Actually, I think it was kind of in the direction of the Lutheran school. Yeah, it was on the way to the Lutheran school. It was about a mile and a half from the school.
Yeah. Before you got to the school. And that’s where I was going to school.
But, you know, all I remember is it was flat. It was real… Oh, yeah, flat land. It was real… Nice land.
Real flat. That’s all I can remember. Not a very scenic place, though.
No. Well, I would have been in, like, the third grade. I think second grade.
Sidney, I think, started over there, too. Yeah. Sidney started in Bishop.
And I was in the third grade through the fifth grade, I think. Oh, that far? Oh, yeah. It’s only the later… They kept the building from… Gave it to the town of the old church, and they were trying to have a little museum thing, but I think they didn’t keep it up.
They still got their cemetery out there. Well, I remember hiding in the church. The church had these… That’s a stucco kind of… Stucco kind of church with buttresses, and we’d hide behind the buttresses and play our games.
Yeah, I believe that. I know when Dave’s funeral went down there, and it rained so they couldn’t bury him. They were going to water out there.
I believe that. Had to wait a few days before they could… We had to service, but the commitment wasn’t done. Yeah.
I was going to go to church this afternoon. That’s at 2 o’clock. Okay, well, I’m going to have to go to the restroom real quick.
That kind of stuff.
So, she had problems in her respiratory system all the time. And they thought it might be tuberculosis. They isolated.
They thought it was a very contagious thing. So, they were thinking about moving her to New Mexico for the dry air climate, but I guess financially that was a little bit difficult to do. So, the isolator had a tent-type deal for the yard for her mother, and that’s where Lillian stayed in for a good while.
And, in a way, they decided to, in order to alleviate that, they went and cut a phandic nerve in here, which collapsed her left lung. Oh, yeah, I remember that. She had a collapsed left lung.
She was breathing on only one lung from then on the rest of her life. And she managed it. It developed stronger than the right lung.
I think it was the right lung. And she sort of recovered and got married and had iris. And I don’t know just at what time frame.
I may be off just in what sequence. Yeah, what the sequence is. But that’s the essence of it.
And, well, that’s what she did. And then, in later life, she had all kinds of problems, stomach problems, and they removed half of her stomach. The surgeon removed half of her stomach.
And I may not be giving you sequences just right in what order this happened. And, anyway, eventually, her stomach slipped through the diaphragm and went up and lodged itself where this lung was removed. Her stomach was under her left breast is where her stomach was.
And I know she said they were doing a fluoroscope with her great aunt. And they said, look where that stuff’s going. It went up into her chest instead of into her stomach.
They didn’t know the stomach was up there. So you can kind of imagine why she was a little bit tense and a little bitey at times. She had her problems, too.
So, yeah. Anyway, that’s how things went. Now, after Iris died, she had to have a major surgery.
They wanted to remove that stomach and put it back below the diaphragm. And that’s what they did. They did a surgery to remove the stomach from the lung cavity and put it below the diaphragm and fixed the diaphragm back up.
And, well, she was in the hospital. I visited her every day for a couple of months. But then it’s gone away.
And, see, Iris was dead. It was just her and I. I was taking care of her. And she’d bite me, I don’t know, once in a while.
But I took care of her. We had our arguments. She was mad at Billy and Sidney and Mariana.
They didn’t care for her no more than she did. And she was always going to disinherit her. And I had to soothe it over to try to keep her on an even keel.
So I had my problems with her. But she was a, I don’t know what you’d call her. She’d flip from one thing to another.
She’d be real sweet to me for a while. And then she’d be just madder than hell at me for a long time. And, anyway, I managed with it.
Until she finally got to be home. And I visited her and I got her this electric bed. And she lived by herself.
Our neighbors were nice to her and took care of her pretty good. Until she passed away. I don’t know, something like that.
I can’t think of what it was. I just took that off a minute. Maybe I’ll think about it.
It was something in connection with it, I was going to tell you. The Scott White deal? There was something about the Irish that was involved in that. Well, who raised her? Well, Iris, when she was young and going to grade school.
I don’t know, down in lower grades. She developed a mastoid in her head. Where the pus formed in the skull.
And there was no penicillin. And the only cure was they punctured her in the back of her ear into the skull. And made a hole there.
And Dr. Woodson, it was with Scott and White. When Scott and White were just starting. Dr. Woodson, he did the surgery.
She and her grandmother moved into an apartment at Temple. Because they had no penicillin to cure it from the inside. The only possible cure was to keep this hole open.
So that the pus could drain out. So every day they had to go up there. And she said it was torture.
They scraped all of that out, the crust. So that the pus could. They had to heal it from the back to the front.
And they finally did. And she missed a half a year of school. That she was up there taking that treatment.
She had a big hole in the back of her ear. A deep hole. When she died, that hole.
The skin. You know, the skin of somebody. It kind of dented in.
She could kind of put your finger in that hole. And that’s that. Oh, the thing I was going to tell you.
I was trying to think of. It’s kind of strange. But I saw my wife Iris when she was three days old.
And I remember it. I was just a little kid, you know. And mother and dad were friends with Bill and Lillian.
And they went over to see Lillian’s new little baby. And I remember Iris in the cradle. To this day.
That I can remember seeing this little baby. And that was Iris. Isn’t that strange? That’s a pretty strange story.
But it’s true. Oh, I believe you. I had my goals with them.
Bill was a nice guy. Bill was, yeah. Bill was really nice to us kids.
Oh, he liked you kids. Well, he never grew up. He was just a kid.
He himself was a kid. He was kind of strange. But I kind of admired that he had that personality about him, too.
All the different inventions that he’s got. It was always thinking. Yeah, his mind was working on something.
Now, him and Bill Rodenbeck were a pair. You know, he worked for them. He called that Monkey Island where he worked.
You know, Bill Rodenbeck’s ideas were pretty monkey-ish, in which they were. Building car smashers and whatever. All that junk’s still out there in the woods.
That old shed. I wouldn’t want to know how many rattlesnakes are in that thing. I’ll bet you.
Well populated. Oh, so. Bill worked as a… Body man.
Body man there. He worked as a carpenter. Yeah, well, he did a jack of all trades.
He was a welder. And he was good at fixing all kinds of… He had a brain that was an inquisitive brain. He’d come up with crazy ideas that weren’t always crazy.
Yeah. He showed me how to do Bondo. Oh, and he loved that Bondo.
He loved Bondo. When that was invented, that was just… That was his thing. He could make what he wanted out of Bondo.
But he could sit there and he could take a death in a piece of tin and take the death out. Well, he was a body man. You know, used to cars were all… They’d fix them up.
They didn’t just scrap them. If you had a wreck, they’d straighten it all out. And that last little bit, they’d put that Bondo on it.
And then sand it out. You couldn’t tell it was a dent in there. They’d weld it up first.
And he had a way of… You know, when you’d get too much metal, he’d heat it along. He’d crunch it with water. That would shrink it to get that excess metal out of the fenders and things like that.
Oh, yeah, he was… He’s good at that. Bill was one of a kind. Well, when the war came or when the Depression came, I don’t know which, he went up to Fort Hood and lived in a chicken house or something? Well, he helped build Fort Hood, you know, when they was constructing it during the war.
He worked on Fort Hood. Lots of people from around here worked there. So he just moved up there and left Iris.
Well, I don’t know. I guess that was just until the weekends and during the week so he didn’t have to drive all the way. I think I heard something about that.
Well, I heard it from them. I heard them talking. I’d sit and talk to Lillian and Bill for hours and hours at night.
So I heard about him living in the chicken house and how they were nice to him that they would even allow him to live there, you know, this kind of a thing. Well, that wasn’t so strange during World War II. Housing was very scarce.
I know Warner, one of the pilots, he said he and his wife lived in here. Hell, that wasn’t nothing but a chicken house. They lived in whatever they could.
Well, now the barn that got torn down, they lived in that barn. Half the barn was built, right? My granddad and them, they built that and they lived in that as a home while they were building the house. And they had a place where the old smokestack used to come out on the side, you know, where the stove was.
They didn’t have one on the roof. They went out the wall and put a stack up to do the food cooking and so forth. Yeah, they lived in part of it and then they made it into a barn after they built the house.
I think it was the right-hand side where my corn crib was at. Was that where the side they lived in or was it the other side? It was that northeast side. Yeah, that’s where I had my corn crib.
Okay, I don’t know. It had a little hole in the wall. Yeah, I didn’t remember seeing that.
Well, I had tin nailed over it. Oh, okay. I wish you wouldn’t have torn that barn down.
Yeah, me either, but it’s done. I went over to the Winchey house and, you know, they beaded ceiling. Man, that’s the best wood.
They only bought that thick, but had them beaded. And, oh, the people in restaurants and so forth, they loved that stuff in the room. And I had that whole ceiling all in long pieces.
Had them stored up in that barn, all moist and all wet. They didn’t pay no attention to that. Okay.
Well, I can remember pulling out nails at the Winchey house. We spent many an hour knocking nails out of boards. Is that right? You set up.
Me and Sidney, that was our job. Maybe that was them ceiling boards. It probably was.
I don’t remember what the boards were. I just remember removing. It was really easy from the ceiling.
I could knock them down, and they came down without breaking the beads on the end. Right. They were in good shape.
And I had them all stacked up. I mean, I had a whole lot of them up there. And he just knocked them all down without looking.
They all went because the buzzards shit on them. The buzzards made a home out of the top of that old barn. Yeah.
They don’t really make a nice home. No. It’s that diet that helps.
Yeah, they’re kind of ugly. Well, then he took down the old tractor shed where the B. John Deere used to sit. Yeah.
Two. Well, I don’t know whether he took it down or whether it fell down. I’m not real sure.
Yeah. Either one. You know, I had iron stacked out there.
Of course, I’m a scrounge. I use all that kind of stuff. I had I-beams and everything.
And then I just loaded it all and took it to the junk pile. It’s gone. It needed to go to the junk pile.
It needed to go there. I’d have saved me some of that stuff that I could build. You know, I like to build things with my welder.
You know, I always play with it. Yeah, you had raw material up there. Yeah, well, I mean, I didn’t like to go buy it new.
I could stick it out at old implements that worked. Well, believe me, Bill and I and Sidney went to every junkyard on a regular basis. I was there the day he found the drums.
He said, oh, look at these. And they were ugly when they fit. But you see, he had a good mind.
He made something out of that. It was real neat, I think. Oh, yeah, those drums, we’d never get rid of the drums.
They, for years, were a conversation piece. And one was for Sidney and one was for me. And Sidney, you know, if he wants it, he can have it back.
But he hasn’t asked for it, so it’s up in California. Yeah, I thought they was cute. Everybody who ever saw it, when guests would come in, they’d say, is that a drum? You know? A very unique thing.
So. I always say, I don’t know, maybe I tease you all about it, your scientific minds. They reflect back when Bill used to take that wet horse shit and broom waste and he used to make the whitest smoke out of it.
And I watched him do it, man. I mean, he can lay down a white smoke screen. Well, I heard all the stories about working at the crazy water crystal plant, too.
Do what? He worked for a time at the crazy water crystals. Oh, yeah. I bet he was a pisser.
Yeah. I remember when he worked down there. That and when they put all the hitching posts up on top of the buildings in Tharndale.
Oh, it was Halloween on the next morning. They’d have cows up on top of the roofs of the dam buildings. Outhouses were all over the place.
And let me say, I bet it was him. His mind said that, you know, the trains used to drop, stop and drop stuff off at the depots and whatnot. Well, the train was stopped.
They took a chain and put it around a cistern and hooked it to the train. The train took another train pulling the cistern. Oh, there was pranksters here.
They didn’t have nothing else to do. No, they had to invent their own entertainment. Pulling the cistern with a train had great entertainment.
You know, I still remember the last few steam trains coming through. Oh, you used to be, when you were a little kid, you were hooked on steam trains. Johnny Dicklehorn and his damn steam train.
Yeah. In your sleep, you’d blow the whistles on that train. You were really intrigued with it.
And they were something to look at. Oh, they were something to see. They’re not like the modern trains.
Everything was done by train. When I was a teenager and worked at Steve Riggers, I had to do the cream testing at night when I got through with the cream. I’d put it in the pickup.
We’d haul it up and put it in the depot. And that night the train would stop and pick up the stuff. You’d ship stuff just like UPS or something like that.
Yeah, it was the UPS of its time. And, I mean, they stopped. They had several stops every day in Thornhill.
Had the big depot over there. People brought stuff over there or they’d receive stuff over there. That was our, you know, mode of transporting things around.
There weren’t big 18-wheel trucks and stuff. No, very few of those around. And they didn’t make regular runs anyways.
It was all done by train. Well, a whole lot of it was. And that old depot there had benches in there.
And then the train would come by. They’d pick up the mail. They had a thing out there.
The train didn’t stop. It just went by and picked up the mail. They had a postal department put them up there.
There weren’t big platforms out there. If you shipped something in, like cotton bales, they’d drop. They had a ramp to get up on this big platform.
And that was the height of the train, flat cars. And they’d drop the bales on there. Or if you shipped something in or out, they just had steel planks to let down to load.
And they just put it on this platform. And then it was about truck height. And they could back a truck up to it.
Or they had a ramp you could drive up on it. And it was a great big thing, a big platform out there that you could load. I remember that platform, I think.
Yeah, I remember the trains coming through. Barely. And the other thing I heard, I don’t know if it’s true or not, is coming up in the Thorndale, the brushy bottom uphill, they took wax and put it on them tracks.
So they couldn’t pull out. Oh, God. They had to have something to do.
A bunch of shysters. I remember that old city jail was still there, that concrete. It used to be an iron cage thing with iron bags about that large.
It’s crossed like there’s holes in it, you know. That was the jail, Thorndale jail. They locked some people up in there, drunks and so forth.
Then they put forms that made concrete. Had the steel frame that made a concrete thing. It’s still sitting in Thorndale.
And they had big steel doors with great big padlocks. And they surfed and they had them. When I was a teenager, I got in real bad trouble.
I mean, a bunch of us, 10-year-old Raymonds Oakley, we put a bunch of chewing gum up there in the box. It was a Kegel. One morning, the deputy was out of the house.
I said, they’re looking for me. I don’t know whether Dad paid the fine or something for me putting chewing gum in the jailhouse lock. Had to do something.
Yeah. Yep. Well, there was hunting and fishing.
There was a lot of hunting and fishing that went on. I mean, I don’t know when the great Robert versus Bill controversies and all that. They were always in competition.
Oh, well, it was really not the fishing. The hunting? It was a competition thing is what it was. Yeah, anything.
Yeah, they’d compete with each other, try to outdo the other one with the name of the game. Yeah. Whatever they were doing, that was really what they were doing.
It didn’t matter what it was. Now, Robert, he was addicted to guns. He was so, the guns fascinated him.
Too bad he didn’t get an arm. He’d have plenty of them to play with. Oh, yeah.
More than enough. They would get mad at Robert. But the next day is probably fishing together.
Yeah. That’s just the way it went. And Lillian had Esther across the street.
What? Esther was Lillian’s and Aline. Aline more so than anybody. Yeah.
They were like sisters or better. The other thing I remember is the day Harold died. Huh? I remember Harold dying in that Econoline van, Econoline thing.
He had a traffic accident. Harold, Aline’s husband. Oh, yeah.
He got killed. Pretty young guy, too. Yeah, he wasn’t old.
He was a little bit heavy drinker. Well, yeah. I think that contributed to his problem, that accident he had that day.
Yeah, but I didn’t know that part of it. No. I was pretty young still, I think.
Yeah, well, that’s what happened. He was intoxicated, which he was nearly every week. He was pretty much of a lush.
He was a nice guy, but he had a drinking habit. Well, he wasn’t alone in that. Well, he had company, yeah.
Yeah. Willy, until he got, until he, when Willy quit. Then he’s, everybody that drives with him.
He was a sorry dog. Yeah, anyone else that now was, his old drinking buddies are all sorry dogs. Willy had it pretty bad, too.
But then all he would do is drink. Mountain Dew is what he would go. He would still go to the beer joint.
He didn’t lose any weight or anything. He just went to the beer joint, ordered Mountain Dew instead, instead of beer. It looked kind of like beer.
So. Now, I just had a pretty rough go on her. She had to make up that school year then that she left.
Well, I would, she probably should have just repeated that year, right? No, I think she, I think she made it through. She didn’t lose any weight. I don’t think she did.
Well, now you, you yourself were, were, what, saluted touring at San Gabriel High? Yeah. You know what, being that is not that hard to do. No, no, I made the highest boy.
Highest boy. Okay. No, there were two other boys.
Well, I was a pretty poor student. Were there girls, too, or was it just three? Oh, yeah, the girls were valid at touring. Sergeant Ned Yeager was a little bit valid.
Okay, I thought, I thought there was only three of you. You had three boys, is what you had. No, no, I had three boys and three girls.
Okay. Three girls, three boys, three girls. So you’re the highest boy.
Yeah. Got a scholarship. Went with the Schreiner Institute at Kerrville.
And you didn’t go? No, I didn’t go. My mom and dad wanted me to go to A&M. Oh, that’s where all this came from, originally.
Huh? This going to A&M thing came from. Well, all these real old people thought A&M was the, the, the place to go, you know. Yep.
And, uh, and my bank told me I didn’t go. I don’t think I’d have made it. Them days at A&M, all there was, was cadet corps, and it was raunchy.
I mean, they were tough. It was tough enough when you went. It was tough enough when I went.
It was even worse then. It was pretty bad. We heard stories, well, actually, there was remnants of that raunchiness.
Still have it. That they didn’t talk about, yeah. But, I don’t know how anybody made it over that.
I don’t know how I made it either. You know, I was a very poor student. Like I told you, I have memory problems.
I can’t, to this day, I’ve never finished a book, reading a book, in my life. All the way through. And I, I just don’t have the memory to, and I didn’t have it.
It’s a wonder that I went into places that I went with that handicap. And I knew I had it all the time. And it’s really hurting me.
It’s hurting me all my life that I couldn’t do that. And I don’t know why I couldn’t, I just couldn’t. I had no, I had no long-term memory recordings.
It didn’t want to go. Like I said, it mattered. I made it to where I did it.
That couldn’t have gone, well, I guess farming is a little bit different. You knew where to plant. Well.
That’s a guess. It’s kind of, it’s a kind of a. See, I had algebra. I had hell to get through algebra.
I had to take the final exam in order to make it, make a passing grade. And I got to geometry. And that was a breeze to me.
Yeah, I would imagine that would be a breeze, yeah. And I thought that was great. But some of the courses in English was hell on me.
Yeah. And they had a disadvantage. The first year I went to high school that they hired an English teacher that didn’t teach.
Who just told jokes? I had no English one in my whole career. They finally fired the guy when there was about a month or so of school left. But what you going to do? Yeah, right.
That was kind of, I had no English one in high school. So the grammar part that they hammered into me. And then when I had English two, you know, I was lost.
And I made the grade, but it was just barely over. All they did was told jokes. And they finally, the school finally caught on that that’s what it was.
We wasn’t going to, our students wasn’t going to say nothing. No. We was having a good time not having no English class.
Anyway, that’s my high school. But I made it. At least I got a, well I got, I can officially say I graduated of St. D’Ivoire High School.
Well you actually, then after the war with the G.I. Bill, didn’t you get accepted into Rice? What? Didn’t Rice University? The University of Texas and Rice both accepted me. And I took the entrance thing and I passed them. They both offered me, you know, an enrollment.
You’re better than me. I couldn’t get into Rice. I didn’t know nothing.
I think they went by my work instead of by my… Academic. What I did instead of what I knew. Yeah.
You know, they figured if a guy can do this, he ought to be able to, you know, ought to be able to do this.