The first move to Farmers’ Branch, [we moved to Farmers’ Branch again when I was in Jr High], was to a house that my father had purchased. It was the first non-rent house for us. The house was large enough for us, which may have been the first time that had happened since I stopped being an only child. We had a brick house with a two car garage. I remember my father got talked into some sort of deal where he bought a half of cow, all butchered with the meat parts wrapped in butcher paper, and with the cow came a large freezer. For a time we had beef in one form or the other night after night.
I could sense that were not as poor as we had been, that there was disposable income. The freezer and meat was one sign of my father’s prosperity. I also remember that my father had a company of men come in and construct a redwood fence around our back yard.
At school I found myself in class with a student I’d known in first grade. I don’t remember his real name, but we all called him Lucky. Lucky played a role in my life that year. Because I already knew Lucky, from first grade, and Lucky knew a bunch of other kids, he ushered me into this group of friends. Lucky was not a church of Christ kid. Lucky was actually not all that lucky. Lucky had a step dad, and he cussed, and he was not above breaking rules. I loved that about him. Lucky was, in some ways, my Huck Finn.
My house was not far from a busy two lane blacktop road, and on the other side of that road was a barbed wire fence, [we called it Bob Wire because we all misunderstood its real name], and on the other side of the Bob Wire, was a stand of mesquite trees. Just past the mesquite stand was the short lushly green grass of a golf course and 30 years from the trees was a golf course water trap. A man made pond. A place to fish.
I hadn’t fished much other than a couple of times with my granddaddy Crawford, but here there were 6 boys with few chores and an inclination to do stuff.
Fishing in that golf course pond was one of the funniest things I remember from childhood, and it wasn’t the fish. I don’t think any of us caught anything larger than three inches. The fun was from doing something wrong. Illegal.
I didn’t care if I was doing something wrong. First of all, I discovered my first addiction, my first unforgivable sin, a sin I could not seem to control: masturbation. I didn’t want to, you know: rub one out, yank the carrot, spank the monkey. There were a million ways to say what you were embarrassed to say, but the point was, I was told this self pleasuring was a sin that would send you to hell, and since I’d try to stop and could not stop, I was sure I was going to hell anyway. That realization was liberating. I still hesitated in the face of wrong. I had some inner scruples that forced me to choose between the wrongs I would or would not do. My main rule was that I should not hurt another person, I should pretend I was not an unredeemable sinner, obey my parents when they were around, and my bad should not be so bad that it would get me into serious trouble, like stuff that would get the police involved.
The golf pond fishing was perfect. It was like being in a movie.
Most of our fishing poles were really just sticks with a fishing line tied to one end. We had a float, a weight, and a hook. Someone would bring bait, usually bologna, sometimes grubs or worms.
Six boys lined the side of the road. At a signal from Lucky, our leader, we dashed across the road. I would hold up one of the barbed wires of the fence and five boys would scamper through like jack rabbits, onetwothreefourfive, and then I would worm myself through. We walked through the mesquite trees and it felt like we were a band of raiders, gorilla soldiers on a deadly mission.
We would gather at the edge of the trees. If there were golfers out there we waited. We hugged the ground and complained about life as we waited.
“I hate my stepdad,” one boy would say. “Last night he drank like 30 beers and then he and my mother started yelling at him. Then he slapped her and after that I just heard my mother crying and saying words too soft to hear. But I could sort of tell what was happening just by the sound of that.”
This set off a contest in which the boys tried to tell the saddest worst story about their parents. I couldn’t really compete. While I felt ignored, and like I was a bother they would love not to be around, my parents didn’t fight with each other. The yelling was at the children, not at each other. I remember now, thinking then, that my parents got along. We were not a demonstrative family. I don’t remember being hugged on, kissed, and praised. I think that did happen to my siblings after I left home, but in the mid-1950s that wasn’t happening.
Once the golfers moved on to their next hole, we dashed for the water and dropped our lines in the water. We lost our bait a lot. There were box turtles. Sometimes we got crazy over the sighting of a snake. It could have been a grass snake or a water moccasin, but if we saw a snake we killed a snake. Everyone I knew hated snakes. We would fish, and push and tell dirty stories until the groundskeeper spotted us. He would come, on foot I think, I don’t remember there being golf carts then, and he would yell at us.
We would run for the trees and disperse within the thicket of mesquite trees. The groundskeeper never entered the thicket of mesquite. The first time this happened I remember wanting to go home. We got caught, an adult had yelled at us to get the hell out of the golf course and to never come back, so I assumed we all would agree to find something else to do. I was wrong. Lucky wanted to wait for the groundskeeper to leave and for use to go back and fish some more.
The dirty stories fell into several categories:
F word jokes
Poopie jokes
Sex jokes
I didn’t always understand the sex jokes. I understood that the girls with chest enlargements were interesting to me, and when I thought about them sometimes Mr. Winky started stiffen and move around, but I still, at this stage, had no clue about how sex actually took place.
EXAMPLE:
Q. What's worse than getting raped by Jack the Ripper?
A. Getting fingered by Captain Hook.
OK I got that Captain Hooks hook would hurt you, so yeah, funny, but what did it mean to get fingered? I had no clue. If the sex joke got too specific I got lost. I had to wait for the other boys to laugh so I would know when to laugh.
F jokes could be just normal acceptable jokes, but if the F word was inserted into the joke was enough. I wasn’t sure what the F word meant, but I just knew it was worse than shit and bitch. The F word and Taking the Lord’s Name In Vain were the two worst words you could say.
EXAMPLE:
Two guys walked into a Fuckin’ Bar. The third guy ducked.
Poopie jokes were just bathroom jokes
EXAMPLE:
Q: Why did the little moron put the TV in the bathroom?
A: He wanted to watch Howdy Doody.
It was several years before I realized the Doody was a play on the word doo-doo I guess. I still may not get the joke.
DEATH IN CAMERON
When the call came in I was in the tube. I heard my mother go to the phone. I heard the tone of her voice get serious. Then came the words.
“No. Don’t tell me that. No. No.”
Then she must have realized I could hear her voice. A soon after I hear the murmuring stop, she hung up the phone, and she came into the bathroom crying.
“My daddy’s dead,” she said.
What I was told is that he was at his store in Cameron, and he had a girl working for him. She told the girl he didn’t feel well and he was going to lay down in the back for a little while. She said she heard a noise like maybe he sat down real hard. When she didn’t hear him for a while she opened the door. He was dead on a cot in the back of his store.
I guess in 1958 when smoking wasn’t viewed as that bad by most people and he was fond of White Owl Cigars, and food fried in lard, and he disregarded his weight, and he never exercised, well, perhaps it will come as no surprise that he had a heart attack.
I remember the funeral. I remember the social time I had with my cousins, Jim, Dennis, and Renee Beaver. I think my cousin Allen was there. We were sad, but there was something unreal about it all.
I knew about death. I’d had a childhood friend that died in a car accident. I had a school friend who had cancer and died. But this was the first family member that I remember dying.
My mother would tell people later about my broken leg, that it was because I was in a daze over the death of my grandfather.
I don’t know if that is true.
BROKEN LEG
After my grandfather Crawford died I returned to school. I remember, one day my mother had to go somewhere and so I was told to come straight home from school. But that admonition meant something different to me. I was not one to obey every order given to me by my parents. My mother not being home meant I didn’t have to get right home after school. I was free from the interference of my mother. I was relieved from the oppression of childhood, for a little while. I could do whatever I wanted to do, which turned out to be anything Lucky and the gang wanted to do.
After school we rode our bikes over to the athletic field. It was a cold windy Texas day and no one was there. At the baseball field we noticed that there was a dugout shelter for the players and because it was dug out, the roof of the dugout was not that high off the ground.
The dugout roof looked like the perfect place for use to climb, and jump from. Jumping off stuff was an absolutely normal thing for 8 year old boys to do. We did that.
I took my turn and was successful a couple of times, but on my third or fourth jump I landed funny. I landed on the side of my left foot and rolled to my left side. I heard the sound, the snap, but didn’t know what that was, and while my leg hurt, it wasn’t so bad a hurt that I imagined something was really bad wrong. When I tried to get up, that is when I felt that this pain was worse than past pains. I tried and it just hurt too bad to stand.
I asked one of my buddies to wheel my bike over and I used the bike to support me and I managed to get up, I sat on the bike, and my injured leg was hanging limp to one side of the bike. I couldn’t figure out what to do. Finally I asked Lucky if he would take my bike and go get help.
After a while, a car pulled up, and Lucky got out on the passenger side. A man got out on the driver’s side. He looked scary to me. He had a mustache and what would be called today a short beard, but then was like a two or three day old five o’clock shadow. He had a cigarette in his mouth. This man came and just picked me up and carried me to his car. He put me in the back seat laying down.
Lucky’s step dad drove me to a near-by doctor’s office and carried me inside, and then he left me there. Lucky said he would keep my bike safe at his house. The doctor had be placed on a table where his X-Ray machine was located. A nurse took off all my clothes except my underwear. That was mortifying to me, at the time.
The doctor took X-Rays. He came out of a room and I asked, “Is it broken?”
He told me that it takes a little while to develop the X-Rays.
I gave my home phone number to the nurse, but I guess when they called there, no one was home. Someone kept coming in asking me why no one was home and did I know anyone else they could call.
How long did I lay in that chilled room in my Fruit-o-the-Looms? It seemed like hours, but it may not have been hours. It felt like hours and hours.
Eventually my parents showed up. My father picked me up and carried me to the car. I couldn’t remember being in my father’s arms before. It probably happened sometime before that day, but I have no recollection of it. It was so strange for him to put one arm behind my bare back, one hand at the bend of my knees, the leg with the cast sticking out in an awkward manner.
Breaking my leg resulted in a lot of insight and misunderstandings. I stayed home from school. I had a wheelchair to get around that house and because the left leg was sticking out [I had a cast from my foot to my groin] I kept misjudging as I attempted to negotiate doorways and hallways, and I dented and gouged places throughout this brand new house.
I had three breaks in the center of my left shin and a fourth break of the shin just above the ankle.
When I got crutches I tried to do too much. Four different times I had to have the breaks reset and a new cast put on. The fourth time that happened the doctor told me if I couldn’t be more careful they would have to do an operation and pin the bones together to make them stay in place.
When the cast was finally removed my leg had atrophied. My thigh was so skinny I could put my hands around it and there was more room left. The left leg was so wasted away that I couldn’t walk. I had to stay on crutches.
There was no rehab then. The doctor told me to try to pick up marbles with my toes and drop them in a milk bottle.
MOVE THIRTEEN
My father had risen to a supervisory level at the Texas Instruments’ technical artist department, but my father hated working there. It is my opinion now, that my father could never stand having a boss, that he could not function with a direct supervisor, and that is why most of his working life he was a preacher, or a freelance commercial artist.
My father was wanting to escape the oppression he felt at Texas Instruments, he had developed his skills in commercial art, and Jody Boren had an ad agency in Abilene, Texas and he offered my father a job. We moved to Abilene in 1959, and my father bought his first house. It was a small house with linoleum tile floors throughout, a car port, and one bathroom. The roof was covered with tar and white quartz like gravel.
I had a neighborhood friend while we were living in Abilene, named Rex Zimmerman. We were Rex and Tex everywhere we went. There were a lot of boys in the neighborhood around my age.
The summer time game I remember best was Graveyard Tackle. One person stood in a yard between two driveways. The rest of the boys lined up on the edge of one of the driveways. The kid in the middle of the yard would should out, “Pom-pom-poly-waddle Graveyard Tackle” and once that was said the boys would dash for the driveway on the opposite side. The kid in the middle would try to tackle at least one of the dashing boys. Now there were two or possibly three boys standing in the middle of the yard and the magic words were shouted again, “Pom-pom-poly-waddle Graveyard Tackle” and the game would continue in that manner until there was one guy trying to run from one drive to the next with a dozen boys in the middle trying to drive his body into the ground.
I’m sort of amazed now that we only had baths on Saturday nights
It was in Abilene that I was baptized in the church of Christ. It was in Abilene that my sister was born. I was ten years old. I think I was there the entire school year.
I know I was living in Abilene, Texas when I turned 10 and my sister Carol was born. After moving from Abilene all I know is that I lived all over the Dallas area, including, but not limited to: Dallas proper, Grand Prairie, Arlington, Garland, Mesquite, Grapevine, Richardson, Carrollton, twice to Farmers Branch, and Allen. What I am not but what I’m not sure of was where in the Dallas area we moved on Move Thirteen I’m going to have to just describe some houses where we lived and not try to give an order to when we lived where.
One source of anger about my early childhood is linked to the frequent moves. I never felt like we had a home, everything felt temporary. I realize that kids often live in motel rooms and move around daily, weekly, or monthly, and my childhood was more stable that this homeless motel living sort of childhood, but that is not saying much. The instability is a matter of degree. The instability is on a continuum and I feel like my early childhood was closer to crazy nutz than it was to secure and safe. There were too many children, the rent houses were too small, my parents were sick with money worries, and their fear planted fears inside of me.
Here are some of the houses I remember but not necessarily in the order presented here:
MAYBE MOVE FOURTEEN
I remember a nice house that had a Mimosa tree in the front yard, hardwood floors too small for us, but one of the nicer rent houses in which we lived. I must have been carrying a lot of anger inside, because for the first and only time in my schoolyard history, I got into fights at school. I remember the school was not that far from our rent house.
I started several fights and spent time in the office. The practice of corporal punishment was “in full swing” so to speak, and each time I shoved a kid, or wrestled them to the dirt I was sent to the office and given three to five licks with a wooden paddle.
Once, at PE, or recess, I remember walking in after the bell rang and I was shoved from behind. I turned and there was this thin kid standing behind me giving me his best shithead grin. I graduated from shoving to punches.
I am not sure where this came from, but I made a fist and landed my boney fist in the center of his face. Shitgrin staggered back, and then returned my gift with a bony fist of his own. I got a bloody nose. The blood was flowing freely down my face and onto my shirt. I shoved this kid to the ground, sat on his chest and started hitting him in the face with alternating fists. It wasn’t as violent as it sounded. I was pulling my punches some, out of fear of causing real damage, and ole shitgrin was blocking most of my efforts. I felt myself being lifted into the air and spun away. The PE teacher had intervened.
Why did I fight? I was not a fighter. I was never one to stand up to my parents when they decided I needed to be hit with the belt, and they decided that a lot. I was angry though, I remember hating my life, hating life, hating this new school, hating being the new kid.
My other memory of the Mimosa House was art.
I’m not sure if my father was doing freelance commercial art, or if he was working for someone. While we were living in the Mimosa House my Uncle Bob, got my dad a commission to paint a border around wall, near the ceiling in the dining room of a rich man’s house. The man was Mr. Goldberg, and he was the owner of Goldberg Department Stores, a chain of stores around Dallas and Fort Worth. The art was a design of chickens and Easter eggs. My father came up with the design, got that approved, and then he went night after night going to the rich man’s house to paint these chickens and eggs pieces on the walls.
Some nights my mother went with my father and I was left to babysit my siblings: Tim, John, and Carol. I may have been 11 years old at the time.
Because we were left alone I would do what babysitters have been doing since the mid 1950s: I put something on TV for the younger children to watch, and I used my father’s drafting table and art supplies. I remember finding a bird in one of my father’s CA magazines that I copied using Casein. I remember getting some kudos from my parents when they got home from the Goldberg job and saw the painting on the art table.
This incident stands out because I didn’t feel that many positive vibes from my parents, back then. Since art mattered to my parents, and since I showed some promise, it became one of the ways I tried to get approval from my parents. I think, with that casein bird I realized that art was perhaps my best hope of getting love and attention from my parents. I remember that I took my habit of drawing to pass the time and kicked it up a notch, believing that if I got really good, I might stop seeing myself as a loser.
Another thing that happened is that my father, for the first time ever, took me with him to the Goldberg House. I was young, but I could use an eraser, so my father gave me the job of going in after he’d painted the chickens and eggs, and after that paint had dried, and my task was to erase the pencil lines that were not covered by the paint. I had a kneadable eraser and standing on a ladder I would twist the eraser into a point and gently erase the lines without touching the painting. It wasn’t exactly me doing art with my dad, but it approached that.
I remember Mr. Goldberg coming through the dining room from some other part of the house. I’d heard of drinking, but Mr. Goldberg was the first person I’d ever met who drank alcohol and he drank it to excess. He reminded me of the old Rye Whiskey song:
If the ocean was whiskey and I was a duck
I’d swim to the bottom and never come up.
Mr. Goldberg would stagger into the dining room and he paused when he saw me. It is the experience of all children to be noticed by stranger adults who may have a soft heart of children, or who live a life that is mostly child free. I remember Mr. Goldberg asking my father if I could have a coke.
I followed the rich man into his kitchen. He had a black woman working in the kitchen. This was the very first kitchen I’d ever seen that had a lot of stainless steel in it. The counter and sink were stainless steel. The icebox was stainless steel and Mr. Goldberg had an actual icebox. When he opened the door, which looked like it was maybe a 2 foot by 2 foot door, and as he reached in and got a short glass bottle of Coke, I saw a block of ice and a little fan blowing against the ice. It was actually the first and only time I saw a genuine, working icebox.
God’s Punishment: Cuban Missile Crises
It was while living in the Mimosa House that the Cuban Missile Crises took place.
One morning, before leaving for school my mother spread out the Dallas Morning News and showed me this fuzzy aerial photograph that showed what looked like big white drainage pipes scattered on the ground. There were some obvious lines and lettering on the photo used to point stuff out to the viewer. My mother said Russia had missiles in Cuba and at least one of those missiles is pointing right at Dallas.
This was scary. At school we did these Drop and Cover drills in case the Commies dropped an A-Bomb on us. In those days I thought the Communists were really bad people who wanted to drop A Bombs on Americans, and then they were going to send in troops and take our Bibles away from us.
Later I came to know that the only nation on earth to use an Atom Bomb was us, but then, I saw the USA as being the ALL GOOD nation and the Russians were ALL BAD, and the other countries were weak and dependent upon the USA for protection. I was a gullible child.
The same day that I saw the photo in the Dallas Morning News we had a bomb drill at school where the students were ordered get under our desks, put our heads into our chest and to cover the back of our head with her arms and hands, with our fingers laced together to hold the hand protection
I got home and my father watched the news coverage of the missile crises with a stern look on his face. Nothing else was said about the missile crisis until bed time.
My father called me in from my room. That’s never good.
“Tex,” he said, “I don’t know how much you know about it, but the communists in Cuba have missiles they got from Russia. Each missile is loaded with nuclear warheads, atomic bombs more powerful than the ones that exploded over Japan. At least one of those missiles is pointed right at Dallas. If things don’t change soon, it looks like those missiles will be fired off some time tonight. Missiles will fly through the night sky and by morning we may all be dead.”
This didn’t sound too good to me.
“And do you know why this is happening?” my father asked me. It was rhetorical. I didn’t know the word rhetorical back then, but I knew he’d just asked me a question that he intended to answer himself. I was expected to stay silent and I was staying silent.
“America is about to be covered with atomic explosions that will coat this nation in fire, because America elected a Catholic President of the United States.”
I was confused and terrified.
“Now brush your teeth and go to sleep.”
I did sleep. But it took a while before I slipped up and fell asleep. Terror adrenaline is a sleep inhibitor.
MAYBE MOVE FIFTEEN
I remember a house that was crummy. We lived there several months. It is memorable only in that everything seemed worn, and the windows leaked cold air. I would be in bed, waiting for sleep, and reach my hand out toward the window where I could feel a cold wind. The leak was strong.
I remember I hated the school. When it was time for math the teacher would call kids up to do a problem on the blackboard. I recall once when I stood there looking at a problem in chauk that I had no clue how to complete.
I didn’t know how to add or subtract, I only knew how to count forward or backward. But if the teacher saw me counting on my fingers to find the answer she would hit me with a yardstick . More than once a yard stick broke on one of the students, and I had at least one turn at being the thigh to break a yardstick.
I have two clear memories from House Fourteen.
I remember watching Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom with Marlin Perkins. Usually, Marlin Perkins did shows about animals, but sometimes they were related stories about some primitive culture. The show I’m remembering here dealt with an archeological dig for dinosaur bones. After watching big bones being pulled from the earth I said aloud, “When I grow up, I want to be an archeologist.”
Without a break I heard my mother announced to the world, “There goes his faith.”
Most children like dinosaurs, and liking dinosaurs, whales, and manatees is just a child delighting in unusual creatures that thrill the imagination. Enjoying looking at something unusual is not God’s criteria for labeling you outside the saving embrace of Jesus Christ. It is just a child that enjoys the unusual. The impact of my mother’s words may say more about me than it does about her.
Maybe my mother said, “There goes his faith,” as a joshing way of reminding me that in the church of Christ we are leary of science, and anything that hints that a 6 day creation might be more metaphor than fact. What it taught me was that my interested in things had pass through a church of Christ filter that culled out dangerous thoughts and interests and facts and all curiosity of the world.
The second thing I remember about House Fourteen, is how we left it.
I remember getting up the morning of my last day in that house. Nothing was unusual. There had been no talk of moving. There were no boxes in the house ready to be filled. When I got home from school that day, the house was in chaos and there were boxes stacked and filled throughout the house.
My mother ordered me to my room. She spread out a sheet on the floor of my room and said, “Put anything you want to keep in the center of this sheet. You have to include your clothes and shoes, and then other stuff you want to take with you. Anything not in the sheet gets left behind.”
I never found out why this move was so sudden. What I learned from this sudden move is that even when my world seemed to be going along OK, normally, that that was a façade, that the outside cold look stable, but what my family presented to the world has nothing to do with what is on the inside. The inside of my life and my families life was anything but stable.
MOVE SIXTEEN
I think I remember living very briefly in Grapevine. I don’t remember the house. I remember the school and the church.
