not for the skill of a Pakistani cardiac surgeon who did four bypasses on my heart arteries three of which "took" and compensated to some degree for the failure of the fourth. Now I’ll admit that those two things sound bad but bear in mind they are the only health problems that I have had other than childhood diseases and a college case of mononucleosis (and you know how that is spread----it used to be called "the kissing disease" or "the coed disease".) So my health as a whole over eighty years has been not only good but outstanding.
CHILDHOOD—I was an only child and as I grew up I was surrounded by people who showed me the greatest love and care that you can imagine. It is true that some have felt that the fact that I lived in 42 towns by the time I was 13 and attended 26 schools altogether should surely have ruined my childhood—it did not. My nomadic existence shaped certain personality and character traits I am sure—some good and some bad but I never felt that it injured me in any way and might have been an important factor in developing a certain self-reliance. It did make me very close to my parents–we were a unit–us against the world so to speak in the sense of the Arab proverb that says "Me against my brother, My brother and I against the world". Never at any time in my childhood life did I ever doubt that I was loved and protected by my parents, my grandparents and others. That is a very good shield to carry into adulthood.
EDUCATION—my journey through those 26 schools was at a time before the federal government and the NEA had ruined the schools of the nation. I did have the good fortune to spend my three last years in high school in Austin Texas and I believe that it was the best school one could provide. It was before PC was invented and facts were taught and my math and science courses in Austin High School were more rigorous than my freshman college courses. My physics teacher was Mr Whitner who carried us through the college sophomore level of physics in some electrical areas. I took my freshman year of college at TCU in 1943 when I was 16 and then transferred to the University of Texas until I got my BA with a Zoology major. Several years later I got the opportunity to attend Pepperdine University and earned my Masters Degree in business at company expense. I skipped two grades in going through all those schools in three different states so I was generally speaking two years younger than my high school classmates. I was only 16 by a few days when I graduated in 1943 from high school and was less than 22 when I got my BA from the University of Texas. Throughout the system I did not make outstanding grades—but I made passing grades. I liked to go to school-.
GIRLS, GIRLS, GIRLS!–As I noted above I was generally two years younger than my classmates in high school and add to that the fact that I was a slow developer and a fat little boy and my high school social life was practically nill. I DID NOT HAVE A DATE UNTIL AFTER I GRADUATED. Dad was nearly killed when I was in High school by falling (being pulled actually) through 12000 volts and was out of work for nearly a year—as a result we were dirt poor and I did not have much money to spend and most importantly I was too young to drive and did not think that I could ask a girl for a date if I didn’t pick her up in a car. Don’t feel too sorry for me I made up for it later. I was not blind to the lure of girls—there was a darkroom beside room S10 at high school and as assistant photographer for the Annual (the Comet--that is another story that I will tell sometime) I had a key to this darkroom and I used to give developing lessons to Natha Lou in the darkroom until Mrs. Boynton came in to check on us once and thereafter gave lessons herself to Natha Lou. But I was definitely not in the social whirl in high school. In college I was on a strict self imposed budget and had no car and was a senior before I saw much social life.
DRUGS AND ALCOHOL—I grew up before the drug culture became a factor. To this date I have never tried a recreational drug of any kind (other than tobacco and alcohol) including marijuana and have no desire to start. I smoked nearly all my life from the time I was 17 until I was 65 and I was thoroughly addicted. Most of that time I smoked 2 ½ packs a day. And one day I walked into my bedroom and threw a nearly full pack of cigarettes into the wastebasket and told myself I was never going to smoke again. I was convinced that it was killing me. That has been 14 years and I have not had tobacco since in any form. Alcohol was a little different. I drank moderately until recent times. I detested the feeling of being intoxicated and have only three or four times in my life been really drunk and that was when it just slipped up on me. But I have stopped drinking also. It does me no good. It might injure my heart which is only about 40% as it is—and it is expensive and I don’t need it.Besides my father was an alcoholic and that turned me against the use of alcohol. I currently take a raft of prescription medicines associated with my heart condition but I am in no danger of becoming addicted to any to them—so drugs and alcohol have not been a factor in my life of note as far as my personal use of them is concerned.
MARRIAGE--Since my marriage ended in divorce after 26 years I suppose I should not list it as a good thing that happened in my life---but it certainly was. I have four children that I treasure from that marriage, I learned a lot about people in that marriage and I am sure that its ending in divorce was as much my fault as anyone's.
CRIME--I have never been Arrested for any infraction of any law . Nor have I ever spent any time in jail. I've had no problems with the Law -----except traffic tickets---I got a few of those.
WORK—I have been in my life a butcher, a meat grader at Swift and Company, a turret lathe opera tor, a lathe set-up technician, an experimental mechanic at Consolidated Vultee Corp., a toolmaker and lines loftsman at Consolidated working on the B36, an optical tooling repairman for the University of Texas, an electronic technician for TEMCO Corp, a high school science teacher, a point to point airline traffic control radioman for American Airlines, a production planner , a tool engineer, A supervisor of Machine Tool Production Planning, A General Foreman of Production over Jet engine stator stages, a Tool Engineer, A General Supervisor of Machine Tool Planning and Tool Design. A senior Customer Relations Representative, A manager oif Manufacturing Services (scheduling, planning, tool design), A Director of Purchasing and Material, A vice president of Operations in the Garland Division of E Systems. Vice President and General Manager of the Commercial Division of E Systems, Vice President of Operations and Quality Assurance for UTL Corp., Bookstore proprietor, farmer. I loved everyone of those jobs and learned a tremendous amount from each one. With the exception of the job as electronic technician which I got after 1300 clock hours of electronic training in the Navy I never had any formal training for any of them.When I was a kid my Dad used to say "Charles when any employer starts a sentence with the words ‘Can you....?.’ then you have but one answer and that is"Yes Sir". My rise at TEMCO-LTV-E-Systems was meteoric and was partly due to the fact that early in my employment at TEMCO I very favorably impressed the CEO and Chairman of the Board, Bob McCullough who thereafter until the day he died was a close personal friend of mine, Someday I'll write about how I impressed him and about the man himself because he was bigger than life to me. But my work has always been super interesting and rewarding and luck and good fortune always followed in my steps at work. I also attribute part of my advancement at work to the fact that I was very intense about my work and it was very important to me.
TRAVEL---Not only was my childhood nomadic but my work also involved frequent travel. In the course of company business travel I visited 61 foreign countries and all fifty states and Puerto Rico (which is a "territory"). Business travel was great. After I became a vice president I was allowed to travel first class and always used 5 star hotels wherever I went if they were available there. Some countries I visited many times and made some fast friends that to this day I keep track of. Italy, Spain, England, Israel, Iran,Belgium were frequently visited countries and places that I made friends---some of whom have visited me here at the farm since my retirement. I did however develop no ex-pat fever, I was always glad to come home and never wanted to move overseas to live.Nearly every where I went was "a nice place to visit but I didn't want to live there".
LOOKS--I ain't never been good lookin'. By that I mean that I do not have a Charles Atlas build, I have been bald since I was 30, toothless since I was 65, fat bordering on obese since I was 12 and blind in my right eye all my life---but you know what?---none of those things bother me a whole lot. My left eye is correctable to 20-40 (my right eye is 20-450--anything over 20-250 is considered blind). I have dentures but they are uncomfortable and I don't wear them but the important thing is that none of those factors make me sad. I am very protective of that left eye so I can still read, drive, walk and I don't have to put Sara into seeing-eye harness Oh, I almost forgot---I am nearly deaf. You'd be surprised how little is said that is important and I can turn the TV up to about 80db and understand the dialog.
STRONG SUITS---By the numbers below:
1. I was blessed by my Creator with an almost infallible prodigious volume memory that aqpproached being photographic in nature. I can today remember most of the part numbers that made up the B52 Vertical Stabilizer
Attach Bulkhead (1-75034-1401) was the final assembly number and it had about 185 welded components. I didn't try to remember those numbers---it just happened. It doesn't happen much anymore---everything wears out I guess.
2. I was a strong extemporaneous speaker. I rarely if ever used notes to make a speech. But I had the ability to organize the speech as it went along and I exuded confidence. Back in the 70's I taught Sunday School at the First Presbyterian Church in Irving for quite a while and one day the preacher's wife asked if she could visit my class and I told her of course she could. She was a sweet little old lady of about 70 and after the class she pulled me to one side and said, "Charles, you know that not everything you said for the last hour can be backed up in the Scriptures, but I agree that we ought to do it anyway so you just go ahead". In business I made quite a few significant sales when I was in marketing just by sensing a minor change in the demeanor of the audience when I said something .
3. I was intense in everything I did. I liked to work and I worked hard.
4. I was always as honest with people I worked for and with people who worked for me as I could be.
WEAK SUITS---By the numbers below:
1. Names--I was one of the world's worst at remembering names of people. I had a razor sharp memory for numbers and parts and things but not for people. All my life I have beern poor at remembering names.
2. People--My secretary once aked me "why didn't you speak to the people who spoke to you in the hall when you went downstairs just now?" I told her that I hadn't seen any people. She told me that she had followed me and that three people had spoken to me in the hall and I had ignored all three---I hadn't even seen them. I finally learned to correct this problem. I was not a people person---and that was bad.
FAITH--I do not think that we generate Faith but rather that it is a gift of God. Since I was 12 I have been as sure as
granite that there is a God, that He created the world and life and that after we finish our mission here on earth we will be privileged to a continuation of life with Him. You know there is a current scientific theory that our universe was once a very dense material object that exploded and is still racing away through space and expanding---OK I can buy that. If God created the heaven and earth in that manner who am I to argue.
This started out as an inventory of the good things that have happened to me in my life and I am sure that I will think of some more things along that line but for now I'll get this on its way.
Love
Dad, granpa et al*
|
|
|
|
|
|
This morning on my way out to the garden to execute a few weeds and johnson grass I chanced upon about a yard-long snake in the freshly cut lawn north of the house. It was a desert Kingsnake, Lampropeltis getulis splendida. They are very docile and this one let me walk right up to him. He was a black snake with scales so glossy that he looked as if he had been dipped in a can of lacquer Along the sides of the snake this critter has dark brown sergeants stripes that are very pale and do not really detract from the blackness of the snake. On his lower lip the labial scales are faintly edged with yellow which gives one the impression that the snake is grinning. The desert kingsnake is fairly uncommon according to the literature but we have encountered this one or one like him in the chicken pen several times swallowing a chicken egg. I usually walk off and let him have his morning egg but Frank takes some offense at the robbery and stirs the snake up with a stick and it will usually disgorge the egg and mosey on off. Like all kingsnakes this snake lives on other snakes and lizards as a rule and is a deadly and efficient hunter. It readily takes copperheads and small rattlesnakes and is totally immune to pit viper venom. Once when Frank and I were loading a trailer with junk to haul off we pulled up to this pile of old tires and began to throw them onto the trailer and a total of five desert kingsnakes tumbled out of those old tires. They ordinarily will not bite a human even when picked up unless they are roughly handled and I am glad to have them around the place. I couldn’t hire a more efficient and effective copperhead and rattlesnake hunter to be about the place. It was about 0930 hours this morning when I saw this one sunning himself in the morning sun. I don’t know how long he or she stayed there (checking that is complicated and indelicate and angers the snake) but had moved on when I finished with my hoe work in the garden. We are just about in the middle of the range of the Desert Kingsnake which starts down in Chihuahua and goes up to the edge of Nebraska but only goes east to about the line of highway I35. Next time I see it I’ll try to get a picture—they are a beautiful snake.
|
|
|
|
|
It is very difficult for one who has lived in forty-two towns by the time I was fifteen, who attended twenty-six public schools, who was part of a family that never owned any land until I was twenty-one and who in my adult life literally lived with an under-seat bag packed in the trunk of my car to facilitate my business travel to nominate one of those many towns as my home town. I solved that problem when I was about ten or eleven and told my mother that as far as I was concerned the High Plains city of Plainview was my hometown. I later became entranced with Austin Texas where I graduated from high school, where I lived for three years prior to graduation and where after a brief tour in the Navy during WWII I returned to graduate finally from University of Texas in 1949.
Austin was a wonderful town. I made life-long friends there. I have a daughter and grandson who live there. It is a beautiful town and reeks of the history of early Texas and yet, if asked my hometown even now, I still say Plainview Texas.
I was born just eleven miles west of Plainview on the route to Olton near a wide spot in the road known as "Halfway". I presume that designates that the traveler is halfway to Olton or to Plainview depending upon whether he is driving east or west. My maternal grandparents lived on a farm 13 miles east of Plainview. They were tenant farmers or more accurately sharecroppers of the Texas Land and Development Company and lived under a set of terms and conditions that amounted almost but not quite to peonage. My maternal grandmother had three sisters who lived with their husbands in and around Plainview. They were Aunt Ada Owens, Aunt Mellie Willis and Aunt Emma Tillson. The Dennis girls were very bright and wonderful women and these three exemplified every bit of that. Three of the Dennis brothers of my grandmother came to Plainview. They were Uncle Robert Dennis, the youngest of the Dennis family, Uncle Jim Dennis and early in the history of my family there Uncle Delbert Dennis. It was this last Uncle who in 1923 invited my father, then single, to move out to Plainview to help him build a movie house and suggested that he board with his sister and brother-in-law Mary Ellen Dennis and Walter Thomas Hamilton, and that is how my East Texas father met my West Texas mother. They were married on 7 June 1926. My maternal grandfather also had one relative in the city. The son of his brother Elmer Hamilton came to Plainview and became a fireman in the city and rose to become Fire Chief and is still well known in the town as "Ham" Hamilton. I even dimly remember my great-grandmother coming to live with Mary Ellen and Walter Thomas and electing three year-old me as Dr. Flathead, her physician.
So I had a bit of extended family in Plainview. Those of you who receive this that are very young cannot even imagine the ties that existed to members of an extended family of seventy-five years ago. As I mentioned my grandparents were poor. As my Uncle Weldon once said, "My dad never had two coins to jingle in his pocket." Yes, they were poor, and cash was rare, but it was not unusual for my grandmother to prepare Sunday dinner for twenty or feed all of the baling crew of volunteer neighbors that came to bale the alfalfa. And all of these relatives were close. They visited each other frequently and commiserated with family failures or discipline problems. They were all Baptists or Methodists or heathens and good naturedly argued about the efficacy of sprinkled baptism or whether, as my Dad used to say, one could "slip, slide and fall from grace". Politically they were almost solidly Democrats (except none would vote for Al Smith in 1928 because he was Catholic).I have heard noted sociologists proclaim on the importance of "peer pressure” of the extended family, and I can personally testify that I have felt that pressure many times I have also felt the warmth and love and care of having not just one or two but close to one hundred relatives interested in and caring for my future and willing to offer help. It is a warm and sustaining aid, and I am sorry that it has greatly diminished in this country.
Now all of these good people were just a bit aghast at the fact that my dad worked six weeks in one place and then moved to another small town to work six weeks or so, To stay in a town much more than six weeks was unusual. My first year I attended six schools, five my second and it didn’t vary two much off that in any year. I was happy. I liked to see new places and new faces. My dad was supervisor of a construction crew who considered me something of a mascot, and I frequently rode on the construction truck and was labeled "Pie’s Grunt". Pie was the truck driver and "grunt" is a construction argot for "helper". I gloried in the title. I was well satisfied with the arrangement and my lif,e but mother was a bit worried about my language and my morals as part of a construction crew consisting of about sixty-percent ex-convicts and drifters. So she and dad decided that it would be wise for me to spend every summer with her parents on their farm in Plainview. So beginning shortly after my fifth birthday in 1932 they put a baggage tag around my neck and sent me off to Plainview from Carlsbad, New Mexico on the bus. From then until I was thirteen I spent every summer and some long vacation periods at the Hamilton farm. I thought it was heaven. About six weeks of that summer I would spend in one or more visits to my Aunt Christine and Uncle Ott’s house where I became immersed in the Way family with their seven children.
My Dad was a bit of a rake. He drank bootleg whiskey (there was no legal liquor west of Fort Worth in those days). He was not regular in church attendance. He had been known to gamble and shoot dice. He hitchhiked when he wanted to get somewhere fast. He used profane language to the crew he supervised ( I have never heard my father use profanity or tell an off color joke in my life but there were many who did). It is a wonder that he maintained a place amongst these deeply religious people, but he did and was almost universally liked by them – not approved of, but liked. He had two paramount saving graces. He loved my mother with all of his heart, and there was no other woman on the planet for him and he made that clear. Secondly, he was a good provider. Dad had a terrific sense of humor and was a great conversationalist. He worked, and he worked hard. If he lost a job – and he lost many – he would take a job doing anything in the electrical field and was soon in a management position with that company. I have heard my mother tell people that she had never expressed a wish for anything in her life that dad didn’t go get it. Yes, there was a lot of clucking about Dad’s drinking, gambling , heathen ways, and cussin’, but he was loved and respected in the family just as if he was a Dennis or a Hamilton. I will always be glad that my Dad died a millionaire – not because I got a bit of it but because he did.
So that is the background that made Plainview my home town. I haven’t lived there since 1937, and have only visited there a few times. This spring on our way back from Albuquerque Frank P. and I made it a point to stop in Plainview for an early morning breakfast, and I cruised around the town a bit to see if anything had changed. Had it ever!
The courthouse was still there and looked about the same, except I missed the old WWI cannon that I used to mount while I waited for Grandad to finish shopping. It was always a trial and tribulation for me to decide whether to go to town with Grandad on Saturday or stay and help my grandmother cook by eating the left over cake batter and crumbled cookies. Grandmother always did her baking and major cooking on Saturday because she knew that "...six days shalt thou labor" meant that she shouldn’t do any cooking on Sunday that she could accomplish on Saturday – so Saturday was a good time to be at home with grandmother. On the other hand if I went to town with Grandad I was frequently given a quarter with which I could see a double-feature movie (two westerns), a newsreel, one or two serials and one or two cartoons – all for twelve cents. Then I had the delicious decision to make between a hot fudge sundae at the ice cream parlor (another twelve cents) or the double treat of a big bag of popcorn (five cents) and seven cents of bulk candy at Woolworth’s where my Aunt Rowena worked at the candy counter. The ice cream parlor is now gone, Woolworths is closed, Halsey’s drug no longer is on main street. The movie theater that Uncle Elbert Dennis built has been torn down and replaced by a more modern structure which houses a far more modern movie theater. The creamery where Uncle Ott and Aunt Christine used to work on Saturday’s is now an empty hulk. The cheese factory where Grandad use to sell his cream and eggs sometimes is still there, but it is not a creamery any more – just an empty building. The grain elevator and feed mill where Grandad had his chicken and hog feed made to order was still up and operating as a feed mill – almost unchanged. I tried to find the house where Aunt Christine and Uncle Ott and family lived down near the railroad overpass but was unable to locate anything down there that looked familiar. I couldn’t find Central Ward School where I started the fifth grade nor the rent house we used to live on Fifth street where the landlady said that it was acceptable for us to have a twelve tube radio only if we swore not to listen to any stations more distant than Lubbock or Amarillo so as not to use too much electricity – we promised. The place where I took violin lessons was no longer there. The wagon yard where Grandad used to park his Model A was now occupied by a water tower, the blacksmith shop back there and the livery stable were long gone. The fire station was still there and looked the same and we found a few people who remembered "Ham". Perhaps the biggest shock was that the Tillson Implement Company run by Aunt Emma and Uncle Hugh’s son Orville Tillson is now an antique warehouse. Halsey’s drug where I became addicted to cherry phosphates is no longer on Main. We cruised down one street where I was sure that "Crazy John" lived—a mentally defective man that we children teased unmercifully, but I could no longer remember the house. I finally got to meet John through the offices of my grandmother, and he was a fine fellow.
It was an interesting hour for me that we spent in Plainview. Sure, everything has changed nearly – only a few spots here and there that are as they were – but I have to say it is still my hometown. I still feel at home there despite the changes.
|
|
|
|
|
An angel of Despair has descended upon Benpensa Farm and we here have been beset with technical difficulties that have tested our allegiance to the advance of technology. First of all you should know that being eager to communicate
with our scattered (in more ways than one) friends and relatives that we have installed here three (count them – one, two, three) telephone lines altogether and during this last week these lines have become so noisy and infiltrated with random communication by others (technically referred to as cross talk in the trade) that the privacy and integrity of our electronic transmissions and vocal offerings of brilliance to the world of literature and technology has been sorely prejudiced. Three days ago we insisted that ATT abandon the defense of (you have squirrels in your attic) and immediately install a new telephone service cable which they did day before yesterday. They sent a man and a rather comely blonde out who made quick work of installing what they referred to as a "quad five" (seems like a contradiction in terms to me) service line out to the pavement edge where they have a junction box. The blonde lady was so overcome by my bearing and the general nature of my personality as well as my story of travail that she promised me (on the sly) to connect my service line to the cream of the crop lines into the exchange---which no doubt she did. So two days ago was taken up with these tricky negotiations with ATT personnel and testing of their response to my demands.
Then yesterday I discovered that someone has been siphoning colored ink out of my Dell 720 printer and that I no longer was capable of sending color pictures to my dear aunt who lives in Albuquerque and to three other of my relatives who have not yet entered the computer age and so I hastily ordered three colored ink cartridges from Dell---I should note that Dell is the only source for ink cartridges for Dell printers---which is indeed a restriction of trade if not a conspiracy to monopolize the market on Dell ink. In the past Dell has been very expeditious in sending their ink out and it should arrive here by Fed-Ex no later than tomorrow. So until then my plans to keep my relatives and friends advised of the appearance of their progenitors and distant cousins that they would not recognize if they met on the street are at a standstill.
Then yesterday was the acme travail---Frank noted that there was water in his room coming from under the partition to the principal bathroom in the house. Investigation in that room which has a tiled floor indicated that water was about an inch deep and skillful investigation showed this water to be bubbling up through the floor of the bathroom around the water service to the commode. So we called a plumber who came out and said that the copper line to the commode was broken under the concrete floor and that the only way to fix it was to Jackhammer a hole in the bathroom floor and reconnect it, which he did. And lo and behold the wellspring of water was quenched and the sun once again shone upon Benpensa Farm and all was well until I asked him what his charges for this service were. A gentleman does not discuss his personal financial matters with the world at large so I shall not do so here. Suffice it to say that if FPT and I eat gruel and bitter herbs for two decades we may repair the damage to my bank account, but the bathroom floor was dry.
All was well. Frank took a shower and I retired to the other bathroom and spent some time in quiet contemplation of the world and lo and behold water began to flow all over the bathroom floor. My anger at the plumber was intense – he had already departed – and I did discover that it was not a fault of his workmanship but rather a filled up septic tank and backed up sewer line that was the problem. They ought to put a gauge on all septic tanks so that one could go out there and look every so often and determine in this was going to happen and take steps to prevent it. So a septic tank maintenance service is coming out at one PM today to empty the tank and unplug the line.
So that is the story of what I have been doing for three days and why there are going to be no more pictures in the mail or over the aether until the ink gets here and why I hate plumbing. In my childhood there was a small dual chic sale at the end of a forty or fifty foot path from the back door and when that became over used one could call the WPA office in town and the government would send out a crew of ten men who would move it to your spot of choice and cover carefully the evidence that it ever was at the old spot. What was wrong with that system---gave employment to ten men, provided a free service toi the citizenry of the nation and all was well. I conclude that indoor plumbing is not necessarily a sign of progress.
I will keep you advised if the telephone lines hold up. The comely blonde said the replaced telephone service line was badly attacked by fire ants and that the new "quad five" line was more resistant. Must go make coffee and contemplate this technical breakthrough.
|
|
|
Showing 41 - 50 of 59
·
1
·
2
·
3
·
4
·
5
·
6
·
|
