Aside from having so many other things to do, I got a bit hung up with concerns about managing all my thoughts in a chronological order. But, more recently, I realized that a blog is actually a collection of thoughts, not a biography! So, it really won’t matter if I bounce around through my history. The important thing is to collect as many remembrances as possible for the reader to peruse. So, with that in mind, I’m going to use these cold winter days to make a concerted effort to continue telling my story.

In my original post from January 2013, I summarized the family history from the 1600’s up to the early 1900’s. Now I want to look back at my immediate family.

Some time during the 1920’s my Dad purchased 20 of the 42 acres that my Grandfather owned in order to build his own homestead. He, himself, built a three room house consisting of a kitchen, bath, and bedroom with a covered porch on the rear that extended from end to end. That porch would later be enclosed to make a long living room. “Daddy” married “Mother” in 1930, and they began the process of developing what would be a garden place completely surrounded with wide beds of shrubbery of all kinds and large areas of lawn. Several large oaks grew on three sides of the house and created a canopy that nearly covered the whole structure. A long tear-drop shaped driveway extended from the front gate back to the house, around a huge oak tree, and back out to the gate. I would spend many hours riding one of our horses around that circuit, as did my siblings. Our location was well out from town with our nearest neighbors being one mile to the north and ta half mile to the south. Heavy southern forest surrounded us. Behind our house was our barn, with a milking room, stalls, feed room, and chicken room. We had Jersey and Guernsey milk cows, an occasional bull, calves, horses, goats, chickens, ducks, and rabbits. My oldest brother, Kurt, was in FFA in high school and started raising pigs as a project. It seems that pigs multiply like rabbits, because it wasn’t long before we had quite a few of them in a large fenced area in the woods behind the barn. Other than the horses, most of the livestock was for our consumption and occasional sale. It was fun and, often, educational growing up on a farm. It was only as I became older, with responsibilities of milking, feeding, and other chores, that the fun became work.

A large grassy field separated our home from my grandparent’s, which was located well back from the road, with a long gravel driveway running back to the house. Our horses and cows kept it grazed short. I would make many trips across that field to spend time with “Mama an Papa”, as they were known by all the families. I had a special bond with Papa since I was the “baby” of our family and was born on his 70^th birthday. Behind their house was a barn that held a 1912 flat-bed log truck and a 1917 sedan. I don’t remember the make of them, but I remember how mystical they seemed to me, with their wood-spoked wheels and rusty bodies. They remained there until the termite infested barn eventually collapsed onto them. Papa, as well as my Dad, never wanted to get rid of anything with sentimental value. Along with the barn were two long, elevated turkey houses, a poultry processing shed, and a brooding shed with incubators and heated runs for baby chicks. Papa had developed a commercial poultry business many years before I was born, and as a young boy our family would, at times, spend all day helping to process chickens and turkeys.

Our property was located on US Route 90, five miles East of Vidor, Texas, about twenty miles from Louisiana and roughly fifteen miles, “as the crow flies”, from Sabine Lake which connects to the Gulf of Mexico. US 90 was the main route across the south, extending from Jacksonville, Florida to San Diego, California. It would be replaced by Interstate 10 in the 1950’s. Highway 90, as we called it, was a two lane concrete roadway with no paved shoulders. It’s hard to imagine that, as a child, that “major” highway had very little traffic. We could take walks or ride bicycles on the road and seldom have to move off into the grass for vehicles to pass. I was born in 1944, a year before the end of World War II. I can remember, as a young child, sitting on our gate with Mother, watching Army convoys passing by. Seaports in Florida and New Orleans were major ports for the return of soldiers from the European theater and they traveled this road to get to forts throughout the south and west. These convoys would sometimes number hundreds of vehicles carrying troops, tanks, artillery pieces, and equipment. Also tanker trucks, jeeps by the dozens, and airplane bodies with the wings removed. We would wave our arms and our American flags as they passed by, and they would wave back and honk their horns to us. It was almost magical for a very young boy, and it was something to which I looked forward with great anticipation.