Floating down the Brazos

When I was in 8th grade Don Roe came to our church as the Minister of Music. His son Johnny was a year younger than me but 2 years behind me in school. Don invited me to take a float trip down the Brazos with them.

I think we spent two nights out on the river, so I got out of school early on Thursday and was out all day on Friday. Don and Johnny picked me up at the drugstore at the corner of Handley Drive and Lancaster (Hwy 80/Division) and we drove somewhere near Glen Rose for our trip down the river.

It was really fun floating down the river. Somehow we put the boat in the river upstream and someone took the car and boat trailer several miles down the road to a park where we were supposed to come out. Occasionally we fished while we floated down the river and we talked and we just hung out. Of course, Don was always singing. Since we didn't get on the river until fairly late in the day on Thursday, we didn't go very far when we stopped before sundown to build our camp.

Johnny and I gathered wood for an open fire and Don made something for us to eat. I have no idea what we ate. I remember finding a trot line that someone had put out just above the rapids. There were a couple of fish on it and the guy came by sometime that evening and took them off.

The next day was fairly uneventful until Don saw a school of gar coming down the river behind the boat. We quickly pulled the boat over onto the bank, again just above some rapids. Gar have alligator type mouths with rows of sharp teeth. I guess they can be dangerous. After we got out of the boat Don loaded his shotgun and started shooting the gar as they came by where we were standing. Sometimes the concussion of the shot would stun some of the fish and they'd wash up on shore by the rapids. Johnny and I were then supposed to take big rocks and crush their skulls. It was really kinda exciting.

The other thing I'll never forget is what Don did while we were floating down the river. He pulled his pants down, hung his rear over the back of the boat, and proceeded to take a dump. A few seconds later these little brown logs came floating down by the me in the river at the front of the boat. Gross!

We floated a long way and were on the river all day but we weren't anywhere near our take out point. It was getting dark so we floated until we came to a place where there was a house. We pulled over to shore there to find out how much further the park was. It was still a long way away. By the road we were only going a few miles, but the way the river twisted and turned we would have had to have gone 5 or 10 times that much further. The guy helped us pull the boat out of the water and carry it to a place where we could load it onto the trailer. Then he took Don to get the truck and trailer from the park. After we loaded up and drove home it was pretty late and we had church the next morning.

I had a good time. I was also pleased years later when Don told me why I was invited. He said he'd learned that to build a good youth choir you had to recruit the leaders. Even as an 8th grader he recognized me as a leader of my grade and a future leader of the entire youth group, so he wanted to get me to know and like him.

There are lots of Don Roe stories. He was quite a character, but I'll always thank him for teaching me to enjoy singing and I know he always had a heart for the Lord.

Basketball - Junior year

I began my sophomore year at 5'2" and grew to 5'7" by the end of the year. When my junior year started I was up to 5'9" and still growing. When we had our one school pep rally of the year at the start of the basketball season, Coach Howerton announced me as "the most improved player on the team." I had gone from almost cut from the B-Team as a sophomore to a member of the varsity as a junior.

Memories of the season include the first game in which I played. We played Richland at their gym. They ran a full court press the entire game and beat us by about 8 points. With 10 seconds to go in the game the second one of our guards fouled out. Coach put me in and simply said, "get through the rest of the game without a turnover." After the made free throw they were still running the press. I tossed the ball into Dwight, the other second team guard, and he quickly passed the ball back to me. I quickly passed the ball up to someone at half court, ran past the half court line, and got the ball back. The clock ran out and I hadn't turned the ball over. Coach said, "good game." In the scorebook the 10 seconds went down as a full quarter played. I ended up playing enough throughout the year to letter.

The highlight of my junior year was the Fort Worth Optimist Tournament. It was Fall 1966 and, while intergration was already taking place, there was still a Texas high school Negro league and the regular UIL league. I.M. Terrell and Dunbar were the two Fort Worth schools that were still all black and played in the Negro league. Every other school in Fort Worth was intergrated except Eastern Hills. We were the last all white high school.

I.M. Terrell was the defending state Negro champions and went on to win the league in the 66-67 school year, its final year in existence. Terrell was invited to play in the Optimist tournament. It would be the first time an all white high school played an all black high school in Fort Worth athletics. There would be about 2,000 people in Public Schools Gym, now the Billingsley Field House, with 1,000 whites in the lower portion of the stands around the court and 1,000 blacks in the upper portion of the stands ringing the court.

I.M. Terrell had a great team! If you couldn't dunk, you couldn't be on the team. Every player could dunk the basketball. The coaches told us not to watch their warm ups because they didn't want us to get psyched out. I wasn't going to get to play anyway, so I watched them. As they came out to the dressing room hallway onto the court the upper portion of the stands started this hissing sound, "sssssss". The players ran single file like a big black snake completely around the court. All the time the "ssssss" was going on. The first 4 or 5 guys carried basketballs in their hands as they were running. When they completed the lap around the court they dribbled to the basket. Reaching the basket, they jumped and dunked the basketball. "Whoomp!" went the upper section of the gym as each player dunked the ball. After everyone had dunked the ball a guard dribbled to the basket followed by one of the post men. The guard flipped the basketball up on the blackboard and the trailing post man jumped up, grabbed it in mid-air, and slammed it home with a resounding dunk to an even louder "Whoomp!" from the crowd. It was incredible! They then went about the normal warmup routines still ocassionally dunking the basketball, and each time they dunked the crowd went "Whoomp!"

It was a close, well played game with neither team getting more than a couple of points ahead of the other. In the middle of the 3rd quarter they stole the ball at around the top of key on their defensive end. David Payne, a senior 6'2" guard who played 4 years at UTA, grabbed the ball, dribbled to mid court, and flipped the ball high toward the basket and Sherman Evans who was running full speed down the court on the break. Evans was 6'4" senior, muscled like crazy, and had a 90' vertical leap. (So, I'm exaggerating a little, but he could really jump!) The ball was actually thrown over the backboard. At that end of the gym there was about a 15-foot walkway between the stands and the court. Evans leaped out parallel to the ground and batted the ball back over the backboard where Lee Shaw, a junior 6'3" forward leaped, grabbed the ball in mid-air, and slammed it home to a tremendous "Whoomp!" from the upper portions of the stands! It was absolutely astounding! It was the most athletic sequence I have ever seen in a basketball game. That play took a 3 point lead to 5 and the game was never in doubt after that. They probably won by 10 or 12. That played simply crushed us.

Terrell lost the championship game to Paschal, but not before an empty whiskey or gin bottle had been tossed from the upper reaches of the gym onto the court, splattering glass all over the court and cutting the scorekeeper. Terrell didn't like to lose, and when they got behind you could expect the crowd to get raucous and throw stuff on the court. Later that year they had a riot when they were playing Dunbar and bricks were added to the bottles raining down on the court.

That tournament was easily the highlight of my junior season even though I didn't play. I played in a few games, enough to letter but nothing memorable. I do remember our post season/ off season inter-team championship, but that's another story.

10th Grade basketball

I entered 10th grade at Eastern Hills High School as a 5' 2" 14-year old. Not only was I very small, I was younger than my classmates. By age, I should have been in the 9th grade. Unlike today, 10th grade was the first year we were actually in the high school building.

Meadowbrook and Handley junior highs fed EHHS and, if you recall from my earlier stories, Handley had beaten Meadowbrook for the 9th grade championship. That meant there would be a lot of competition for the basketball team. We didn't have a 10th grade team, just a varsity and a B-team or JV.

At 5' 2" I was very small but I was very fast and a good ball handler and defender. I thought I was pretty good. Little did I know how close I came to getting cut as a sophmore.

We practiced with the varsity. So you can get an idea of my relative size, this was the starting lineup for our varsity.
Wayne Nash, center, 7'0" senior (They listed him as 6'11" in the program to keep the expectations and hype down)
David Wolliman, forward, 6'8" senior
John Heatherly, forward 6'4" junior (Ralph Hill a 6'5" senior was in the starter here until be broke his foot and football was over bringing Heatherly in)
David Hannebutt, guard, 6'2" junior
Jerry Miller, guard, 6' senior
Tommy Thompson, guard 5'10" senior
Jimmy Aycock, guard, 5'11" senior
Other guys were Danny Harris a 6'3" senior guard
Dwight Smith a 5'10" junior guard
Phillip Berry a 6'4" junior center
and some other juniors and seniors.

As far as 10th graders my competition at guard was Jay Worley 6'1" (he was a "star", scored a lot of points but wouldn't play defense, and was given a varsity jersey as a 10th grader but chose to play on the B-team), Charlie Cook 6'0", Jimmy Swanson 6'2", and my brother Gary 5'9". Gary was playing football so he wasn't around the first part of basketball practice. When football was over the starting QB, a junior, decided he wanted to play basketball, too. He'd been the starting point guard at Handley in the 9th grade but didn't play in 10th grade. That bumped me back a little more. In addition, there were a couple of other juniors trying out as guards.

As I've said before, I thought I was pretty good. I was fast and I could play defense. Most importantly, I hustled all the time. We would run wind sprints at the end of practice and I'd win almost every time. That would remain true throughout my high school career. I remember in practice that I would particularly make Danny Harris look silly. I would steal the ball frequently on his dribble and deflect his passes like crazy. Coach Howerton would yell at him and tell him, "You're a foot taller than he is and you can't get the ball past him?" Danny was a great guy but sometimes it seemed I had his number.

I really didn't play that much in the games, so I have no memories of them. I also kept the scorebook for the varsity games. I learned later that the only reason Coach Howerton didn't cut me was that I hustled so hard and had such a great attitude. Even though I was small I could hold my own in practice and worked the varsity guys hard. Maybe I'd grow, so he kept me that 10th grade year. I'm sure glad he did and I did grow. I was 5'7" by the end of the 10th grade and ready for my junior season.

Summer in Sudan part 2 - On the Farm

While we had fun in town, the real fun was going out to Uncle Blackie and Aunt Elsie's farm with my cousins Van and Patsy.

Their farm was several miles outside of town. After traveling several miles of "paved" roads the last turn was onto a sandy dirt road that was a real mess when it rained. The paved roads were of a tar and gravel composition and weren't really that good. When Pleaston View Drive in Arlington got paved it was the same tar and gravel composition. They owned 640 acres and there were several more sections, a section is a 640 acre plot, that belonged to the Seymour family that they sometimes farmed or that we could go hunting on.

Before they built a new house on the paved road when we were much older, they had a small house surrounded by a few trees. As you know, there aren't too many trees in West Texas and when you find two or three together you usually find a house. So their house was very typical. We always went into the door on the backside of the house away from the road. I don't know if there was even a door on the road side. When you came to their house you pulled off the road and into the chicken yard between the house and the barns and other out buildings. When you went in the door you were in the litchen. There was a bedroom to the left of the kitchen and a large living room when you went straight on through the kitchen. Off the living room was one or two other bedrooms, or maybe it was just another bedroom and the bathroom. Anyway, it was a small house.

The water came from a well and a windmill kept water pumped into a holding tank from which the livestock was watered. The well house was a thick walled stucco building and inside was a that was kept very cool by the stucco walls where they kept a lot of canned goods. I always thought that it was really neat how cool it was in that room even when it was 100 degrees or so outside.

To the west of the house about 100 feet was the main barn. It was larger than the house and held the sheltered portion of the hog pen, the cattle stalls, and the hay loft above the stalls. South of the house was the hen house and between the barn and the hen house was the well house. The area by the barn was fenced with a combination of wood planks running horizontally and hog wire. Where that fence stopped a single strand of electric wire fence ran around the well house and hen house and on around to the road. There was a wire fence that ran all along the road except where the house and driveway around the house were. The land to the west of the barn was an area for the cattle to graze. South and east of the house were the garden and usually a field planted in maize. I suppose they could have had cotton in there sometimes, but I remember maize. On the rest of the 640 acres there were large cotton fields and maize fields. Sporadically, there were grazing areas that were not tilled.

That's the physical layout of the farm and the site for our adventures.

The chickens ran all over the area between the house and the hen house. They had lots of chickens. We'd gather fresh eggs from the hen house every morning and every evening. At lunch, if we were going to have gried chicken, we got to go out and pick our chicken. We select one and go catch it. Sometimes we had to select another one more easily caught. After we caught it we had to kill it and clean it. I don't rember a whole lot about that process but we were shown how to do it and did it. Aunt Elsie always said I was really good at snapping the chicken's neck and killing it. Gary was always too squimish and couldn't get a good, quick break. I remember Van catching one and chopping its head off with a hatchet. You've heard the expression "running around like a chicken with its head cut off"? Well, I've seen it! That chicken ran around in circles all the time spurting blood. Finally, it quit and died. I guess Aunt Elsie always gutted it and plucked the feathers. I don't really remember doing that. Anyway, Elsie's chicken was always great, and, for Gary, we always had mashed potatoes. He loved Aunt Elsie's mashed potatoes.

Any leftovers that weren't fit to save were thron to the hogs. They really like the leftovers and would really go at it eating them. I didn't liek the hogs much. They stunk, they were big, and I was warned they could hurt you. When they ran out of bacon or ham they'd load a hog into the pickup truck, tie it in securely, and take it to the butcher shop in town. A few days later there was fresh bacon, pork chops, pork loin, ham, and sausage.

We helped feed and milk the cows, too. Milking a cow isn't as easy as it might appear. You had to tie their head up so they wouldn't reach around and bite you and you had to be careful they didn't kick you with their hind leg. If you knew what you were doing the cows didn't give you much trouble. Obviously, I didn't or at least didn't do it well. The normal way to make a fist is bring all your fingers together at the same time or may even bring your little finger, then ring finger, and on up first. You don't get any milk that way. You have squeeze the teat with your index finger first and then then middle finger and on down to squeeze the milk out while kind of puuling down on the whole teat. When you have both hands going right you can get alternating steady streams going and get the cow milked in good time. Perhaps the cows didn't like us because we were also known to direct the stream at someone standing nearby and have milk fights that way.

They also had ducks that swam in the stock tank and nested in the barn. They didn't eat the duck eggs. They let them accumulate until a duck sat on them for the 28 days or so required and hatched them. One day when Buddy and Travis were there with us we had a brilliant idea. We gathered up a bunch of the duck eggs and went up into the hay loft. There, we moved some of the remaining hay bales around and made a couple of forts, divided up teams, and had an egg fight! Since a lot of these eggs were ones that a duck had been sitting on for days and maybe weeks, these were rotten eggs and boy did they stink! I think we quit when Patsy got hit a by a couple of rotten eggs and went to the house to clean up. When Aunt Elsie found out what we were doing she was livid. She wanted the new ducklings and she didn't want a stinking barn. She yelled at us but we didn't get a spanking or any other punishment that I recall.

Picking cotton is tough. While they had a tractor that had an automatic picker on it, they also hired migrant workers who were paid by the sack for what they hand picked. I tried it for about 30 minutes one day. It was hot. It was hard to get the bole to lets loss of the plant. And, you just didn't get much cotton in the bag for all that work. Van and I fixed that. We crawled up into the trailer that the cotton picker attachment was dumping its cotton into and filled up our bags from that spout! That was much easier picking!

The best tortillas I ever had was from one of those migrant worker kitchens. One evening Van and I were walking back from one of the fields a long way from the house. The workers had already quit for the day and they were staying in one of the old one room houses on one of the adjacent properties. They gotto stay rent free in one of those shacks as part of their pay. As we were walking by we saw that they were cooking dinner. Vam asked them if they had anything we could eat. Thye brought us each a fresh flour tortilla. Up until that time I had never had a flour tortilla. I had only had thin corn tortillas. This flour tortilla was was as big as a pancake, hot out of the skillet. We put a little butter on it and ate it. Boy was it good! Maybe it was just because I was so hungry. Maybe it was because it was the first time I'd ever had a flour tortilla. I don't know. I only know it was good and I remember it to this day.

Well, this has been long enough; but, quickly let me tell one more story. One reason I gave you the layout of the farm was for this story. we were playing baseball over in the maize field. There was enough room between the field and the electric fence by the hen house. The ball was hit and I went back to catch it. Did you know how hard it is to catch a fly ball when you're getting zapped by an electric fence! It was quite a surprise and I dropped the ball. I don't like electric fences. They won't hurt you but they sure scare the beejeezus out of you.

I loved summers in Sudan.

Summer in Sudan, part 1 - In Town

As kids growing up my brother and I would spend at least 2 weeks every summer in Sudan. We split time between Granny's house in town and Aunt Elsie's and Blackie's farm south of town. We had a great time and many memories. I'll try to relate some of them here.

First, getting there and home was often an adventure. Many times we'd ride the bus. Mom would take us to the bus station in downtown Fort Worth, the bus driver would put our suitcase in the storage bin under the bus, and we'd get on for the almost all day ride to Sudan. I don't remember ever getting off the bus on the way. I guess we didn't have to change buses and we took a sack lunch. Anyway, the bus driver would stop the bus by the side of the road when we got to Sudan and let us off. We'd cross the highway to where Granny was waiting. On the trip back we had to wait outside by the road and flag down the bus driver to get on for the return trip.

Staying with Granny was always fun, even though she had no air conditioning. Heck, we didn't have air conditioning until we moved into the country. We had an evaporative cooler in the den that blew down the hallway running through the house into the kitchen. Around 5th grade mom and dad got a window A/C unit for their bedroom. At Granny's we had an evaporative cooler in the kitchen that blew through to the front room. Her house wasn't even big enough to have a hallway. It was literally a 4-room house with a bathroom added on later. The bathroom was really little more than a lean to. It was wide enough to put a cast iron tub in and had a small sink and commode, but the ceiling wasn't more than 6 feet tall. The other rooms were Granny's bedroom, the living room, the kitchen/dining room, and Bob's bedroom. Most of the time Uncle Bob wasn't there. If he wasn't there we slept in the double bed in his room. If he was there we slept on the couch and on the floor, or maybe with Granny in her bed.

Early on, my uncle Bud and Jean Crouch lived in Sudan with our cousins Travis, Buddy, and Carla. Later they moved to Lovington, New Mexico but they'd come to Sudan when we were there. Jean's mother lived a few blocks away from Granny. The one thing I remember about her house was that she always had a bottle of vodka on the table and was drinking it from a glass. Morning, noon, or night she always had her vodka. Travis was a year or two older than Gary, Buddy was my age, and Carla was a couple of years younger. They also had a cousin, Tommy, who was Gary's age and lived in Littlefield. Sometimes he'd come over when we were there. Of course, Elsie and Blackie had my cousins Patty and Van. Patty was Travis' age and Van was Gary's age. As you can tell, that's a bunch of kids around the same age, so we had fun.

Sometimes we would have baseball games, sometimes we'd walk all over town, and sometimes we'd have a little bit of mischief. A fun treat was to walk down to one of the grocery stores and get some candy. There were 3 mom and pop grocery stores. Granny didn't like the lady that owned the store closest to us, so she didn't want us to go there. I think she didn't like her because she didn't give credit. It was a block from the house. The other 2 stores were 1 and 2 blocks further away and they gave credit.

So, the Sudan downtown consisted of 3 blocks and there was a grocery store in each block, all on the west side of the road. They also had a bank and a newspaper, The Sudan Bee, on that side of the street. Diagonally across the street as you headed downtown from Granny's house was the Methodist church. In the next block was the Ford dealership, then a hardware store in the next block, and finally the police station and the city park. Going south from Garnny's house, the Baptist church was at the end of the block. Main Street ended with the Baptist church and dead ended into the schools. The Elementary, Junior High, and High School were all on the same block with football field and Baseball diamond (no outfield fence) right behind.

Granny spent years working as a cook for the schools and later she was a cook for the coffee shop at the Sands Motel. All the farmers would gather there for breakfast and we often walked there ( about a mile away) for lunch. It was the best reastaurant in town.

I hope you got a picture of the town, 1200 people with no stop lights. One main street down the center of town with Highway 84 on the north end and the school on the south end. I forgot one of the other prime spots. On the highway was the Dairy Bee. That was the hangout for all the high school kids. Every night they'd drive up and down Main Street, turning around at the school or the highway and occasionally getting an ice cream or Coke at the Dairy Bee.

I said "mischief" earlier. Here is an example. Granny's house had a big porch in front and the roof was at its apex over the front door. High up in the apex was a huge wasp nest, probably 6-8 inches in diameter. Buddy and I (and maybe Van) found a box of rubber bands from somewhere and started shooting them at the wasp nest. When we'd hit the nest the wasps would come swarming after us. We'd run out into the yard until they didn't follow anymore. As we hit them over and over the wasps started chasing us further and further. On our last shot we had to take refuge in the Methodist church across the street. Granny finally realized what we were doing and sent Bob out to burn down the nest. He soaked a rag in gasoline, wrapped it around a broom or hoe or something, set it on fire, and held it up to the nest until it was burned away. It also blackened the white paint.

Bob also had a huge dog, Bo. I think it was part great dane, part boxer. It was huge, tall like a great dane, but much heavier. The butcher at the grocery store was always giving us bones to take to Bo. One day, while playing baseball in the backyard, I stepped on one of Bo's bones and slit open the bottom of my foot. We were playing barefoot. We went most everywhere barefoot. Granny didn't take me to a doctor. She just cleaned the slice, put a gauze bandage on the bottom of my foot, and wrapped it in tape. I had to walk on the side of my foot. I went bowling in Muleshoe like that and on the bus for the trip home.

One other event I remember in Sudan was during the fall when I was about 5. We went to a Sudan Hornet football game to see Bob play. I remember it was extremely cold and I was all wrapped up in blankets. As far as the game went it was always "Bobby Don this and Bobby Don that." He was the Sudan football team. I think he was about 5'10" and 160-170 pounds which was really big for a high school running back in those days. Granny always claimed that the Pittsburgh Steelers offered him a contract out of high school to play pro ball. That would have been in the mid-fifties. Instead, Bob wanted to join the Marines and avenge the death of his brother Jack in Korea. He joined the Marines and became a drunk. He killed his best friend in a DWI single car wreck by running up a phone pole. Since he was a football star and they couldn't prove who was actually driving, even though it was Bob's car, the judge let him go. Many years later when he ran over and paralyzed a kid on a bicycle while DWI the same judge put in jail in Huntsville for a couple of years.

My uncle Bud was also a drunk and was divorced from Jean by the time I was out of elementary school. He too spent some time in county jails for petty, alcohol related crimes. Coupled with my dad's admission that he was an alcoholic and my belief that alcoholism was hereditary, you can see why I've always been afraid of it and abstained from it.

The only other incident I remember was the death of a 15-year old girl. I don't know how she died but Granny made us go to the funeral. I was about 10. It was at the Methodist chuch with an open casket. They moved the casket by the back door at the end of the service and you had to walk by it to get out. I'll never forget the dead girl lying in a casket shrouded by plastic. I've hated open caskets ever since. I want mine closed when I die. At that point I'm dead, leave me alone. I don't want people gawking at me.

C-J Softball

The Citizen-Journal had a softball team for some of the years while I was there, and, of course, I played on it.

Usually, companies have teams for their employees so they can build company morale and cooperation. I'm not sure the C-J accomplished that goal, but we had some memorable times.

In the early years of my C-J teams Mark Strickland and Verne Hargrave were still in the mailroom. Jerry Hyde was our Advertising Director or Sales Manager, and I was just a staff accountant that handled various different roles. As a softball team, we weren't very good and I'm sure we lost more than we won. Most of the time, the players still had a good time.

A prime example of our ineptness occured in a game at Randol Mill Park. We had one out and men on first and second. Tommy Eller was on second and Victor Garza was on first. The batter hit a line drive into left-center field. For some reason Tommy held up on the play to see if the ball was going to be caught but Victor was running from the moment the ball was hit. The hitter should have gotten an easy double. OK, the stage is set. Are you ready for what happened then?

The outfielder fielded the ball off the fence and quickly threw into the cutoff man. The cutoff man fired it to the catcher. Eller, who didn't get a good break on the play, is being waved around third by the coach. He slides into home and is tagged out on a close play by the catcher. A second or two later the catcher tags Victor out as he too is sliding into home. A double play by the catcher at home plate to end the inning. I had never seen that happen before in my life and have never seen it since. Only the C-J could have done it.

The other memorable evening involved Mark Strickland and Jerry Hyde. Strick has always been a loudmouth and very intense in sports games. As usual, he was shouting encouragement, comments, etc. He was also only about 20 years old and still small, about 5-7 150 pounds. He wasn't being negative, just loud. Jerry was a about 6-2 240 pounds. Although he was a member of First Baptist, he did not follow the no alcoholic beverage teachings. Also, Jerry was a mean drunk. He'd had quite a few beers before the game and was getting really upset with Strick and told him to shut up. Jerry was in the dugout. At Randol Mill the dugouts were fence in and the "ceilings" were only about 5 feet tall, so you had to bend over to walk through them. Strick was on deck getting ready to bat. Jerry told Mark to shut up and Mark said no. All of a sudden Jerry was in a rage and going to tear Strick limb from limb. As Jerry was storming through the dugout I stopped him with a shoulder into his chest. Strick went flying down the right field line and junped the fence with astonishing speed. I couldn't believe he cleared out so quickly. The umpire threatened to make us forfeit the game if we couldn't control our players. That too was a first, it was the first time I'd almost seen a team forfeit a game because their own players were angry with one another. Strick never came back to the field and went home. After he calmed down, Jerry went home, too.

About the time I was moving over to WBAP the C-J had a team again. The coach was the Sports Director and he also played 3B. I played shortstop. We were winning by 1 run and the bases were loaded with 2 out. We were in the field. A bouncer was hit just to the left of the third basemen and the bounce went under his glove. I had a really good break on the ball and back-handed it in the outfield grass, planted my right foot (about 6' from the foul line), and looked to throw the guy out at third. I remember being somewhat suspended in time on my right leg, trying to gain enough balance to make a throw. I was also waiting for the 3b to see that I'd made the play and get back over and cover the base. As I saw him move back to the base, I threw the ball and then fell as my momentum carried me over. We got the force out to win the game!

It was a great play! It was also a lucky play, but one I will always remember.

Living in the Country

We moved out into the country during the summer after my sixth grade year. What is now a housing edition on the corner of I-20 and Pleasant View Drive was 2 4-acre plats that my folks had bought. Pleasant View Drive was a 1/2 mile or so dirt/gravel road off of Pleasnat Ridge Road. Pleasant Ridge was a narrow, winding poorly maintained two-lane asphalt road. It was maintained by Tarrant County Precint 2 which meant there wasn't a whole lot of money for upkeep.

East of Pleasant View on Pleasant Ridge was a steep hill. It was called both hiccup hill and Morales Hill. Kelly Elliott Road ended at the top of the hill and that was how wide the hill was, just enough for the narrow raod and then it dropped off on the other side. When you drove over the hill your stomach would come up in your throat and cause you to hiccup. It was called Morales Hill becasue a guy named Morales owned the 4-5 acres on the north side of Plesant Ridge down to where Kelly Elliot started again going north at the bottom of the hill. The hill was full of slum shacks that Morales rented out.

Mom and Dad had bought the first 4 acre tract where we actually put our house a few years before we actually moved out there. I can remember having a garden with lots of tomatoes. I went to all the houses up and down and around Sharon Street in toen selling about 2 pounds of tomatoes for 10 cents. The first tract was heavily wooded, except where we put the garden. The second 4-acre tract was almost barren of trees. An old farmer had owned it. They had several kids and they all lived in a 4 room shack of a house. They boys slept out on the porch during warm weather. Of course, they were gone by the time we moved out there. We used the house for a hen house where we kept out chickens.

We also bulldozed out a stock tank (lake) and built a barn with 3 stalls for our horses. The lake was stocked with perch and largemouth bass. Crappie and catfish washed in from the stock tank on the adjacent property when it rained heavily and the water ran over their spillway. We had a great time fishing in the lake. We brought my Little League team out there for a party after we had finished 2nd in the city. I remember Steve Perry got a hook stuck in his head when he tried to cast out his line. I can also remember fishing out there in the summer when the fish were so hungry they'd bite anything you threw out there. After running out of grasshoppers, worms, and nits of cheese we tried sticking dried leaves on the hook and they even hit that! We caught 50-60 fish in one day. I never cleaned a single one. My mom always did that.

The chickens we had were really unique. A friend of my mom had some chickens that they'd hatched from eggs sent to them from an ad in the Weekly Reader. The chickens were from Chile and they laid different colored eggs. As I recall there 3 or 4 hens and one mean rooster. The rooster was black with a golden neck. When we gathered the eggs we had to keep an eye on him because he would pack at you and spur you with the claws on his feet. He was really mean. One of the chicked was kind of a mattled black and white and was smaller than the rest and dashed around everywhere very quickly. We called her Speedy. She laid blue or bluish green eggs. Another was reddish brown but had feathers coming on either side that looked like a big bushy mustache. We called her Whiskers. She laid brownish pink eggs with purple splotches in them. The other hen was an ordinary reddish brown. I don't remember her name and her eggs were solid brownish pink. We had our picture taken ans a story was run in the Citizen Journal about our chickens that laid the colored eggs. My mom is holding Whiskers in the picture with Gary and me on either side and some of the colored eggs and a normal store bought white egg lying side by side in front of us.

Our first horse was Brown. That was his name and that was his color. He was an old horse, really more of a pony. He was larger than a Shetland pony but not as large as a normal horse. We learned to ride on him. I think we paid $75 for him including his saddle and bridle. The second horse we bought was Beauty. She was a dark brown and white Paint. Her previous owner was a barrel racer and Beauty was her horse. However, Beauty had one rear hip that was higher than the other so she wasn't a competitive quality horse. She has avery easy nature and we had her several years. As we got older Brown was too small so we sold him and bought a pool table with money. We also bought anotherPaint mare. Midnight was a back and white paint. When we had races she always beat Beauty. Just up the road from us a guy had bought the land and started clearing the land to build a house. He also put in a nice dirt road that made an ideal race track. We'd take the horses up there to race them. I'll never forget day when Verne was over. He was riding Midnight and Gary or someone else who'd come over was riding beauty. The went up to the track to race. It was about a 1/4 mile away. My dad and I and I don't know who else were sitting in front of our house waiting for them to come back. We heard someone holler "Go!" and we knew the race was started. 10-15 seconds later you could here Verne hollering, "Whoa! Whoa! Whoa dammit whoa!" I still laugh thinking about him hollering and trying to get Midnight to slow down.

We built a swimming pool ourselves using a kit that we bought from Montgomery Wards. There was a natural depression and gully out in front of the house by the garage, so we put the pool there. There would be less dirt to dig out that way. We dug the deep end until we hit sandstone and couldn't go any deeper. Then after digging around everywhere else to the specifications of the plans, we lined it with sand, and put in a vinyl liner. And, that was the pool. We had a lot of church swimming parties and played a lot of "baseball" games in the pool.

Growing up in the country was great. Swimming, fishing, and riding horses were great. On the down side was cleaning the pool, cleaning out the stalls, and hauling hay. We literally shovelled the crap out of the stall and into a wheelbarrow. Then we dumped it in a pile outside the barn. Later we'd come back with the tractor, scoop up the manure, and dump it in the garden area. That would later get plowed under for the fertilizer. Hauling hay wasn't much fun either. It was hot, sweaty, and itchy. Gary and I got into more than one fight while hauling hay. One time we were hauling hay in using an old 1952 pickup over in Kennedale. We were making 8 cents a bale to haul it out of the field and stack it where the farmer wanted it. At the same time he was paying another couple of guys by the hour to use his tractor and his trailer to stack bales from ther same field. After talking to them we realized that they were actually making more money and using the other guys equipment. ALso, they got to goof off whenever the owner wasn't around , which was half the time. It didn't look so bad becasue they could put a lot more bales of hay on the trailer than we could on the truck. We got back at them though toward the end of the day. A big rain storm was coming in and the farmer wanted us to haul in hay from an alfalfa field. Those bales were a whole lot heavier. He offered us more money, 10 cents, but we said no. We needed to get our own bales home. The other guys had to work doubly hard with the owner right there working with them before the rains came.

Since this has been a book already, I'll quit. I may revisit this someday.