Was a time…

In the 1950s and early 1960s, Northeast Texas got one, maybe two, hard freezes every winter, when the temperature at night dropped to the low 20s, high teens. We got ground-covering snow maybe every five years.

When weathermen forecast a hard freeze, my job was to drain the pipes. My family lived near Rocky Branch, Texas, then, seven of us in a two-bedroom, one-bath house. The house had a well with a pump and running water, indoors. That was the first house we lived in that had indoor plumbing.

On nights of a hard freeze forecast, after all us kids had a bath, my mother washed the tub and then filled it with water, so we could dip water and fill up the toilet tank and flush the toilet. Then, she would fill up all the cook pots and a couple of wash basins, giving us drinking water and water to heat on the stove, if the water pipes remained frozen.

Somewhere between 10 and 10:30 p.m., I turned off the water pump, and, with a flash light and a crescent wrench, went to the north side of the house, where there was access to the water pipes. I pulled the piece of tin roofing from the hole there and took off the pipe cap at the junction. Water remaining in the pipes drained onto the ground. Thinking nowdays, it seems the night was always extra dark and moonless, and colder than ever.

These days, from posts by family and friends, Northeast Texas has three or four or five hard freezes every winter, and more ice storms and snow than we used to get.

Too many egg labels

One day while looking at all the egg choices in the grocery store, I realized how far-seeing and progressive most rural families were in the 1950s and 1960s.

Cartons labeled “Eggs” contained eggs. No descriptives necessary.

There were “Free-Range Eggs.” Okay. When I was growing up near Rocky Branch, we had a chicken house. The chickens were kept in place by a chicken-wire fence. They had access to outside the chicken house, but they were not, strictly speaking, free-range chickens.

The store had “Organic Eggs,” too. I’m not really certain what makes an egg “organic.” Seems any egg that comes from a chicken is organic, since laying eggs is what chickens do. It is a natural thing for chickens to do. These days, though, “organic” has an exploded definition, so I guess an “organic” egg is one laid by a chicken that is fed “organic” chicken feed.

The real confusing label, though, was “Vegetarian Eggs.” As far as I know, eggs don’t eat anything. An egg is a step away from requiring gathered food. Our chickens (or any non-free-range chicken) were hardly vegetarian. I suppose bugs and worms come under the non-vegetable label.

Chickens not kept in cages are, through no choice of their own, vegetarian. Caged chickens do not have an opportunity to eat worms or bugs.

Was a time people had chickens, the chickens laid eggs, people ate the eggs. Pretty much the way God intended – Label-Free Eggs.

Baby rattle snakes and eye glasses

My parents moved to a house southwest of Boston, Texas, in 1953. The house was the newest we had ever lived in. There were two bedrooms, a kitchen and a living room. There was a well out back, and an outhouse rather than a bathroom. We didn’t yet have television. I didn’t know anybody who did. There was radio, but I spent most of my time outside.

The land sloped west into a pasture, with a cow pond not far away. There was a sand road in front of the house, leading from the paved road about a mile north, curving through some trees, and then up a hill and into woods to the south.

Northeast, a big house sat on a hill. The house was not painted. A lot of houses weren’t back then. Paint cost money most people didn’t have. Our house was yellow, but it was a rent house, and the builder had painted it. A widow woman, or maybe two widow women, lived in the big house on the hill. I was never invited into the house, so I don’t know what it was like inside.

Just south of the house, the hill sloped sharply down, making about a 10-foot cliff. At the top of the hill there were cans and jars thrown out over several decades. I used to climb the hill and go through the cans and jars, looking for anything interesting.

One day I found three eye glass cases with eye glasses inside. The glasses were wire framed. I don’t know why the glasses had been thrown away. Maybe whoever used them had died and the family saw no reason to keep the glasses.

I walked down the hill and to the road and put on a pair of the glasses. The sand road seemed to split in two, with one side falling away, like a cliff. That was unsettling. I took off the glasses and let the road come back together and then put the glasses on again. The road split again, so I took off the glasses.

I figured Moma and Daddy would make me throw the glasses away if I took them home, so I climbed the hill and just below the top dug out a small place (a cave, I called it) and put the three cases inside and covered the opening. After that, I went to the cave just about every day and took out the glasses and put on each pair. The world looked different with each one, a different-different.

One summer day I went up the hill and pushed the dirt away and then quickly backed up and almost went rolling down the sharp incline.

A snake sat on my three cases of eye glasses. I crept back and looked. The snake just sat there, its serpent tongue flicking in the warm air. My mind decided it was a baby rattle snake. I knew poison from a baby rattle snake was worse than from an adult, because it was more concentrated.

I did not stick my hand inside and get the snake out. I pushed dirt into the hole and walked away and never looked for the glasses again.

That fall, my parents moved again, to a big old house west of Omaha, Texas. There weren’t any houses around or hills or cases of eye glasses or baby rattle snakes. There were tarantula spiders, though, bigger than my hands. But they were out in the tall pasture grass, along with ground bees.

The girl in jail

In August 1955, Momma went to the hospital to have Patty. Carolyn, Frances, Bill and I went to stay with Mom and Grandpa. Carolyn was 11, I was 9, Frances was 6 and Bill was 5.

Mom and Grandpa lived in a big unpainted house on the north side of the square in Boston, Texas, just across the street from the courthouse. The courthouse was three stories, brick, painted white. It had a steep roof.

The county jail was behind the courthouse. The jail was two stories, painted brick, like the courthouse. Sheriff’s Department offices were on the bottom floow. The second storey was higher than the first and held all the prisoners. All the windows had bars, the lower normal size windows and the second floor windows, more than twice the height of the lower ones.

Mom and Grandpa had been married about 40 years. Mom was 55, Grandpa was 63. They had eight children. That year, three of their kids – Ruby, Betty and David -- and two grandchildren – Bobbie and Jim -- lived with them.

Jim was 16 that summer, and David was 15. They were the coolest boys ever, especially David. They had reputations. Not the serious kind, not yet. David’s reputation would become more serious later on, while Jim would go into the Army for more than 20 years. He went to Vietnam in 1961, and probably later, too.

For a week that summer, the future was a thing unthought. It was August, and a time to play in the big sandy yard, in the shade of three huge oak trees.

It was a time for bicycle riding, too. Jim and David each had a bicycle, but they were so taken with the girl in jail that I got to ride the bicycles as often as I wanted. I rode around the square and around, a short way west and north on Highway 98, and around the square.

One afternoon in the kitchen I asked Mom, “Where are David and Jim?”

She said, “They’re talking to that girl over at the jail.” She waved a wooden spoon as she talked, and from her tone I knew she did not approve of the girl in jail, nor of David and Jim talking to the girl. But from what Momma and Daddy said, David and Jim got by with a lot of things Mom didn’t approve.

I walked across the street and around the courthouse and to the jail. The doors and windows were open, so I went inside and then up the stairs to where the cells were. The floors were white tiles, square and maybe an inch across, like the ones in banks in those days. There were eight cells, each with bars across the front and each separated from the adjoining cell by a brick wall. The cells were at the south end, and there was a wide place north and then the north wall and four high and wide barred windows.

I sat on the tile floor. It was cool. David and Jim leaned against the bars on the front of the third cell. They smoked cigarettes.

A pair of hands rested on a cross piece of the front bars, a girl’s hands, with a cigarette between her right index finger and middle finger. Now and then the hand went inside the cell and then back to rest and white exhaled smoke went through the bars.

David and Jim and the girl talked in low voices. I couldn’t hear what they said. I think David and Jim knew the girl. Probably from school and other places.

After a while I got bored. I left the jail and walked around the courthouse and across the street and got a bicycle and rode around for a while.

Winter wonderland

Electricity absented itself from my home around 11 p.m. Christmas night. Power returned about 15 hours later.

Our all-electric house has good insulation, so Priscilla, Michael, Kathleen and I were not cold. Five inches of snow on the roof might have helped, but I am not too much informed on the R factor of snow.
The house has a fireplace insert. We packed it with wood cut and split from last year’s wind that knocked down several trees. The wood was well-seasoned (meaning dry) and burned nicely.

I thought we would breakfast on cold cereal and milk, but Priscilla reminded me of the propane grill. I then remembered the grill has a separate burner. Bacon and eggs cooked in a cast iron skillet in 25-degree weather … is not any better than that cooked inside in a 68-degree kitchen.

Having power back is good.

In 1961, Northeast Texas had a big ice storm. I was 15. Six years earlier, my parents rented a house and five acres just north of Rocky Branch, Texas. Rocky Branch “is a populated place located in Morris County at latitude 33.112 and longitude -94.698. The elevation is 348 feet.” So says hometownlocater.com.

Texas State Historical Association has a bit more. “Rocky Branch is on U.S. Highway 259 five miles northeast of Daingerfield in east central Morris County. It was named for the site of a sawmill and gristmill established in the late 1870s. A post office opened in 1890 and remained in operation until 1904. In 1896 the community had a population of fifty. By 1915 it had a population of 100, the sawmill operated by Nat Wright, and a general store operated by J. P. Forsyth. By the 1930s the population had declined to fifty and the businesses to two. From 1974 through 1986 the population of Rocky Branch was reported as 120. The community had two churches and a community center but no businesses. Nearby was the Primitive Baptist Church of Christ, which was organized in April 1854. The church obtained a building that year that was used as a meetinghouse and school and was still in use as a church in 1989. In 1990 the population of Rocky Branch was 135. The population remained the same in 2000.”

Rocky Branch was at a fork in the road, U.S. Highway 59 leading northwest to Omaha, and State Highway 338 going northeast to Naples.

The winter storm of 1961 encased everything in ice. Ice covered the ground, the roof of our house, the cars, limbs and trees.

The morning of the first day of the storm, my father decided he, my brother Bill and I should look at ice in the woods west of the house. My mother told us to dress warm. Bill and I both put on two T-shirts, two flannel shirts two pairs of jeans, two pairs of socks and some kind of scarf for our heads and ears. My father did the same, except he had a hat and did not wear a scarf.

That day was the coldest I had ever witnessed. Ice on the ground crunched underfoot. Daddy broke ice from the barbed wire gate in order to get the gate open.

When we got to the top of the small rise just south of the barn, the view was amazing. Trees had become ice sculpture, every red oak and pin oak and white oak encased in an inch-thick clear coating. Pine trees bowed under the weight of ice.

We walked along the two-rutted path into the woods. Now and then a loud “CRRAACK!” sounded from far inside the trees.

“What’s that?” I asked at the first sound.

“Limbs breaking,” Daddy said. “The ice is too heavy for the limbs to bear.”

I thought, Wow! Ice that breaks limbs.

There have been many storms since then – ice storms and snow storms, thunderstorms and heavy rain. But none had the originality, the sense of wonder of that first ice storm.

The storm was cold, it was deadly, and it cared nothing for people or cattle or trees. It was nature.

The house that burned

Momma, Ruby and I stepped outside the café and saw the long pillar of dark smoke off to the northwest.

“Wanda,” Ruby said, “that looks like it’s out by your place.”

“Watch Bob!” Momma said, and she jumped into hers and Daddy’s 1938 Oldsmobile and scattered gravel as she sped from the parking area and onto Highway 67.

It was early September 1952. We lived in an old, metal-roofed, unpainted house off a dirt road three or so miles northwest of Maud. Momma and Daddy had opened the café about a year before. The café was attached to a much bigger wooden building that during the war had been a machine shop.

Daddy bought the building using a VA small business loan. He first got rid of all the machines inside and turned the building into a bowling alley, refurbishing the building’s hardwood floors. The bowling alley didn’t catch on, so Daddy made the place into a honky tonk. Almost all of Texas was dry then, so selling beer and mixed drinks was illegal. Daddy sold Coke in bottles and small buckets of ice and provided glasses, and didn’t check brown paper bags people brought in.

I was at the café that day after a reaction to smallpox vaccine. Ruby was Daddy’s older sister. She was a vocational nurse and sometimes cooked at the café. After Momma left, Ruby and I watched the dark smoke spiral higher and become wider.

“I sure hope that’s not your house,” Ruby said.

It was our house. Daddy was asleep when the fire started. He had worked graveyard shift at Red River Army Depot the night before. Smoke woke him up. The house was just about all on fire when he woke up. He didn’t have a chance to save anything. He pushed out the window screen and got out of the house.

Momma drove the Oldsmobile as fast as it would go, through Maud and then down the dirt road toward the house. “I took a couple of corners on two tires,” she later said.

Carolyn, my older sister, was at school that day. Francis, 3, and Bill, 2, were with Geraldine, Momma’s older sister.

I don’t remember anything about the rest of the day. We all spent the night with Momma’s relatives or Daddy’s, or maybe split up and with both.

Next day, Momma and Daddy took us kids to the burned down house. It was the first burned house I remember seeing.

Everything was burned. There were charred pieces of wood and blackened tin. That was the first house of my memory.

We stayed with relatives two more days, until Momma and Daddy found another rent house. It was bigger than the house that burned.

By then people had given us boxes and sacks of used clothing. What we got was not any more worn than what burned. I didn’t particularly care for any of the charity clothes. But, people did what they could.

Of a well in the kitchen

The well was in the kitchen at the house that burned. There was a plaster facing around the bricks and a pulley suspended by a hook from a ceiling beam. A rope ran through the pulley. One end of the rope was attached to the bucket, the remainder of the rope wound around a piece of wood attached to the well frame so the rope would not fall into the well. The cover for the well was wooden and round. The bucket was not a normal round bucket with a wire handle, but a long cylinder made of sheet metal and an O at the top, connected to a rod that ran the length of the bucket and opened or closed a trap at the end, depending on whether you pushed the rod or pulled the O.

To draw water, you made sure the end was closed and then lowered the bucket. With its cylindrical shape, the bucket entered the water lengthwise until it was all the way in and water flowed in through the top. You could then pull up the bucket and position the end over whichever container you wanted to fill and pull the O, opening the end trap and allowing water to flow out.

With a normal style bucket, the rope was attached to the wire handle and the bucket always lay on its side when you lowered it to the water. Then, you had to jiggle the rope and the bucket until the bucket began to fill with water and then it would go under and be all the way full.

I remember the kitchen there as dark. I don’t remember any light, except for a little from a bare bulb in a socket attached to a wire than ran along a ceiling beam.

I remember my mother bathing my brother Bill in a dish pan. The pan was not the one she used for washing dishes in, but another one she used for bathing Bill and for some small pieces of laundry. The time I remember must have been 1951, when Bill wasn’t yet a year old.

Before the Army, every house I lived in had a well and a bucket and rope. Even the house at Rocky Branch that had running water and a bathroom inside – that house had a well and we sometimes had to draw water, when the pump went out or in hard freezes and we drained the pipes before the freeze so the pipes wouldn’t freeze and burst. One time, too, at that house, we had to draw water because the well was almost dry, and gritty water was in the pipes. Daddy hired a man who climbed into the well and dug out the sand and put the sand in the well bucket and Daddy drew it up and put it into a red wagon and then we put the sand in holes and low places in the yard. The man dug down as far as he could, and after a day we had enough water.
Momma and Daddy moved to Naples in 1967, while I was in Vietnam. The house in Naples was on city water and didn’t have a well.

Setting the field on fire

We burned trash in a 55-gallon drum about 40 feet north of the shed and on the edge of the three-acre garden plot.

There was no EPA then to tell you what to do with your trash, nor did the county government set up rules for getting rid of the detritus accumulated by every household. People then would have pitched a fit and dis-elected any county commissioner who said “You can’t burn trash.” The nearest towns did not have garbage collection, so even town people burned trash.

Back then, too, grocers and butchers didn’t wrap food and meats in plastic. Everything was in paper wrapping or paper boxes. When you had, as my mother and father did, five kids to feed and clothe, trash built up. There were things we grew, but most of what we ate and all of what we wore came from stores.

Daddy set up the 55-gallon drum by punching holes in the bottom sides and by making a screen cover. The holes allowed ventilation, and the screen kept burning paper inside the barrel.

We burned just about everything – newspaper, food containers, butcher paper, cans, bottles, jars. The dogs ate leftover food and bones.

Burning trash was an easy job. The trash was always in paper sacks. There were no plastic bags. Burning trash was my job. Every other day I took the trash sack from the kitchen to the barrel, removed the screen, put in the sack and then struck a kitchen match or two and got the sack going. Then I put the screen over the barrel and usually waited until everything that could burn, did.

One year Momma and Daddy did not plant the three acres north of the house. That three-acre plot had grown a lot of food the preceding years – corn, snap beans, green beans, purple hull peas, watermelons, cantaloupe, potatoes. I don’t remember why there wasn’t a garden. Maybe the tractor was broken.

For whatever reason, there wasn’t a garden. But there was prairie grass, tall and summer-dry.

One day, somehow, burning pieces of paper got past the screen and landed on the tall grass. Within seconds, the grass was on fire, and the fire threatened to spread across the three acres and past the barbed wire fence to the north, into more prairie grass and then to the neighbor’s house.

I was dry-mouth scared. Burning trash was my responsibility, and so was keeping the fire under control. Something had happened, and it was my fault.

I didn’t yell for help. Instead, I ran to the shed and got a shovel and went back to the fire and dug dirt and threw dirt onto the burning grass and if I could get it out … What? Nobody would know? Well, of course Momma and Daddy would know. It’s not like I could hide a burned-out area.

But I wasn’t thinking that far ahead. I was trying to put out the fire.

I dug dirt and threw dirt and dug and threw …

And then Momma and Carolyn came running, carrying the galvanized wash tub half filled with water they had drawn from the well, and Frances, Bill and Patty running too. Momma and Carolyn had two buckets, and between their throwing water and my throwing dirt, we got the fire put out.

We were all tired and sweating. Momma asked, “What happened?” I told her some burning paper got loose. She said, “Well, why didn’t you yell for help?”

I gave a teenager’s answer for almost every question: “I don’t know.”

I couldn’t very well admit it was my fault and that if I took care of the problem by myself … If I had taken care of the fire, I could have said, “The grass caught on fire, but I put it out.” That’s all I wanted, to get the fire put out and then I could admit to a mistake and tell of a solution.

When laundry was a family affair

Saturday was laundry day, when Momma had us five kids put boxes and paper sacks of sheets and towels, socks and slacks, shirts and skirts into the car and then we all piled in and drove five miles from Rocky Branch to Daingerfield, where there was a laundry.

The laundry wasn’t a Laundromat like you see today. There were no square, automatic washing machines and no dryers of any kind. Washing machines then were round and you filled them by turning on hot water and cold water to make warm water. There was a drain hose attached to the bottom and hooked to the top, and you unhooked the hose and lowered it and water drained from the machine.

There weren’t any slots for quarters, either, but a man or a woman who took cash money.

The laundry in Daingerfield was a white wooden building beneath trees and next to a creek. The building had screened-in sides to keep flies out and let in whatever breeze happened to be blowing. There were eight washing machines.

With five kids and Momma and Daddy, we had quite a bit of laundry. Momma sorted everything into whites, darks and colors and put each kind in a box or in paper sacks. At the laundry, she would pay for two or more washing machines and then fill each with a load of clothes. Then she put hoses in the washing part and turned on the water. When the water was high enough, she put in Ivory Soap flakes and turned on the machine.

Those machines did not have safety features to keep unobservant or clumsy kids from falling in. There was no lid, nor any kind of automatic shut off. The agitator kept going, no matter how many kids might fall in.

The machines had rollers at the top to squeeze water from whatever had been washed. After draining wash water and filling with rinse water and then draining that, you would turn on the rollers and take a towel and feed the towel into the rollers and take it from the other side. There were rumors of people sometimes getting fingers caught in the rollers and the rollers taking an arm all the way to the elbow before someone turned them off.

The rollers would not take blue jeans or sheets. Those we had to wring out by hand and then put in a box. All of the washed laundry went wet into boxes. Momma and Carolyn hung the laundry on clothes lines at home.

Sometimes Momma didn’t have enough money for going to the laundry. Those Saturdays, she built a fire in the back yard and had me drag the wash pot to the fire. The wash pot was a big iron pot; the same kind people used to render fat at hog-butchering time and to boil corn in lye water to make hominy.

After dragging the pot to the fire, I put the galvanized metal wash tub next to the well and drew water with rope, pulley and bucket and filled the tub about two-thirds. Carolyn and I carried the tub to the pot and poured in the water. That took two trips, and then I filled the tub again for cold rinse water.

When the water got to boiling in the wash pot, Momma put in soap flakes. The soap boiled into big waves of bubbles.

All the clothes got boiled. Momma used a sawed off broken broom handle to stir the clothes and take the clothes from the pot and put into the cold rinse water. When the clothes were rinsed enough, we wrung out as much water as we could and then hung everything on the clothes line.

Doing laundry was a family operation. Everybody had a job to do. We didn’t like the work, but it was necessary.

Riding a marble pony

The house that burned was the second of three houses on a short dirt road that ran north from another dirt road about three miles east of Maud.

The first house was a newer house and painted white. The house at the end of the road was a big house with a big yard and beneath three old oak trees. The yard at that house was dirt, because grass did not grow in the shade of the oak trees.

Our house – the house that burned – had a metal roof. People called it a tin roof, but these days it’s known as galvanized metal. The front porch was as wide as the house. The living room was, too, and then there were a couple of bed rooms and the kitchen/dining room. The house had never been painted.

Down by the road was a family cemetery surrounded by a wrought iron fence and with around 10 graves. One grave had a double tombstone, extending across the heads of two graves. That tombstone made a great horse for a 5-year-old boy.

I rode that stone pony across prairie and plain, splashed across streams, sped from pursuing Sioux and Apache and Comanche as well as did Bob Steele, Lash LaRue, Red Barry or any other Saturday-afternoon serial star at the picture show in town. That marble horse and I were champions of all underdogs, defenders of the rights of all people to own guns and horses.

That rock-steady Cayuse never let me down.

Until one day the sandy ground shifted and the tombstone fell over and I did not have time to jump off. At first, I was shocked. This isn’t supposed to happen! And then came realization that a heavy marble tombstone lay across my right leg. Realization came from pain. I was trapped. I pulled. That hurt. I did the next-best thing – I yelled.

“Help!” I shouted in a shrill, 5-year-old voice. “Help me! Help!”

I don’t know how many times I yelled, but then I saw Carolyn, my older sister, running down the dirt driveway, and Momma not far behind.

Momma didn’t ask what happened. That was obvious. She grabbed at the tombstone and Carolyn took a hold and they both lifted. But the marble was heavy.
Momma saw a tree limb then, from a persimmon tree. She took the limb and shoved it beneath the tombstone. “When I lift, you pull him out.”

And that was how my Momma and Carolyn saved me from certain death, had I laid in the summer sun, trapped by the heavy tombstone, all afternoon.

The ground was sandy and soft, so I had no permanent damage. But that was the end of my tombstone riding.