I mean, that’s what her intent was. Because that was a passport to a U.S. citizenship. And that was much in demand, you know.
Right. She was a sweet lady, nothing wrong with her, except that I bet she turned into a big woman. Not fat, but a large type woman.
She was a good bit taller than me. In fact, I was having trouble, I was a little bit short in dancing. I was kind of messing around with Dolores a little bit over here.
Weren’t you? And I told Dolores, I sure would like to have some cowboy boots. And by golly, she sent me a real nice set of cowboy boots. I wanted them high-heeled, I wanted them bigger than that.
Ain’t that hell? I still got them. I think I threw away five of them old boots that she gave me. Real nice.
I don’t know where she got them. I don’t know how she got them cowboy boots. Some kind of way, yeah.
Oh, they had, Regna and her, with a shoe rationing on, you had to have a coupon to buy shoes. They had closets full of shoes. They were managed, their employees, they got their coupons, and Dolores and Regna had shoes up their ears.
So a cowboy boot was not that hard. Actually, I guess you used one set of coupons to go buy some cowboy boots. You could buy the stuff, but you had to have coupons, you know.
Yeah, rationing coupons. But I got a pair of boots from her. Did it help? Yeah, it made me a little taller.
I didn’t dance worth a dang anyway. At least I was as tall as she was then. Or nearly.
She wasn’t fat. She was just a large woman. A real sweet girl.
Well, that wouldn’t have been the only one. There’s a number of them that married. Married Americans, I think.
I should say. Well, Ryan, let’s put this in the microwave. Okay, all right.
He said, he showed me a picture, he said, how would you like to have that for it? Beans are the Texan, you know what a Texan is. And he knew I was a Texan. And he said, how do you like that for it? I said, well, that looks pretty good, let’s do it.
He said, that’s how we picked it. Actually, he’s the one that selected it. Is that a character? It’s a Disney character.
One of the Disney characters. Oh, okay. From the Disney series, you know.
Donald Duck and all. Oh, yeah, I guess I remember. From that group, you know.
So. And these are all, this must be later in the war. Yeah.
Not in sequence here. That was Kenny, he was our commander. That Van Etten, the guy took the picture.
He’s still alive.
Seven tons of scrap iron, set that monster down. I heard a lot of chatter, I thought it was a jet. But it was only Del Mar Don with gravel in his trap.
Set that monster down. And then it’s a red light flash and sirens blow. Alert crews hit the sand.
It’s Captain Van, he’s upside down, flying. Look, no hands. You know, look, no hands was anywhere there.
Oh, we had to try the nasty song. We got it from the RAF. They can really sing nasty songs.
I believe that. We had to stay up with them. Yeah.
We had them on the base at times. There’s some reunion pictures here, I guess.
It was very strong, you know. Well, Mutti said she had heart spells all the time, wasn’t she? Oh, yeah. She got out of a lot of work doing that.
And I had Martha used to, she’d really fuss at me, said, till it laid there, and at noon, you know, they’d come and rest from picking cotton and chopping cotton, and said, it’s time for you all to go out to go to work, and she’d stay and lay it down. It kind of ticked Martha off pretty bad. See, Martha was divorced, which was a, pretty much of a no-no in them days.
And she and her son Howard lived here with Grandpa and Grandma. And see, Mama wasn’t, Philly wasn’t married yet. So, I think they had little conflicts at times.
I see. Now, how many sisters there was? Huh? How many were there? There was Tilly and Martha and… Louisa. Louisa.
Yeah, and there was Henry and Albert, the boys. Lena, I remember Lena. I remember Lena.
I remember she lived right across from Tatamata at one time. Yeah. She had chihuahuas or something.
Yeah, she and Uncle Albert. Albert was a little short. He was kind of a shorter guy.
Lived in Bishop, you know, in Kingsville. Uh-huh. When we was down there, they was in Kingsville.
And see, he, after Grandpa died, and the land was divided up, they put it up who’d get the most money for the land, and Albert paid the most. He got the land, this farm here. And he wanted to move to Bishop, and so he sold it to my dad.
Hmm. And see, my dad sold his farm in San Gabriel where we lived, and he was looking for another piece, which worked out, and he bought this land and sold the San Gabriel land, which was what they wanted in the first place, but, you know, the way it was set up, he put the highest bid in so he got the land here when he divided the estate. So that’s how my daddy then got the hold of this land.
And Albert moved down there, and he passed away down there. Bishop was buried in Kingsville. And Aunt Loretta didn’t like to be down in Kingsville.
I don’t think she made many friends down there. And her relationships were up here, so she adopted me as a caretaker for her. Yeah, I remember you went over there quite a bit.
Well, she came over here, and she asked me to get her house built, and I found that lot over there where she built the house and found a contractor, and she picked out a plan that she wanted, and she built the house there. I see. And she moved here, and she moved Albert’s body and brought it to our cemetery and brought his body over here to our cemetery.
I didn’t know that part of it. Yeah, he’s buried here in Thorndale after he was buried in Kingsville. And Lena was a strange woman.
She didn’t fit the Melody pattern. She was a lyricist, and she didn’t think like the Melodies did. I mean, a little different, you know, a different type.
She fell and broke her hip, and I was doing everything for her. I was looking after her. Well, she had the groceries delivered, but if she needed anything, she’d call me.
I mean, I’d do what I could for her. And I was her person to go to if she needed anything. Right.
And so when she broke her hip, I found a young lady to take care of her, to move in with her and cared for her. And she married Stevie Clark then, this lady did. Really? Okay.
And she had some nurse’s training. And, well, this didn’t last too long. She just wanted to quit.
And so I couldn’t find anybody else to take care of Lena. And so we decided to put her in the SPGS Rest Home. And we got an opening there, and she moved up there.
And I said, do you want to rent the house or what do you want to do with that? She said, no. She was a sensible woman. She said, sell the house.
If I have it there, I still want to come back to it. Oh, yeah. And she said, if I don’t have it, there’s no use wishing it.
Don’t have that wish. Eliminate that option. And she was a real sensible woman.
I mean, that’s good thinking. And she stayed there, and I visited her a lot. It’s a strange thing.
My granddaddy had a $5 gold piece. He kept it in a little old box all the time. And when everybody was gone, I’d go open that box.
I was a kid, and I admired that $5 gold piece. What a pretty piece of coin that was. Right.
And, well, when they divided the estate and Grandpa died, then I got that. Albert got that gold piece. And then I had it then.
And I was going to bring stuff up to her. She wanted all that stuff. And I brought a bunch of other papers and stuff up to her and that gold piece up to the rest home to her.
And the next day, I found that gold piece laying on the floorboard of my car. And it had slipped out some kind of a way out of the package that I was carrying. And I took it, and I said, God, that woman’s going to think I stole that damn piece of gold piece.
And I went and said, Hey, I found this in the car. It must have fell out while I was moving the stuff. She said, I knew it was missing.
I’m so glad that I took it to her. Oh, yeah, it could have fallen in a place you wouldn’t have found it. Yeah, it would have been bad.
That would have been even worse. So, anyway, that piece of gold piece is in my safety deposit box. It’s got a letter on it.
It goes to Tristan. Okay. Because he’s the first Tice male that carries a Tice name.
I don’t know whether I’m going to get any descendants out of him, the way it’s going now. But you never know. Yeah.
But it’s in there written on it that that’s for Tristan, so. Okay. It’s not that it’s worth that much.
It’s a sentimental value. It’s a sentimental value to me, so. I think I wrote in there that I used to play with this when I was a young kid.
Wow, okay. So, anyway, Lena passed away then. She was 101, I think.
Oh, yeah. See, my mother was there, and Aunt Martha was there, and Aunt Lena was there, too. SPGS, the rest of them.
All three of them at the same time. And how old was Martha when she passed? 102, I think. Yeah, I knew she was over 100.
And Lena was 101, and Aunt Louisa was 100, and Tilly was 96 when she died. She was young. She was the young one.
She had that heart trouble over life. Yeah. But that’s longevity.
The boys didn’t live that long. Uncle Henry was a pretty heavy alcoholic. Yes, I knew that, too.
And Uncle Albert, I just, from what I heard, when he was a young man, he joined the Army at Fort Truett. Not Fort, Fort Sam, San Antonio. Artillery office.
And I think he played around with the prostitutes and got venereal diseases. I kind of saw my, it wasn’t made public, but from what I put together, that’s about what it sounded like. He never had any children after that, either.
Ah. So, I mean, that’s just my, I’m playing the cards like they look, so. Right.
I mean, it wasn’t public knowledge, but, you know. And I think he, my mama never did say much about it. They didn’t talk about it, you know.
Yeah. So, but I kind of suspect that’s what happened, so. Now, over at Tilly’s, I would play with her buttons.
She had buttons. Who? Munty, your mother. Oh, yeah.
She had buttons. Let me see it. Was it Mildred, my sister that ate all them buttons one time, and she had a diaper full of buttons? Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.
Yeah, I heard the story of that. Put the diaper on and it was full of buttons. Or was it Hugo Winchester’s daughter? Martin Winchester.
I don’t know which one. Vicki and I would stay over there. Oh.
And there was drawer after drawer after drawer of buttons. You should have seen Elsie’s. She had buttons? Not buttons.
Elsie upstairs in that room, in the bathroom with a big room with it, and she had built in layer after layer after layer boards that you could tilt out, and there was all kinds of sewing devices, buttons, clasps, you name it, threads. It was that wide and all the way to the ceiling, one layer after the other. Wow.
Every kind of a fastening device. Elsie did a lot of sewing. She did a lot of crocheting and quilting and stuff like that, and it made me so damn mad.
That house was all them closets, and it was stuffed full of the nicest crochet work that Elsie, she was waiting for her husband on night shift, and she’d do crocheting all the time and embroidery and all these beautiful garments and quilts and things. The closets were just stuffed full of them. Well, and pretty quilts, and I didn’t mess with them.
I said, they’re not mine. They belong to her kids, not me. So I didn’t mess with them, and the kids came up here and spent the weekends and so forth.
I thought after Elsie died, they were dividing the stuff up, which I thought that’s what they ought to be doing out there. They had the damn auction. They hadn’t divided the crap.
They all put it out for the auction, and they went for nothing. I was out there at the auction, and I didn’t go look what they put out for the auction, and I looked over there, and I saw they was auctioning off those blankets, and I went over there. I was going to bid on them, and the bid was already over, and I wanted to put one on her over there in the rest home, one of the blankets that she had, and I went to Arthur Swartz’s wife.
I knew she was out there bidding, and I went to her, and I said, did you get any of those blankets? She said, yeah, I got one of them, and I told her what happened. I sure didn’t know that they was going to sell that. I thought they was going to keep it for their family, and she said, I’ll tell you that for what I bought it for, and I got one.
That’s the only one I got, but it made me so damn mad. I can’t understand her kids. They’re real weird, both of them.
Clay is weird, too. Well, yeah, I knew he was weird from the dealings I had with him. I had some dealings with Clay.
Yeah, well, you did his wedding, you know. I did his wedding, yeah. That’s how I knew it.
I don’t think he and his wife get along worse than nothing, and he and his son don’t. And his son is just as strong as he is. He’s a nice guy, though.
He’s a doctor’s assistant now. He works at MD Anderson. He got married and just had a little girl, and he’s the only one that come and told me that he really appreciated that I married Elsie and that we had such a good life together.
And Clayton’s daughter, we went to her wedding up around Dallas area, and she has two children on Elsie’s great-grandchildren, a little boy and a little girl. She’s a photographer. Yeah, I’m a photographer.
You know her. Yeah, she was going to get rich in photography, and I said, okay, I wish you good luck. And she found out that dream don’t come true.
No, that one’s a hard one. It can happen, but it happens so rarely. So anyway, she’s real nice to me and everything, the kids are, too, and her husband and I, except I think she got on my DWI from driving before.
Anyway, they came to visit Elsie twice in the two years, and Clayton came every couple of months. He’d come by and see her. And Steve, the one from Denver, don’t record this.