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Doc
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Doc
His real name was John Alfred Arrington Turrentine but almost no one called him by any one of those name. He was my father’s younger brother. His mother even called him “Doc” except for the times she was scolding him. The origin of the nickname goes back to the time that he was about 12 years old and a gypsy carnival came to the small town of Lancaster near where he lived. Both John Alfred and his brother Frank managed to scrape together the few cents necessary to attend that carnival and the additional few cents necessary to have their fortunes told by an old gypsy woman. She predicted a great career for John Alfred as a noted physician and an equally notable life as a minister of the gospel for his brother who was my father. The prediction was not accurate but from that day on John Alfred was known in Lancaster as “Doc” and my dad was called “Preach.”. The name stuck on into adulthood with Doc but didn’t follow my father that long.
As I have explained in other correspondence the father of Doc and Frank disappeared without trace in 1912 while enroute to the Panama Canal to work there as an engineer. The ship that he was ticketed on from New Orleans burned and sank at sea but his name was not on the passenger list. This loss of their father caused Doc and Frank to become very close and they remained very close all of their lives.
Doc was a confirmed bachelor during the years that I was a child. He didn’t marry until he was in his late forties. He lived with his mother and stepfather on a rented farm near Lancaster and was a well known figure in the small north Texas town. He served at one time on the school board. He was an active Freemason and attained the 32 Degree by both the York and the Scottish Rites. Mostly he worked on the farm operated by his stepfather but also took other jobs in the winter when farm work was not so pressing. He worked at a lumber yard, He was a conductor for several years on the inter-urban train between Dallas and Waco. His formal education was limited to high school graduation but he read voraciously and expressed himself almost eloquently.
He had a very lively sense of humor and was not above practical jokes. But he liked board games such as checkers and Monopoly and we used to play many boisterous games before the fireplace on cold winter evenings. He was the typical Nietzsche image of “der blonde bestie” and yet he was very stern with himself in his moral code. He was almost without fear. He once told me apropos of nothing “When you go into a rough bar and begin to wonder if you are going to get out alive just keep your mouth shut, no one but you knows that you are not the toughest one in the bar.”
It would be inaccurate to say that Doc was gregarious but he was very sociable. He was polite and conmsiderate in his language and he was usually abreast of local, national and world news as well as all of the local gossip. But Doc had a tendancy to draw people out in conversation and succeed in getting them, into an intolerable and inaccurate position.; He did this so adroitly that few people recognized that he was doing it or even that he had done it when they found themselves in that position. He was also one of the lucky people who could laugh at themselves and if he did something stupid he would tell it about as readily as though someone else had been at fault.
Doc was a master dog trainer and yet he never seemed to devote any time or effort to training. He had one German shepherd named Carlo that seemed to understand every word he said. Doc would be reading the newspaper on the front porch and without looking at Carlo would say in a conversational tone "Carlo, I wish you would go get the cows". Carlo woul;d bound off toward the pasture and soon return with the family's cattle for milking
Doc was very fond of me yet he kidded me unmercifully about being overweight and referred to me as "Tubbles". He was always ready to sit and devote his complete attention to me and any problem I had. He talked to me as equal to equal and never pulled any punches about what was right or wrong. I once discovered that a boy named Jack Lemon had stolen a pocket knife of mine. He was considerably bigger than I and I was a bit scared about confronting him with the crime. I asked Doc if I should tell the school principal about it. Doc told me that unless I confronted Jack with the theft and demanded that he return the knife that I would always wonder why I did not. It was good advice. I did confront him and he did admit the theft and returned the knife and my crisis was over. There were many crises like that which Doc helped me solve and from which I learned to respect his advice.
He had a tremendous respect for work as a developer of character and cared little for those people that did not work and earned their living by guile. Doc said that the pleasure of making things with their hands was a God given gift to men. In his later years he left the farm and moved to the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex and was a turret lathe operator for Ling Temco Vought Corp at the same time that I was employed by that company.
Doc was a teetotaler. I never knew him to drink anything alcoholic. Although Doc never said it I got the impression that his avoidance of alcohol was because my father was alcoholic. He smoked cigarettes and died of lung cancer in his early seventies.
He was a good man and I miss him.
Preach (L) and Doc (R)
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