A memory taken off The Journal so I'd have something to post. It's just a note about my granddad who I vaguely remember. If I've posted this before, my apologies. Someone remind me and I'll remove it. In my world, he and Elisa started it all. William Carol Boggs In 1939 a few days before Christmas we came back to Wichita Falls from the cotton patch where we wet every fall to pick cotton. Mom and dad could not find a house to rent for what we could pay. All our belongings were in our car, a 1932 model sedan. We stayed with mothers sister and brother in law while they continued to look for a place we might rent. Dad’s sister and brother in law found somebody who had a large tent we could use for a minimal charge and we pitched dithers tent on theWe lived there for almost three months before a man across the road from us had a small house that came up for rent. He let us have it for what dad could afford to pay from his saving from monies earned during our three months out pulling cotton. Our landlord’s name was Morris and everyone referred to him as Jew Morris. I walked to school each morning with his son. Mr Morris was something of a fixture in Wichita Falls. He had a wagon, a produce wagon he loaded each morning with fruits and vegetables. I was a green wagon, trimmed in red, and agents horse pulled this wagon all over Wichita Falls. Selling fresh fruits and vegetables, whatever was in season, up and down the streets of Wichita Falls. The same routes every week. Occasionally his son would go with him on Saturdays or in the summertime and help out. When they were really busy I would go with them and would earn a quarter which I gave to my mother for groceries or lunches. It was while we were living in Mr Morris’s house my grandfather (my dad’s daddy) came to see us. It’s the only time I remember him visiting us. He lived with my uncle Sam in Breckenridge and Sam brought him up in his truck to spend a week. Pa, as every one called him, was born in 1859 in Winchester, Clark County, Kentucky. I never learned just when his family moved to Texas but in the 1870 U. S.Census, Pa is listed as a stock hand on a ranch outside of Breckenridge, Texas. Pa twice worked on a trail drive taking cattle to the railhead in Kansas. When he came to visit us he wore black pants with a matching black coat. On the sleeves of his striped white shirt he wore graders to hold his sleeves the right length for his coat. He wore a black western style hat with no crease and a straight brim with low-quarter black shoes. And he sported a large, white handle bar mustache. He was seventy-nine years old. He had worked on ranches and the cotton fields until the oil boom that hit that country around Breckenridge, Ranger, and Eastland in 1930 and 1931. Pa had a sense of humor. Mom would asked him to watch me and keep an eye on the baby (Kenneth) who was only about a year old, while she went to the store to get something for supper. Basically he would tell her, “no problem, Katy, you go ahead and take your time. I’ll keep an eye on the baby. I’ll just sit the baby in that red ant den out in the from yard and let him play with the ants while you’re gone. Mom would pretend to believe him and throw a hissy and Pa would give out a belly roll laugh. We only lived in the Morris house for a few months and moved over on the East side out on River Road, out past where Duncan Street became River Road, just inside the city limit. There were five houses out there and all five used a water well to draw their water. Our house was the closet to River Road. We were a few hundred yards up slope from Holiday Creek and less than a quarter mile from the Wichita River. We lived there two years and didn’t go to the boll patch. I’ve often thought that was the best place I ever lived and up to that time it was the longest I’d ever lived in on place. We were living there when Pa died in Breckenridge. We drove down to his funeral. I wasn’t going to the funeral but was to stay with other kids who were not going. Then dad changed his mind and I went to Pa’s funeral. Dad lifted me up so I could better see Pa in the casket. I cried when I saw him lying there. Pa was a couple months short of eighty and there were many people at his funeral. I was six years old but the experience made me wonder about life and death for the first time. It made me sad and a little bit afraid.
Understandable Bill - I don't agree with young children being at funerals I love the names of American places, so poetic
Your Pa sounds like quite a character, @Bill Boggs . He might have been one of the last cowboys. I think I would have enjoyed knowing him.