It's taken me over a month to get this written and it's going to be a very long and sloppy post, so settle in...
And here's a picture of Nita, Charlie and Trout. People are not shy about staring or commenting on Nita's height and when she's with Charlie, she sometimes asks them why they say something to her but not to him when he's 3" taller than she is. Both the staring and the comments happened right on cue while we were with them.
Geneva hadn't seen me since I was a little kid. I vaguely remember that train trip from San Antonio to OKC with my mother. Here's a picture of Nita, her mom Geneva and me. For those of you who are counting, Geneva is my first cousin, once removed. Her mother was my great Aunt Rhoda. She's in her 80's and has difficulty standing, but she did it for the picture.
My records indicated that several family members, both Garlands and Woodses (my mother's mother) were buried in Moore, OK, but the only grave we found was that of Nita's and my Garland great grandparents, Minnie and E.R. This is it.
Oklahoma City Memorial
Besides meeting Nita, her sister Iona, their husbands, seeing their mom Geneva again and visiting graveyards, I wanted to see 2 things in OKC. The first and most important is the memorial for those who died in the bombing.
I remember the day of the bombing quite well. Trout and I had carpooled and when he picked me up from work he asked me if I knew anyone who worked in the Federal Building in OKC. I didn't, but having family there and not knowing if any of them might have been harmed set me back a bit.
Charlie and Nita took us to the site. The memorial is very impressive. The bombing took place at 9:02 am on April 19, 1995. The memorial shows 9:01 at one end of a reflecting pool and 9:03 at the other. I think it is best seen at night and we were able to time our visit perfectly from dusk until dark.
The building was torn down. The chairs are located roughly where the people died. That's why they don't appear to be in even rows here. Each one has a name on it. The small chairs are for the children.
Even though it's been 13 years, people still bring things to put on the fence nearby. It's cleaned off periodically and some of those things are put in the museum on the grounds.
On a much happier note, OKC has created a tourist attraction in downtown with a canal. They dug down below grade and created a waterway among old warehouse buildings. We took the tour boat and learned a lot about the city and the state. For example, did you know that Mickey Mantle was a Sooner? And do you know what a Sooner is? And what does Oklahoma mean anyway?
Here he's on his box in one of the early poses. If you walked up just then, you would think he was a real statue.
And here he is with a curious but somewhat reluctant kid. I thought this guy was great.
In the background of the Will pictures, you can see a bit of a waterfall. It's man-made of course, just like the canal you see here.
And this is an example of one of those formerly derelict warehouse buildings with its old business painting on it.
Now about those Sooners... They were the ones who jumped the gun during the OK land rush and sneaked onto the land. Many of them ended up in jail. There is a great life-size sculpture depicting the land rush that goes across the canal. Here are some shots of it.
He said he would only do the work if he could put his dog in it.
And these guys have already crossed the river. See the hoof prints on the bank?
All in all, I felt very comfortable and connected in OK. This sign in the window may indicate why. Anyplace that advertises that it has okra has got to be dear to my heart.
When I lived in Ashland, I was a substitute librarian for the Jackson County Library system. I worked in both Ashland and Medford, filling in for people who got sick or were on vacation. At that time in my life, it was the perfect job for me. My boss and friend was Theresa. An Okie by birth, she now lives in Norman and is the Associate Director for Planning and Operations for the Pioneer Library System which serves 3 counties in central OK.
Earlier I mentioned that my mother was born in Vanoss. There is nothing but a school and a few houses there now, but in the early 1900's it was a bustling town. This was my grandfather, Bunk's garage at the time. That's him at the right edge of the doorway. He always went by B.D.
We went so I could see the location and visit my grandmother, Vercie's grave. If you can read the inscription, you can see that she died just 4 days after her 19th birthday. My mother was a twin and supposedly, the baby, unnamed, was buried with Vercie. I don't even know the gender of the child.
Our stop was too short for me to pay attention to picture-taking, but as it turned out Herb and Zak were racing the following Saturday at Texas World Speedway in College Station, home of those nasty old Aggies, and Trout couldn't miss that. He left the house at 6:30 in the morning and drove 3 hours each way to and from the track to watch the race and to take some pictures. You for some people there is no vacation without racing...
This is Zak (43) and Herb (42) on pregrid.
Here the three of us, Betty, me and Ronna, are with Tex, Ronna's rescue Great Dane.
This is the river. It has a limestone bottom and is very clear and shallow most of the time. You can go down it and find some deeper holes if you really want to swim.
And it really does flood. This marker is about 50 yards out from their house toward the river. If it gets up higher than this, that probably means that they can't get out because the road to their place dips down in places that would be filled with water.
When they bought the land (about 5 acres), it was covered in brush all the way down to the river. It looked something like this, only not as neat. Through the brush you could still see evidence of the wagon ruts of the old road that followed along the river to Fredericksburg.
Now from their house down to the river it looks like this.
This is from the river looking back at the house. They lived in the little cabin to the right until the house was built. It was a one bedroom place. Now it's a two bedroom guest quarters. The main part of the house is in the middle and the garage is to the left. There's an enclosed breezeway between the former cabin and the house, but it's not straight because it cuts around a big oak tree. Very nice.
And here's Ronna with Boots, one of several cats. Ronna and Allen are serious animal lovers. They voluteered for a long time at a wildlife rescue. Ronna mostly worked with the big cats. They said the monkeys were nasty and they couldn't deal with the snakes, but the only injury Ronna got was from a goose.
They had a small garden which I was surprised to see was in raised beds. In Tucson it's better to plant into the ground because of the heat and I thought it would be the same at their place. Allen told me that they had to raise the beds and put soil in them because there's hardly any dirt. It's limestone like the river. And yes, we did eat some of this yellow squash.
I can't leave Johnson City without showing their neighbor's house -- a bit of Santa Fe on the river.
We went over to see the place and it's beautiful with wonderful views from the upstairs especially. Caroline, the owner, has done a great job of decorating and has a lovely terraced garden that she works in constantly according to Ronna.After a few days of R&R and visiting Ronna, Betty and Allen, we went on to San Antonio. Now for those of you who may think that my home town is just a sleepy little piece of Mexico north of the border, San Antonio is now the 2nd largest city in Texas and the 7th largest in the nation. The top 10 in order are New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix, Philadelpia, San Antonio, San Diego, Dallas and San Jose.
The 2nd room was a queen suite, but neither the AC nor the TV in the living room part of the suite worked.
This is the bath of the 2nd room. It was bigger and nicer and had more light than the one of the 1st room.
This is where the breakfast was served. It was good enough even for Trout to get up before 10 so he wouldn't miss it.
You Can Go Home Again
The first house I lived in was at 338 Stace Street. It was built around 1900. My father split it into 2 apartments, added a 3rd and built an additional separate one on the property. I lived here until I was about 6 1/2 and I remember living in every one of those apartments. It's still standing, over 100 years later, but parts of it are in pretty bad shape.
So here I am with my parents in various locations around the Stace Street house compared with what it looks like now.
This is the house from the corner of Stace and Truax. I didn't take a similar picture this time. The trees may be familiar to Arizonans. The ones on the left are salt cedar and the ones on the right are a type of acacia.
This was the backyard. I think I'm about 2. We're under a pecan tree that my grandfather planted.
Here we are on the porch of the apartment that faced the side street, Truax. This is a cropped and blown up version of the corner picture above.
This is me at about 4 from a slightly different angle.
And this is what it looks like now.
This my father and I and a terrified dog on the front porch.
And this is the same porch now.
My First Grade School
As long as we're in the old neighborhood, below are pictures of where I went to 1st grade. It's within walking distance of this house and my mother walked me to school. I remember eating lunch there -- taking it and buying milk or juice. I may have gone home for lunch sometimes, but I don't remember doing that.
This was also where my father went to school some time between 1913 and 1927. This is the oldest building still standing at Hillcrest Elementary and he probably went there. I don't remember going inside it.
Papa's House
When my father went to school here, he lived in a house my grandfather built. Trout and I drove by and it's still there. Eventually it was split into a duplex and my Aunt Elenora and Grandma Pearl lived on each side of it. We hooked up with my cousin, Melba, in the short time we were in San Antonio and we reminisced about the many fun times we had with Grandma Pearl in that house.
Now it has a paved ditch running next to it, but back then, there was a spring fed stream that we played in, caught crawfish and minnows and had a great time. I don't remember it, but Melba says I came up with a scheme to fry minnows in a skillet in the sun one hot day. We got a frying pan from Grandma, caught the minnows and tried it, but it really wasn't hot enough to do much more than make them stink.
This is that house with my father and his siblings from the 1940's and 1950's. The picture on top had to be taken before 1948 because that's when my grandfather, Papa as he was called by everyone, died and he's in the middle of the picture. The one below is of the siblings in front of the house.
Top picture L->R: Daddy (Buster), Agnes, Papa, Mamie, Elenora, Florence.
Bottom picture L->R: Elenora, Florence, Agnes, Mamie, Buster.
I got so distracted by visiting with Melba and her husband, Bill, and going to the cemetery and taking pictures there, that I totally forgot to get a picture of her and me together. However, I came home and found a picture of her mother, Eula on the left, and my mother, Pearl, on the right. I found out that between the time my father died in 1976 and the time my mother moved up to Tacoma, 1994, she spent lots of holidays with Melba's family and with Eula. I know Mama always loved Aunt Eula. So here they are together.
How Melba and I Are Cousins
Now I have to tell this story about how Melba and I are cousins and how we grew up so close and in a lot of ways so much alike. I think it is fascinating. She lacks about a week of being one year older than I am. I was supposed to be born on her birthday. We are cousins of the heart if not genetically and I tell the story because of the step sisters and brothers our kids have, the step cousins our grandkids have and because neither she nor I had kids of our own, but both have step-kids ourselves.
Yes my mother's name was Pearl and so was my step-grandmother's. Grandma Pearl was Papa's 3rd wife and the only grandmother I ever really knew. He had 4 girls by his 1st wife, 1 girl and my father by his 2nd and married Grandma in his later years.
Her 1st husband was named Richardson. They had no children of their own, but they were at a church picnic and a baby boy had been left on the grounds. The umbilical cord was still attached and ants were crawling all over him. Grandma Pearl found him and being childless, she assumed he was a gift from God. She was only 21 at the time, but I think she was right.
This was in 1905 and there weren't many rules about these things anywhere back then much less in the small West Texas town of Ballinger, but the sheriff did insist on keeping the baby overnight. Then he let Grandma Pearl and her husband have him. They named him Gerald and he grew up to be Melba's father.
At one time much later in life, Grandma Pearl was x-rayed. The doctors saw what they thought might be a malignant mass in her uterus, but upon closer examination they discovered it was actually a fetus that had died and hardened in such a way that Grandma never got pregnant again. So Uncle Gerald was a only child. He made up for that by having 6 kids of his own and Melba was one of them.
Melba and I spent a lot of time with each other as kids. She doesn't remember the house on Stace street pictured earlier, like I don't remember about the minnows, but I'd swear she was the cousin with me when I fell and cut my chin at about age 5. Whoever it was, we both thought we were ballerinas spinning around on my mother's highly polished wood floor in the Stace house. We were both wrong. I was so wrong that I fell, broke the corner of a glass-topped coffee table with the back of my head, cut my chin on the way down and ended up in the ER getting stitched up. Nobody worried about the bump on the head back then
Hot Wells House
The house Melba remembers is the house my father built and we moved to in 1952. It was made almost entirely of leftovers from his other jobs (he was a bricklayer and masonry contractor) and from salvaged materials from buildings that had been torn down. This was just 6 years after the end of WWII, so people were still recycling things including building materials.
Hey, anyone under the age of 50 -- it's not a new idea! We do it now because it's the environmentally responsible (and cool) thing to do. People did it then because it was the economically necessary thing to do -- at least in my family.
I must also mention here that we had no air conditioning. The house faced south and that big screened-in porch is on the southeast side to catch the prevailing winds from the Gulf of Mexico a couple of hours away. Those big windows to the left of the front door were later replaced because there was too much wind. I thought that was a shame because even as a kid, I loved those floor to ceiling windows Daddy got out of some old torn down building.
So here's that house from the front. And yes, AZ folk, those are small salt cedars there in the front yard. At first we had neighbors to the right, but eventually a street, New Braunfels, was cut through and we ended up on a corner. At the time, it was the only street that went all the way from the south side to the north side of San Antonio.
Part of the leftovers for this house were split brick pavers. Those formed the living room and dining room floor. They were expensive, but the reason we had them is that they were all "culls" as my father called them. They were supposed to be flat, but these were ones he rejected for his customers because they had warped in the kiln. That meant that the floor was not exactly flat. However, Melba remembers it being just fine for pulling each other around it on throw rugs. Of course my mother kept it spotless and polished and stripped and rewaxed it every 6 months.
Jacks was a popular game of this time involving a ball (we usually used a golf ball) which would head into oblivion on that floor. So we were thrilled when my father added the office (he was self-employed) to the back of the house. The floor was very smooth cement. It was bright red with the color right in the cement. It accepted a high-wax shine well, too.
This is the office on the back of the house. When New Braunfels was cut through, Daddy put a driveway in from the street which made the office perfect for his business since you had to go through their bedroom to get to it from the house.
My Second Grade School and Junior High
One advantage or disadvantage depending on your point of view to this place was that it was across the street from a school -- Hot Wells Elementary and Junior High. There were actually 2 schools on the same piece of ground. They finally tore down the 1st building I had class in. It had been built in 1915 and had 2 floors with 4 classrooms on each floor. Originally it was for all grades, but by the time I got there it was just 1st through 9th. I went there through the 9th grade.
It's all much bigger and nicer now, and it's called Connell Middle School after the principal that was there when I went, but this is one of the main buildings I was in after the 2nd grade.
Highlands High School
For high school, I had to drive or be taken. Some of you may remember that I got my drivers license at 14, so much of the time I drove one of my parents' cars -- usually an old 1952 Chrysler clunk-o-matic.
So this is Highlands High. I tried to take pictures of the parts that were there when I was there. It's much bigger now, although the class following me graduated 800.
This is the entrance to the auditorium. I was very active in drama, so this was the main entrance for me.
And this is the actual main entrance to the school.
And these are some shots from the market area, just a block from the hospital where I was born. San Antonio has the largest Mexican market outside of Mexico.
Family Graves
When we went to visit our family graves at Mission (Burial) Park, Melba and I were struck by how many family members are in the same area. It all began when Papa died. Daddy bought the plot for him, plots for us and the rest of the family followed suit. You can see that many of the headstones are in the same style.
These are people who came and went before us who are buried within yards of each other. Without them, we wouldn't be here.
Melba's dad and mom.
Melba's brother.
Melba's nephew.
Our Grandma Pearl.
Papa. 
Lo's dad and mom.
Our aunts and uncles.
Our cousins.
My Parents, Leslie/L.F./Buster/Smitty and Pearl
One of the delights of this trip was that my cousins gave me pictures many of which I had never seen before. These are 2 of them. My parents got married in April, 1941. I suspect they are from that year.
