Lylabeth

Sand Tarts

2011-08-04T17:19:00.000-07:00

Sand Tarts. Strange name for cookies, huh? If you’ve never had a sand tart, you’re missing something. When I was growing up, my mom usually made sand tarts for special occasions like showers, teas, parties, etc. Sand tarts are the most flaky, tender, good tasting cookie I’ve ever put in my mouth. They are made with very few ingredients, butter (and I do mean butter, not margarine), powdered sugar, flour, vanilla extract and pecans. Then they are rolled in powdered sugar. When you pick one up, you get powdered sugar all over your fingers and usually on your face and your clothes, too. They crumble on your tongue and literally melt in your mouth! I'll give you the recipe later.

I liked them when I was a little girl and I still like them now. I had gone for many years and not made any sand tarts.

This week, I had a special reason for making sand tarts and I’m so glad I did. As the church hostess, I’m responsible for preparing and serving funeral meals to families. This past Monday, I did that for a special family, the Klings, long-time friends of ours. Chris and Stewart Kling’s brother passed away. Their parents, Bill and Florace Kling died within the past two years. Florace had been a friend of mine and I was aware of some of her specialty desserts. I came up with the idea to make some of her favorite desserts and serve them at the family meal after the funeral service. I hoped that her sons and their families would enjoy eating some of the desserts that she was “famous” for. I have several of her recipes, including her cheese cake and her shortbread sticks, so I made them. I remembered that she also made sand tarts. I didn’t have her recipe, but I knew that all the sand tart recipes I’ve ever seen were the same, so I made them. They turned out just like I remembered them, if not better! I made signs for the desserts that read “Florace Kling’s Sand Tarts”, etc. and I had copies of the recipes for the family to take home. They seemed so surprised, excited and appreciative of what I had done. I’m so glad that God placed it on my heart to do that. It brought joy to the family and lots of memories of Florace’s cooking. She was a very organized, precise woman and we talked and laughed about how her recipes were examples of that.

I hope you'll try these and enjoy them as much as I do.

Sand Tarts

1 cup butter (room temperature)
5 tablespoons powdered sugar
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 1/2 cups chopped pecans

Cream butter and sugar. Add vanilla. Work in flour and pecans until well mixed.
Form into crescent shapes. Bake on ungreased cookie sheet at 350 for about 30 minutes or until lightly browned. While warm, roll gently in powdered sugar. They will be very fragile. You will probably break some, but that will just give you an excuse to eat some while they’re warm.

William and William

2011-07-14T03:20:00.000-07:00

Some of the following is a re-run of an earlier post, but I just feel like it needs to be said again to introduce you to some more thoughts I have.

Soon after Art’s Grandma Barnhill died in 2001 (at the age of 101), Art and I spent some time with Art’s mom going through some old photos. There were some very old ones of Art’s grandparents, great grandparents, etc. and I became really interested in them. I asked Art’s mom if I could borrow the pictures so I could copy them. In the midst of that, I decided it would be fun to make Ken and Ross photo albums for Christmas. I’ve always liked to give unusual Christmas gifts…ones with more meaning, more substance than just something bought at a store….something to treasure. I spent many hours copying photos and calling Art’s mom asking questions about the people in the photos. By Christmas I had two books, exactly alike, filled with Art’s family history. One day, while working on that project, it dawned on me that I had nothing like that about my family history. That made me very sad. Thus began my genealogy adventure…the search for my ancestors.

I’ve discovered that either you are really interested in your family history or you are not. There is no in-between. I also discovered that you usually don’t get interested until most everyone who could answer your questions is no longer on this earth to ask. That is certainly my situation. So what do you do? You have to dig for the information. You might be asking….why do you even care who your ancestors were? I don’t think there is a very clear answer. Like I said, you’re either interested or you’re not.

One of the reasons I’m writing this blog is so my kids and grandkids won’t have to wonder who I was and what I did in life and what I thought…in case they are interested someday…..after I’m no longer here to ask.

I never got to meet even one grandparent. They died before I was born. That’s sad to me…sadder the older I get. That means that I missed out on a whole bunch! My grandparents were never even talked about in our house when I was growing up. I’ll never understand that. But when I realized how much I had missed, I became very curious. No, I kind of became obsessed with finding out about my grandparents. Who were they? What were their names? What kind of lives did they live? Were they good people? Or would I be ashamed to find out about them? After several years of searching, I found out those answers.

Check out the pictures below. This is one of my really, really interesting stories I discovered. The old man on the left was William Frank Murray, my great grandfather…my mom’s mother’s father. For a long time he was what a genealogist calls “my brick wall” and I guess he really still is. I can find no trace of him being born or growing up or anything about his parents. He just appears about the time he marries my great grandmother. Well, guess what? On his death bed, he confessed to being John Wilkes Booth!! That’s the guy on the right. What do you think? Looks like it could be, huh? Booth as a young man compared to Murray as an old man? I’m no expert on photo-facial comparisons, but I would sure like to find someone who is. I know you’re thinking…but I thought there was a fire in a barn and Booth died there…..well, some people think that and others do not. Some Booth historians believe that he indeed escaped and lived to be an old man. They lost track of him for about 12 – 15 years and then think he lived in Mississippi, Texas and Oklahoma in his later life. Guess where William Frank Murray lived during that time? Yep and I have the documentation to prove that part of his life. The Booth historian I visited with told me that I would be famous if we could prove that William Frank Murray was really John Wilkes Booth. I’m not sure I want to be famous.

Well, now for a better story or I mean one that is about a better man…my great grandfather on my daddy’s side…another great grandfather named William…William Garey…my daddy’s mother’s father. There’s no“brick wall” here. I have found lots and lots about him, pictures and even copies of letters he wrote. I’ve been to his gravesite in Hardin County, Tennessee. William Garey was a good man.

According to the man who wrote William Garey’s obituary: “Mr. Garey was a farmer and was a successful farmer always enjoying the farm and for many years had owned one of the good small farms in the county, which he kept up well and made a bountiful plenty for those he was commissioned to care for.” He went on to say, “William Garey was one of God’s noble men always standing for that which is right and best for his fellow man. He professed religion in early life and joined the Cumberland Presbyterian Church and was a ruling elder for many years always caring for and supporting the Church and was a leader in his community for schools.” In the writings of my Great Grandfather Garey, there is strong evidence that he was a deeply spiritual man of God.

Grandpa Garey had quite an interesting childhood. His parents emigrated from Ireland to New Orleans. William was the youngest of six children of David and Mary Ann Garey. On July 10, 1852 David died of yellow fever and then just a little over a year later Mary Ann died on August 1, 1853 leaving 6 children. The four oldest children were apparently able to take care of themselves, but the two youngest boys, Bartley, age eight, and William, age five, needed to be cared for. They were given to a Dutchman who kept them for about two years and then took them to a male orphan asylum on June 19, 1854 where they stayed four years.

In the early winter of 1858, J.H. Hawkins and Rueben White, farmers of Hardin County, Tennessee loaded wooden staves onto a flat boat and floated up the Tennessee River, down the Ohio River, down the Mississippi River to New Orleans to sell their goods. Needing extra help on the farm back in Hardin County, Mr. Hawkins applied to the necessary authorities while they were there and went to an orphanage to select a young man to take back with him. From among over 100 boys, he chose Bartley Garey. It is said that Bartley refused to go without his little brother, William, so because Mr. Hawkins could not take both boys, Mr. White decided to take William. The four of them walked back to Tennessee. The boys grew up near each other on neighboring farms and according to William “both had good homes – none better in Hardin County.” And William went on to say, ”But here we were 1,000 miles away from any relative of any kind, and everything different from what it was in a large city.” He said “Imagine dear reader if you can how two little children would feel under such circumstances.” Talking about the White family in his later years, William recalled, “I was living with them, Reuben and Caroline White, an orphan boy with no relatives save one brother and hundreds of miles away from my place of birth, was given a home by them and cared for as one of their own, under those circumstances.”

My great grandfathers,William Murray and William Garey. Two very different men.

Summer Camp

2011-07-13T05:44:00.000-07:00

Our oldest grandson, Aken, is at summer camp. This is his third year to spend a couple of weeks at a camp in North Carolina. I’m reminded of my days at camp.

When I was 9 years old I went to 4-H camp for a week and went every year after that until I was probably 13 or 14 years old. We went to the same place every summer. It was by a lake near Marble Falls, Texas. I remember it was always very hot and dry and dusty. We stayed in small dormitory-like wooden cabins that had no air conditioning and slept on cots. The mess hall was a short walk away on another little hill. That’s where we ate and met together. That was a big wooden building with a big kitchen and dining/meeting area. I recall that it had screens on 3 sides to let in any slight breeze that might blow off the lake.

I didn’t know it at the time, but our camp was in “the hill country”. I’m probably the only person I’ve ever heard of who doesn’t like ‘the hill country”, but I don’t. I grew up where it was very flat, lots and lots of lush green grass and big, healthy trees. At camp, it was hilly, no grass, lots of dirt and rocks and scrawny things that were called trees, but looked more like sick bushes to me. Despite the way it looked there, I always enjoyed going to camp.

Kids from all over Wharton County went to camp the same week. I don’t remember how many were usually there, but probably 40 to 50 kids and some adults. We all pitched in to help cook and clean up and plan our activities. I always liked working in the kitchen and eating! I remember one time making coleslaw and realizing that a piece of my finger had been grated off with the cabbage. I tried to find it to no avail. I guess that had to be my first experience cooking in large quantities. In those days, I could eat a lot. I’m sorry to say that it was at that camp that I would participate in eating contests with the boys! They usually beat me, but I gave it a good try.

We did folk dancing at camp. That was kind of like square dancing, but better – at least I thought so. It’s really the only kind of dancing that I’ve ever really enjoyed. We danced in groups, similar to square dancing, but there were no costumes. The music was different than square dance music. At 4-H Club functions, was the only place I ever heard of doing folk dancing. I’m not sure where it came from or what has happened to it, but it was so much fun!

At night, we built a campfire on a little hill by the lake and sat around the fire and sang “campfire songs”. If you’ve never done that, you’ve missed something special!

The first year I went to camp, I said earlier that I was just 9 years old. My parents drove me to Wharton to the County Agents’ office. We unloaded my things and a kind of strange thing happened to me. I looked around and saw all the kids and their parents hugging and kissing each other and saying good-bye. I wasn’t sure what was about to happen to me. You see, my parents had never shown me any affection like that, certainly not in public, at least not that I could recall. I remember feeling really uncomfortable and anxious. I’m really not sure what happened at that moment, just that we said good-bye and I left for camp. If I ever got homesick at camp, I don’t recall it. I just remember having a good time.

I hope Aken is having a really good time at camp. Just like his Nana, he will make new friends and do lots of fun things and have lots of good memories about summer camp.

Soda Jerks

2011-07-01T13:50:00.000-07:00

Our three grandsons from Alabama visited us for several days recently and I introduced them to the term “soda jerk”. It was terribly hot while they were here and I tried to come up with some fun things for us to do inside. They always like to spend time with Nana in the kitchen, so I decided to show them how to be soda jerks. For those of you who might not be familiar with that term, a soda jerk was a person who operated the soda fountain in a drugstore. Soda fountains date back to the late 1880’s and were really popular when I was growing up.

I’ve mentioned before that my daddy would take me to one of the drugstores in Wharton and get me a malt. Before that, I barely recall the soda fountain in Greathouse’s Drugstore in Boling. After Art and I married and moved to College Station, there were at least two soda fountains in drugstores in Bryan-College Station. Redmond Terrace Drugstore was on the corner of Texas Avenue and what is now George Bush Drive. Jarrott’s Drugstore was in Townshire Shopping Center. Both of those closed in the late 1960’s, I think, and I don’t recall seeing a drugstore with a soda fountain since then.

Soda jerks were usually young men who wore white shirts and bow ties and distinctive little white hats. The name soda jerk had nothing to do with their personalities or temperaments. When they dispensed the soda water, they would jerk the handle on the soda fountain machine. The sodas were usually made of flavored syrups, ice cream and carbonated water. The drinks were served in a tall, thick glass with a long-handled spoon and a straw. You could sit on a tall bar stool and watch the soda jerk do his thing and then stay there and drink his creation or move to a cute little round table with 4 chairs. I loved going there. I have very fond memories of my Daddy taking me to the soda fountain.

Usually soda fountains had food, too. I recall eating sandwiches at the soda fountains in Wharton…..chicken salad or tuna salad on toasted white bread cut diagonally and served with potato chips. Art and I discovered “Aggie Chili Burgers” at the Redmond Terrace Drugstore and that became one of our favorites. We have made them at home many, many times. It was an open-faced hamburger on a toasted bottom bun, covered with chili and grated cheese and chopped onions. The top bun was toasted and cut in half and placed on the sides. Good stuff!

I miss the soda fountains in the drugstores. Why did they have to go away? I wish I could take my grandchildren back to those days.

I’m glad I was able to introduce Aken, Austin and Aaron to the soda jerk. They had such a good time. I had a really good time, too. I have (had) lots of bottles of flavored syrups and they used almost all of them making their concoctions. Austin took the orders and wrote them down. He was so creative as he named each drink. I saved the papers he wrote on and cherish those. These are some of his inventions (spelled like he wrote them): vanilla vader bomb, rasberry rampage, caramel crazy, almond joy buster, cherry cyco, gredient monster, gredient monster 2 and no alcohol pina colada. He even wrote down the recipes for some of them: GM (gredient monster) – water, chrused ice, sweet rasberry syrup, French vanilla, Arizona fruit smoothie mix orchard peach and pineapple coconut, sour cherry, Coke, lime. Again, I wrote that just as he did. Aken helped make the drinks and Aaron and I fully enjoyed drinking them. We spent several hours being soda jerks. We tasted and tested and changed and added and got the drinks just like we wanted them. I drank way too much sweet stuff and cleaned up lots of syrup spills, but it was so worth it!

Now I will need to replenish my supply of flavored syrups so I will be ready to set up the soda fountain for Sam, Jude and Naomi. Hopefully some day soon I can have all six of them in my kitchen being soda jerks.

Father's Day

2011-06-17T12:50:00.000-07:00

Father’s Day. As Father’s Day approaches I am reminded of my father, who I called “Daddy”. I was not fortunate to have him around for a long time. Daddy died just a couple years after Art and I married. He died suddenly, with no warning, no time to say “good bye”.

He had lots of names. He was Daddy to me, Clarence to my mom, “C” to his sisters, Grandpa Joyce to his grandchildren, A.C. to some people, Cotton to others and of course, Mr. Joyce to many.

Daddy was not a tall man, but I didn’t consider him to be short, either. His hair was thin. His skin was very tanned and leathery looking…with lots of wrinkles. He wore glasses and had false teeth, which he loved to stick out and surprise the little kids. His hands were those of a very hard working man. I can still picture them. Veins stood out on the back of his hands and some of his fingernails were deformed from being mashed by heavy objects…I think from pipes when he worked in oil fields. As he got older, he told me how his skin was getting thinner and referred to it as “his bark was gettin’ thin”. Those hands were never idle. He used them almost constantly. He was good at lots of things. He was a “fixer “. He could repair almost anything around the house, inside and out. He used his hands to mend fences, grow and harvest beautiful gardens, shell peas, milk cows. And he used his hands to warm my sheets in front of an old space heater just before I went to bed on a cold winter night. He never even once used his hands to spank me. That’s probably not a good thing. I’m sure I needed it sometimes.

Daddy used his hands to cook. He was pretty good at it. Homemade biscuits were his specialty. Mama was the main cook in the house, but once in awhile Daddy made biscuits and some other things, like rabbit stew. We had a brick bar-b-q pit in the backyard, that he built, and he was good at cooking bar-b-q.

Daddy seemed to be a very happy man. He joked a lot and loved to tease people, especially young people. I’ve mentioned before how he would hang around with the teenagers after church and tease them.

I felt a lot of love from my Daddy. We did some special things together. He would take me to Boling to Greathouse’s Drugstore and buy me some tooty fruity ice cream and when they closed down, we would go to Wharton to one of the drugstores and get a malt, which at that time we called a malted milk. Wow! That was a treat! Daddy taught me how to drive when I was just 9 years old. He expected great things from me. He was never satisfied, even when I brought home straight A’s. He would say “Is that the best you can do?” I knew he was teasing, but I also knew that he really did want me to do the best I could do. He was proud of me and I knew it.

Daddy smoked Camel cigarettes. Most men smoked back then. He told me one time that he figured that I would smoke some day. He said that I reminded him so much of his youngest sister, Virgil. She smoked. Well Daddy, you misjudged that one. I have never smoked a cigarette (or anything else) in my entire life and certainly don’t intend to start now!! I know he would be proud of that.

He provided well for us. We were not rich, but we always had what we needed. He was very opposed to me borrowing anything from anybody. He said if I needed it, he would figure out a way to buy it, but there would be no borrowing.

Daddy worked at the Newgulf Sulfur Company in Newgulf, just a few miles from our house. When they brought the sulfur out of the ground, in liquid form, they would pour it into molds and build gigantic rectangles of hardened bright yellow sulfur. They looked like huge buildings of sulfur. Then, as needed, they would use dynamite to blow them up in sections and load the chunks of sulfur into rail cars to be shipped off by railroad. Daddy was in charge of the dynamiting process. He would bring the empty dynamite boxes home for us to use. They were wooden crates that had many uses. During the summer, when I was out of school, Mama and I would fix lunch and drive to Newgulf to take Daddy a hot meal to eat. I loved doing that and seeing my daddy during lunch time. That was special.

Daddy didn’t have much education, but he was a very smart man. He was especially good with math (with numbers, as he would say). He could add, subtract, multiply and divide most anything in his head. He instilled in me the importance of a good education. I’m not sure he realized it, but he lived in a place where his children received a very good education. I thank him for that! It was important to him that I go to college and I did. He was proud of that.

Daddy was a great role model. He was a good, hard working, God fearing man. As a family, we went to church “every time the doors were open.” Daddy was active in church, serving as a member of the church board. He didn’t just send us. He went, too. He knew the scriptures and he tried to lead a life pleasing to God. He was the spiritual leader of our family, just like it should be. It was obvious to me that he was well respected by those he worked for and with and everyone he came in contact with. I was never, never ashamed that he was my daddy. I never once saw him do or heard of him doing anything that would not make me proud of him.

Even though my daddy has been gone from this earth for 42+ years, I still miss him. He wasn’t here long enough. I am so sad that my sons and my grandchildren didn’t get to know him. They would have loved him and learned so much from him. Daddy would be proud of what a good father Art is and what good fathers our sons are. I feel so blessed that Art did know him, for as long as I did….just another reason I’m so glad that we grew up together. I hope I have some of Cotton Joyce’s characteristics. We didn’t have long together, but it was good times. He was a good man and for sure the best father a girl could have!

Vacation

2011-06-14T11:51:00.001-07:00

Vacation. I looked up the definition and it says “a period of time devoted to pleasure, rest, or relaxation”. This time of year is vacation time for some folks. For others, it’s just a regular work time, just hotter and drier than usual, especially here in this part of Texas. Since all my grandchildren are on vacation right now, I’ve been thinking a lot about vacations.

I don’t recall many vacations during my growing up days. In fact, if you compare them to the kinds of vacations the grandkids are having, we didn’t have any vacations like that when I was a kid.

We lived less than an hour from the Texas Gulf Coast, so occasionally we would drive down there for a Saturday at the beach. Some people in Wharton had a cabin in Rockport and several times they let us stay there for a night or two. Our church would sometimes take the kids to the beach and that was fun until one time on one of those trips I was attacked by Portuguese Man of War. I was probably about 10 or 12 years old at the time. I was the first one out of the cars and I went running out into the water. Almost immediately I felt something that felt like seaweed all over me and even inside my bathing suit. At first I just tried to brush it off and then realized that it was more than seaweed. I started yelling and fighting it off, but everyone thought I was just having a good time. Then I started screaming for help and running back on the beach. These tentacle things were wrapped all around me and the pain was horrible. The sting felt like fire. People came to my rescue and I was put in a car and rushed to the nearest little store where we asked for help. The people in the store knew what had attacked me and said to siphon gas out of a car and put the gasoline on me where I had been stung…which by now looked like I had been whipped with a wet rope all over my body, and it was hurting really bad! Well, they did what was recommended and guess how that felt!! Oh my gosh. The pain was excruciating. Needless to say that vacation didn’t end very well. I suffered from that for several days and then the whelps got infected (apparently because I scratched them in my sleep) and it looked like I had been whipped with a huge wet rope all over my body. Before it had looked more like a string. Now the stripes stood out from my body about an inch wide and an inch tall. Yes. I’m not kidding. I ended up having to go to the doctor and for weeks had scars all over my body. You wonder why I don’t like to go to the beach?

Well, let’s see. What other vacations did we go on? I remember going to Jackson, Tennessee to visit my Aunt Ivy, Daddy’s sister. Aunt Ivy lived way, way out in the country down a dirt road in a very old unpainted wood house. There was no bathroom inside, so we had to take a bath in a wash tub. That was…uh; let me think….not much fun. Aunt Ivy served us sweet iced tea for breakfast. That was a first for me. I kind of liked that. Aunt Ivy was a stocky little woman full of energy. Her husband, Uncle Ebe Blanton, had suffered a stroke sometime in the past and he was paralyzed and bedridden. Aunt Ivy obviously had a very rough life, but a wonderful attitude. She had a smile on her face and joy in her heart. It was obvious that she and my Dad loved each other very much. I think it must have been on that trip that we did kind of a “touristy” thing and went to Pickwick Dam on the Tennessee River. I remember getting to buy a bracelet that must have been made out of aluminum. It was silver and very light weight. It was kind of like a charm bracelet with little round discs hanging down spelling out “Pickwick Dam”.

Then there was our visit to Sapulpa, Oklahoma to see another one of Daddy’s sisters, Aunt Elva…we pronounced it Elvie. She was married to Uncle Argyle McDougal. I really liked visiting them. Aunt Elvie was a tall, slim woman with a great personality. I could feel her love for me. She made really good cinnamon rolls.

When we drove on our “vacations” to Tennessee and Oklahoma, I don’t recall stopping and spending the nights in motels. We must have driven all day to get there. We never stayed long….just a few days. I don’t think Daddy got much vacation time off from work.

When I was little, I went to Austin several summers and stayed for a few days with my oldest brother Murray and his wife, Genny. I don’t recall much that happened there except for seeing their dog vomit and then eat it. I know that’s gross, but it’s what I remember. There are pictures of our family doing some tourist things around Austin, but I really don’t remember those times.

Well, that about sums up my memories of childhood vacations. I know it doesn’t sound like much, but you know, I didn’t know I was missing out on anything. I really don’t think it’s bad. Nobody has to entertain me. And it doesn’t take much to make me happy. I hope my grandchildren are enjoying their vacations.

Music

2011-06-09T13:34:00.001-07:00

Music has always been an important part of my life. Earlier I wrote about my very first music teacher, Mrs. Donaldson, and what a big part she played in introducing me to music theory and singing. She showed me the importance of music. I saw what pleasure music brought to her life and I wanted that, too. She inspired me to want to play the piano.

When I was 6 years old my daddy bought me a piano. That was in 1951. Many years later I found out from a piano tuner that my piano, which I still have, was probably made around 1920. It is an upright piano that at some time, before we got it, had been cut down and a horizontal mirror was attached to it. That was a popular thing to do at one time. That old piano has brought many hours of enjoyment in my life. It is my one worldly possession that I hope one of my kids will want to keep and hopefully be passed down to one of my grandchildren. Ross has reminded me that he wrote some of his first songs on that piano.

I started taking piano lessons when I was in first grade and continued to do so until the end of the eighth grade. You would think that someone who took piano lessons for 8 years would be a very accomplished pianist, but I’m not. I think there are several reasons for that. First of all, I didn’t practice as much as I should have. Also, I really think that I didn’t have the right teacher for me. My piano teacher, Mrs. Pearson, was also our church pianist at the Iago Federated Church. She taught me to read the music and play exactly what was written…no more, no less. That was frustrating for me. We practiced all year on the music that we would play in the annual piano recital which was held at the old Iago Federated Church each spring. The music had to be memorized. We wore long formal gowns and the recital was a really big deal. I was always scared to death. It was not until many years later that I realized what the major problem was. I think I had a good “ear” for music and really needed someone who could teach me to “play by ear”. All I wanted to do was play church music and be able to “run up and down the piano” playing with passion and lots of feeling. Learning and memorizing the recital music just didn’t do that for me. To this day, when I play, I can sight read the right hand fairly well, but have a tough time with the left hand. I don’t care anything about playing what’s written for either hand. I just want to sit down at the piano, with no music, and do my own thing. Sometimes it sounds pretty good, sometimes not, but it’s soothing and calming and relaxing and I need to do it more. Also, I care nothing about performing in front of an audience. I just want to play for my enjoyment. When I was in high school, I played the piano at the Iago Federated Church and even played the organ a few times. In college, I played at a very small church on Sundays. After Art and I married, I played a lot for Sunday school at bigger churches, but only a time or two in church services. I really never felt confident to play in front of a lot of people.

About the time I quit taking piano lessons, I joined the school band. Our band director was Mr. Brantley, T.V. Brantley. He was a good band director and a good man. He loved band music and he so wanted to instill that in us. Just like Mrs. Donaldson, he taught us music with passion. In eighth grade you joined the band and Mr. Brantley would help you decide what instrument was the best fit for you. Our school furnished all the instruments. We didn’t have to pay for anything. Our school district was one of the only “budget balanced” schools in the state of Texas and everything was provided, thanks to Texas Gulf Sulfur Company. Anyway, Mr. Brantley and I decided that I should play the alto sax and I did for the rest of my high school days. My senior year, I was first chair alto sax in the Boling High School Band. We had band concerts and participated in band contests. I was a twirler and Mr. Brantley really didn’t like twirlers, as a group, but I always knew that in spite of me being a twirler, he liked me. He knew that as twirlers we were taking time away from our instruments and he really wanted us to excel in music, not twirling. He also didn’t like for his band kids to play sports. He knew that also diverted our attention away from band and music. Mr. Brantley ran a very tight ship. We had really strict dress codes, when it came to our band uniforms. As soon as we stepped off the bus or walked out of the band hall, we were to be in full uniform. As twirlers, we wore tall, clumsy hats, but they had to be on our heads at all times, with just one exception….the second half of a football game. During the first half, we played our instruments in the stands with the band with those awkward hats on!! After we marched on the field at half time, we could take our hats off and not play the second half. It was during that time that we met the twirlers from the opposing school and twirled in front of the bands and the fans. Mr. Brantley tolerated that, but we always knew that he wasn’t pleased with the whole twirling thing. Since we didn’t own our instruments, my alto sax stayed at the school to be passed down to someone else after I graduated and I didn’t pick up an alto sax again for many, many years. By that time, I had forgotten how to play it. Art bought me an old one many years later. I enjoy getting it out and trying to play it once in a while, but it’s really frustrating that I’ve lost my ability to play it. It’s not like riding a bicycle….you do forget!! Sam likes to get out that old sax and try to blow some notes on it. I still have my batons and really haven’t lost my twirling ability. The grandchildren all like to watch Nana twirl and then try to copy me. I don’t think Mr. Brantley would be proud that I lost my ability to play the sax, but haven’t lost my twirling skills. Several years ago, Mr. Brantley died and I went back home to attend his funeral. A few of us old band members were there and we had a wonderful time reminiscing about our band days at Boling High School. We all agreed that Mr. Brantley was a great band director who instilled in us a lifelong love for music.

I’ve always enjoyed singing. I really don’t remember ever not singing. I don’t think I was very good at it, but in our little country church I sang lots of solos and in small groups. We sang a lot at the Iago Federated Church….in church services, Sunday school, Vacation Bible School, Sunday night youth groups, Wednesday afternoon I.A.H. (I am His – girls’ group). We sang a lot in 4-H….at our meetings, at camps and around camp fires. I like to sing. I’ve realized in my older years that I don’t always enjoy just listening to music. It’s probably annoying to those around me, but I don’t want to sit and listen to music. I like to sing along. I want to participate. When there’s music going on around me, I want to be a participant! I love praise and worship music. I love turning up music really, really loud and singing to the “top of my lungs”. Some of my most spiritually moving times are when I am praising God in music! Many times, I don’t need the sermon, I just want the music!

I wouldn’t want to imagine a life without music. I thank God for music and what it has meant in my life. Music has gotten me through many tough times. I’ve been able to appreciate all kinds of music, but I do have my favorites…from children’s Sunday school songs to hymns to contemporary Christian music, Elvis and early rock and roll, country music, patriotic and marching band music, ‘50’s music, Broadway and classical music, Irish tenors and Celtic music and more!

God blessed me in giving me a husband who loves music and sons who love music…even one who has centered his life on writing and singing music for the Lord. I pray that all my grandchildren will like music. Music is good!!!

“Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, sweetest name I know. Fills my every longing. Keeps me singing as I go”!!

The Iago Federated Church

2011-06-04T11:26:00.001-07:00

The Iago Federated Church. That’s where I went to church from the time I was born until Art and I married there when I was 20 years old. Art and I met there when we were babies. As we’ve said many times, “we slept together for the first time in the church nursery.” We’re sure that we actually slept in the same baby bed, because that little nursery probably didn’t have more than one crib. Art was 5 ½ months old when I was born and since he was premature, I’m sure he was just a little thing sleeping there beside me in the church nursery. Back then parents took their babies right on to the nursery. They didn’t take them into church or Sunday school with them. A good thing.

The Iago Federated Church was located on the corner of the Wharton Highway and Barker Road, just a mile from our house. It was a white frame building with a front porch and famous for its oil well pump-jack in the front yard. Later, just before I graduated from high school, a new brick church building was erected just about a block away down Barker Road. Most of my memories are from the old church building.

The make up of people at the church was very unique, really unlike anything I’ve ever heard of. Most everyone in our area went to church there, except for Catholics and some Church of Christ. The Mexicans and the Blacks had their own churches in Boling and Newgulf. Most of the Bohemians were Catholic. So just about everyone else went to the Iago Federated Church. For business purposes, we were broken up into five groups –
Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Christians (the denomination) and associates, which included anyone else. When you joined the church, you joined one of those groups. We rotated pastors (that we called preachers) amongst the first four groups. Most of the preachers would stay many years, but some lasted only a few years. When a kid “got saved” and joined the church, he would join whatever group his parents were. My dad was Presbyterian and my mom was Baptist. My brothers joined the Presbyterian group and I became a Baptist. Art’s parents were Methodist, so that’s what he was. We grew up that way, having no idea what each of those denominations stood for, so when we left Iago, we were introduced to a whole new way of “church”. As it turns out, after visiting many different churches after we married, Art and I realized that the Iago Federated Church, at least back then, was Baptist. Now many years later, I am so glad to see “non-denominational” churches. Even though, we weren’t called that, the Iago church was probably one of the first.

I have only fond memories, and many of them, growing up in the Iago Federated Church. That’s where I went to Sunday school and church every Sunday morning and “young people’s group” and church every Sunday night. I had great teachers and learned so much. Teachers like Mrs. King (Art’s mom, Wilma Faye), Mrs. McDaniel (Josephine), Mrs. Fields (Mary), Mrs. Barnhill (Art’s Aunt Joyce), and Mrs. Allen (LaRue – Charlie Boy Allen’s wife). Those are the ones who stand out to me. I remember them as being so knowledgeable of the scriptures and having such sweet, sweet spirits. I knew they loved the Lord.

Vacation Bible School was a really big deal every summer. It was a very special time of concentrated Bible study, crafts, singing, refreshments and just plain fun. We went all morning for a week. Both my mother and Art’s mom were very involved. I recall that Art’s Grandma Barnhill told us a Bible story every morning during the time that we all met together.

The “old church” as we later called it, was indeed old. It had high ceilings with ceiling fans – no air conditioning, old wooden floors, and wooden church pews. I can still see that church building as it looked 60 years ago. I can even remember where people sat. I recall the old hymns we sang. I don’t even need to use a hymnal anymore. The words to the first, second and last stanzas are still embedded in my mind and on my heart. I can still see Art’s Grandpa Barnhill directing the music in his own unique way. I can also see him and hear him as he prayed. He was the only person I ever saw who would get down on his knees to pray during a church service. When he was called on to pray, he would get up from the pew and kneel there on the floor and pray the most incredibly powerful prayers…always praying that we “worship God in spirit and in truth.”

The front porch and the front yard of the church were the gathering place for all of us after church on Sunday mornings and especially on Sunday nights. The grownups would stand around in small groups talking and laughing, younger kids would be running around playing and laughing and the teenagers would be standing around talking – the boys usually teasing the girls. I remember my dad many times being in the teenage group teasing them and joking with them. If he knew a couple was dating, he would say “that’s not the girl I saw you with last night” or other such teasing things. Sometimes after church on Sunday night, we would invite a family to our house to visit and share homemade pie and coffee or someone would invite us to their house. Everyone knew and loved everyone else. We were like one big family. It was real community….something I feel churches are lacking in these days.

Art and I married in the new Iago Federated Church building on August 28, 1965. Since then, we have not been back there much except for funerals and weddings and occasional Sunday morning services. Most weddings and funerals in both our families have been there. It’s a very special place that holds many wonderful memories. It’s where we learned so much about God and Jesus and all the famous Bible characters and stories. It’s where we learned to worship God with singing. It’s where I first played the piano in front of “crowds” for church services and my annual piano recitals. It’s where I sang solos and duets and trios, etc., sometimes with Art and Dixie. It’s where I watched Art lead the music and heard God speak to me clearly that he was the man I was to marry. The Iago Federated Church has a very special place in my heart.

Growing up in Iago

2011-06-02T04:57:00.000-07:00

Well, I’ve done it again. I’ve waited way too long to record my life experiences. A lady at church gave me a book that she recently wrote about her life and it reminded me that I need to get back on this project. It also made me think that I should put this in book form and I plan to do that, too.

This time I want to tell you about growing up in Iago, Texas, a small community in Wharton County. I’ve mentioned it in some of my previous posts, but I want to tell you more.

I lived in the same house from the time I was born until I went to college. It was a big white two-story frame house on 37 acres located on Barker Road one mile NE of Iago. It seemed like a really big house when I was a kid, but now when I go back and see it (just from the outside) it doesn’t look so big. My parent’s bedroom and my bedroom were both downstairs and my brothers’ bedrooms were upstairs. Nothing much, if at all, was ever done to the upstairs while I lived there. It had the old wooden floors and wooden walls. It seemed so dreary up there. After my brothers left, I always wanted to decorate that part of the house, but never did. My bedroom had wallpaper with a white background and big pink roses. When I was a teenager, I got new bedroom furniture, including a double bed with a bookcase headboard, a dresser and a desk and chair. I was so proud of all of that. Art and I used that furniture for many years after we married. To get to the bathroom from by bedroom (or any room in the house), you had to walk through an enclosed porch. In the winter, it was so cold in that house. It was heated with space heaters that were seldom left on during the night. Summers were hot and terribly humid. We lived about 30 or 40 miles from the coast. We had no air conditioning. I would wake up some summer mornings just drenched with sweat. My hair would be as wet as if I had just washed it.

It was probably a quarter of mile to the next house on each side of us. Our nearest neighbors were the O’Quinns and the Kuceras. We didn’t have much to do with the O’Quinns. Mrs. O’Quinn was said to be “crazy” and she did do some very odd things…like walk up and down the road talking loudly to her self and walk into church during a service, down the aisle, saying some really strange things and disrupting the church service. That really made me very uncomfortable and I knew it made everybody uncomfortable, sometimes even fearful. Now I look back on that and think how we should have ministered to that family…those children…and try to help them more. Instead, we ignored them. That’s sad

On the other side of us, “down the road”, was the Kucera family, one of the many Czech families in our area. Back then, we called them Bohemians. They had boys, I think 3 or 4. I remember the man’s name was Vit and one of the boy’s, my age, was Ronnie. Vit cussed and used profanity a lot…..said hell and damn about every other word (and worse), but it was just how he talked and we didn’t think much of it….just kind of got used to it. Mrs. Kucera was a little bitty woman who worked hard and moved around quickly. I remember that she was a really good cook, as were most of the Bohemian women. My first experience eating kolaches was probably in her kitchen. I remember watching her cook and do laundry and work in her vegetable and flower gardens. I spent lots of time with her. I don’t recall her first name, but back then, kids didn’t always know grown up’s first names…..we called them Mr. and Mrs. She was a really sweet, caring, busy lady. I especially liked and remember her sweet peas that grew on the hog wire fence. They were beautiful little flowers that were pastel colored and smelled wonderful. I have always wished I had a place to grow sweet peas. I don’t think I’ve ever seen any other than hers. I guess I spent more time at the Kucera’s house than any other besides ours. I just had brothers and the Kuceras just had boys, so I grew up around boys. I think that’s why I’m more comfortable around boys, and men, even now!

Our house, like all the others around us, was very simple. No air conditioning. Just one bathroom. A very busy kitchen. A vegetable garden. No clothes dryer. Clotheslines in the backyard. Oh, the smell of clean sheets…..stiff, but smelled so good. Hollyhocks straight and tall with gigantic pink blooms. Castor beans. A huge yard with big pecan trees. Screen doors. Dogs that never came in the house and ate only table scraps and what they could find on their own. Hens and roosters running freely in the backyard. I was deathly afraid of that mean rooster who seemed to sense that and loved to intimidate me. Watching Daddy ring the heads off chickens and then watching those dying chickens flop around the back yard. Then there was that awful smell of burning feathers and then picking off all those pin feathers until the chickens were clean enough to cook and eat. An oyster shell driveway. Shelling peas on the back porch with Daddy. There was a hole in one of the boards and when we got tired of shelling, Daddy showed me how to drop the unshelled peas in the hole, a few at a time, so we could get through quicker and Momma would never know! Well water. A cistern in the backyard where the grass was always a lot greener. The cistern had to be cleaned out sometimes and oh my goodness…that smell. The story goes that Johnny was carrying me when I was a baby and dropped me on my head over that cistern. A wood fenced “cow lot” in the back with a hay barn and calf pens and calf barns. I loved to play in the hay barn…climbing around all those bales of hay sometimes stacked up all the way to the rafters. And looking for the eggs that had been laid in the hay. We usually had one milk cow. I wasn’t very good at milking, but I did love helping mom make butter from the cream skimmed off the top. We made the butter in a big crock churn that had a long wooden paddle that we pushed up and down until the cream turned into butter. We did that right in the middle of the kitchen and little spatters of cream would fly all over the room and on us. I spent lots of time in the kitchen helping my mom cook, especially in the summer when we cooked and canned and froze lots of fresh vegetables.

I spent lots of time outside, alone, but keeping myself occupied and interested in everything going on around me. I can picture that backyard and hay barn like it was just yesterday. Running through the corn fields, when the stalks were way over my head and wondering if I would find my way out. Almost always bare footed. I remember catching lightning bugs at night and putting them in a jar. Playing jacks and getting really good at it. Playing hopscotch, not on a sidewalk with chalk, but just drawing it out in the dirt with my finger. I think about how our grandchildren don’t have these experiences and it makes me sad.
Our entire 37 acres (except for the house and yard) was barb wire fenced (we said bob wire, and still do) open pasture with pecan trees scattered along most of the side and back fence lines. Oh how I loved to pick up pecans in the fall, and still do! In the spring, the pasture was sprinkled with butter cups and dandelions and clover. I loved to sit in that soft, bright green clover and look for 4-leaf clovers. There were “woods” behind our fence line on the back that were daunting to me. I seldom went into those “woods” alone. I imagined “booger bears” in there….scarey things that would “get me”.

We had a two car detached garage. When we pulled into the garage after dark, I would run to the house as fast as I could….even after I started driving myself. I’ve always been scared of the dark. Speaking of driving…….my daddy taught me to drive his stick shift pick-up in the pasture when I was 9 years old. Then when I was 12, he let me drive to church in the car (always a Ford)…just a mile straight up the road to Iago. By the time I was 15, I was an experienced driver. When I was 15, my mom fell and broke her knee, so soon after that I drove to Wharton and got my hardship driver’s license. My sister-in-law, Vivian, went with me. I remember that I drove to Wharton and after we got to town, she said that she should probably be driving when we got to the courthouse. We were afraid that the man giving the driving test might see me driving and I would get in trouble. We stopped about a block or so from the courthouse and let her drive. I passed the test and then I drove home. I feel like I’ve been driving all my life!

Our telephone number was 17F11. We were on a “party line”…. a far cry from cell phones today. If you wanted to use the phone, you had to pick up the receiver and make sure none of the neighbors were talking on the phone. If they were, and you were bored or just nosey, you could just listen in on their conversation. When the line was “clear”, you would wait for the telephone operator (in the telephone office in Boling) to ask “number please?” Then you would tell her the telephone number you wanted to call. Or you could just tell her the name of the person you wanted to talk to. When I was in college, I would call my parents and the Boling operator and I would have a conversation. It would go something like this. “Lylabeth, I don’t think your parents are at home tonight. They’re not answering. Do you want me to try Johnny’s house and see if they are over there?” Johnny was my brother and of course she knew his number, too. This seemed very normal to me, but my college friends thought I was from “the sticks”. Apparently in Houston and Dallas their phone systems were a little more sophisticated.

Most of the females I was around were my mom’s friends. Mrs.Tabor (down the road) made the very best coffee cake I ever ate. I can still remember how it tasted! It was a square yeast bread with raisins, unlike any coffee cake I had ever eaten or have eaten since. Yum! She, too, had a huge vegetable garden and they grew unusual things like asparagus and broccoli. We didn’t grow things like that. I was so fascinated by those strange vegetables. I had only seen asparagus in a can and not very often at that! We visited her quite often. Mrs. Dawson lived just past her on our side of the road. They made tamales every year, using their big black pot to boil the hog heads. They came to our house sometimes and helped us make tamales out in our pasture near the house. Mrs. Dawson was Grandpa Barnhill’s sister, Art’s great aunt Myrtle. Art says he doesn’t recall getting any of those tamales. Guess you had to be a neighbor to get in on that.

I went to the Iago School from first grade through 7th grade. I rode the school bus that stopped in front of my house. My first grade teacher was Miss Haney. She later married Mrs. Tabor’s son. Mrs. Donaldson was my music teacher at the Iago School. She was Art’s great aunt Wilma, Grandma Barnhill’s sister-in-law. She really stirred my interest in music and bragged on my singing. She allowed me to be the “star” singer in a school music program and even compared me to Jaye P. Morgan, a popular young female vocalist at the time. She had me sing “Silver Bells” in a Christmas program. My daddy realized that I needed a piano and bought me one when I was 6. I still have that piano today. I started taking piano lessons when I was in first grade and always wished I could play like Mrs. Donaldson. She was a very outgoing woman, a dynamic personality, who loved to sing and play the piano with passion. She had no children of her own, but it was so obvious that she loved children and loved music, loved life and loved the Lord. She didn’t just teach us songs, but music theory. And she didn’t just teach us music, but patriotism and life and God and so much more. I had been so very, very shy and she was responsible for bringing me out of that. I remember the mimeographed sheets (I still remember how they smelled) she gave us in music class. The bottom half had a song with the words and the music notes and the top half had a picture that we could color that tied in with that song. My favorite things….music and coloring. Since Mrs. Donaldson was a part of my family after Art and I married, I was privileged to see her once in a while and when I did, we always had a joyous reunion and I was able to tell her how much she meant to me. She would tell me that I was one of her favorite students and she always wanted to know what I was doing “musically”. She was so excited when I told her that I played the piano at church. She would be so proud to know that we have a “musical son”. I also remember that right outside our class rooms, we could see hummingbirds flying around all the flowers. Oh how I loved to watch those hummingbirds. I was fascinated by them. I have nothing but good memories of the Iago School.

There wasn’t much in Iago when I was growing up.…the Iago Federated Church, the Iago Elementary School, Pickett’s Feed Store, Mick’s Grocery and some houses. That’s about all we needed. .The Iago Post Office was inside Mick’s Grocery. Mick’s was like something you see in an old movie….an old brick building, very worn wooden floors, kind of dark, wooden display cases with glass tops and sides, big glass candy jars, a big red coca-cola box that you lifted the lid and slid the bottle down by it’s top until it lifted out, an old time cash register, and we charged things there. We just said “put it on our ticket”. They also had a couple of gas pumps outside. We had a post office box there. Our box number was 45, so our address was P.O. Box 45, Iago, Texas.. We went there every day (except Sunday) to get the mail and buy a few groceries. My mom never bought a lot at one time. We just bought things as we needed them. Sometime in 1964 or 1965 a lot of smaller post offices were closed and Iago was one of them. I remember that happened when I was in college and my friends made fun of me for that. They couldn’t imagine being from such a small town that they closed the post office. After that, our mail was delivered to a mail box on the road by our house and our address changed to Rt. 1, Box 80, Boling, Texas.

Boling was just a mile or so down the road. That’s where I went to eighth grade and high school. We were the Boling Bulldogs. Our colors were green and white. I was very active in school activities. I played basketball and played alto sax in the band….first chair alto sax when I was a senior. I tried out for twirler at the end of eighth grade and made it! I was twirler in 9th and 10th grades, head twirler my junior year and drum major my senior year. I participated in band and twirling contests and won medals in those. Leading the Boling High School band out onto the field at halftime, is one of those special times that I’ll never forget. I can almost hear the announcer saying “now forming at the north end of Kyle Field”. Oops, wait a minute. It was more like “the Boling High School Band, under the direction of Drum Major Lylabeth Joyce”. I would do my little fanfare and off we would go. Pretty cool. I was active in FHA (Future Homemakers of America) and won honors in that organization, achieving the state homemaker award and others. I was on the staff of the school newspaper.

Boling had a few churches, a grocery store (Ashmore’s), and a couple of places to eat. Johnson’s Café was known for their good hamburgers. Art and I still talk about Johnson’s good greasy hamburgers. The Savoy Café had great plate lunches. I ate there lots of times at lunch when I was in high school. I remember the food being really good….just like home cooked. There were several gas stations and the Dairy Treat. In my early years, Boling even had a movie theater. We would take 10 cents and buy a movie ticket for 9 cents and have a penny left for the gum ball machine. Also in my early years, there was Greathouse Drug Store with board sidewalks outside of it. I loved to go there and get tutti frutti ice cream. Just a few doors down from that was Mrs. Beck’s 5 & 10 Store. It was just a tiny white frame building, but packed with things I loved to look at.

Then if you couldn’t find what you needed in Boling, you had to drive 8 or 10 miles up the road to Wharton, the county seat, a small town on the Colorado River. We would go there to go to the movies after the movie theater closed in Boling. Wharton had two theaters, the Rio and the Plaza. When I needed to buy clothes (that I couldn’t make) we shopped at Joe Schwartz and charged our purchases there, too. Wharton was where we banked and went to the doctor. There were two newspapers, the Wharton Spectator and the Wharton Journal. Wharton had three drugstores, Vineyards, Outlars and Rugleys. My daddy sometimes took me to Vineyards or Outlars to get a malt. That was a real treat!

Growing up in Iago, Texas was great. I never dreamed of living anywhere else. I wouldn’t change it for anything. One of the biggest influences in my life there was the Iago Federated Church. It deserves its own chapter, so I’ll save that for later. Also, 4-H played a huge part in my life and who I am today. More on that later, too.

Hunger

2010-12-04T16:12:00.001-08:00

It's been almost a year and a half since I posted on my blog. Not good. I'm going to try really hard to do better. When I started this, I said that it was for my kids and grandkids to read some day and know more about me....my thoughts, my experiences in life.

As I sat in church last Sunday morning and listened to our new pastor preach a sermon titled "A Christian Response to Hunger", I realized that it was time to record some more thoughts and facts about my life. He gave some statistics about the number of hungry people in our world, in the United States and Texas and even right here in Bryan and College Station. Hungry people. Can you imagine? It's not real easy for me to comprehend that.

My Grandmother, my mother's mother, died at a very young age...in her 40's...not sure her exact age, because I'm not sure of the year of her birth. My grandma and I share the same birthday, January 1. I like that. A couple of years ago I found her death certificate. Martha Nellie Louella "Lula" Sullivan died in 1917 in Corsicana, TX. The cause of her death was listed as Pellagra. I looked that up. Malnutrition, improper diet. It was common in the South during the first couple of decades of the 1900's. It's not very common in the U.S. anymore, but common in third world countries. She had young children when she died. My mom was only 9 years old. She had a little sister and a sister and several brothers just a little bit older. I think of my grandmother being hungry. There was not enough food for her after she fed her children. That makes me sad.

I want to do something to help hungry people. I belong to a church that cares about hungry people and I'm glad to be a part of a church that not only cares, but does something about it. This week our class worked at a local food pantry. We distributed food and shared the love of Christ to hungry people. Next week we will be sorting, bagging and distributing food to hungry school children and their families. I work with the Salvation Army...a ministry that cares about hungry and hurting people. Art and I fed hungry people there on Thanksgiving Day. We were alone and thought that would be a good way to spend the day....and it was. We'll be ringing the Salvation Army kettle bells to bring in money to buy food for hungry people. As I do these little things to help feed the hungry, I'll be thinking about my grandmother and praying for mothers who don't have enough food to feed themselves or their children.

I love being Nana

2009-06-23T13:30:00.000-07:00

Nana. That’s what my grandchildren call me. Well, that’s what Aken, Austin, Aaron and Sam call me. Jude calls me Neena and Naomi can’t call me anything yet. I love to hear those little voices call out “Nana” (or “Neena”) when they see me.

The older I get, the more I realize how much I missed out by not having known any of my grandparents. They had all died before I was born. Growing up, I guess I really never thought about it that much. Our family never even talked about grandparents. It seems hard for me to believe now, but I hardly even knew their names. I wish I knew why it was that way, but I think that’s something I’ll never know. I do know that when Art’s Grandma Barnhill died in 2001 at age 101 and he had no more grandparents living, I began to wonder about my own grandparents and I decided to try to find out about them.

It all started when Art and I were going through old family pictures with his mom. Grandma B had died and we were looking at the old pictures that had come from her house. I asked Art’s mom if I could take some of them home with me and copy them. Then I decided that it would be good to make scrapbooks for Ken and Ross for Christmas. The project seemed to grow bigger the more I worked on it. I realized that I needed to know dates and places and the names of all the faces. So after many phone calls to Art’s mom and many hours of copying pictures, recording information, and cutting and pasting, I began making duplicate scrapbooks to give to our boys for Christmas.

In the midst of all that, I realized one night that I had all these pictures and information of Art’s family, but almost nothing of my family. That made me really sad. I shared that with Art, with tears in my eyes. At that moment, I knew that I had to search out my family and find pictures of them and discover who they were. But where would I even begin? My parents had been gone for years. All my aunts and uncles had passed away. I knew of only a couple of cousins, much older than me, who were possibly still living, but had had no contact with them in many years. Where and how would I begin the search?

I found out about an elderly woman here who was the guru of genealogy and had been teaching classes in her home for years. I called her and signed up for her next session of classes, which turned out to be some of the very last classes she taught before she died. She was a good teacher and I soaked up every bit of information she shared.

That fall I kind of became obsessed with doing family research. There are probably two reasons for that: 1) I tend to get that way when I’m really passionate about something and 2) I really felt an urgency to find out all the information I could before it was too late. You see, one of the first things Mary told us was that most people don’t get interested in their genealogy until everyone has died who could have shared information with you. I was the prime example of that.

About the only thing I knew was that my daddy had grown up in Tennessee and he had always said that he was from Hooker’s Bend. Was that a joke or was there really a place in Tennessee called Hooker’s Bend? Well, at that time Ken was living in Memphis and one day while I was talking to him on the phone I mentioned this and he immediately got on his computer and searched for Hooker’s Bend. He found an e-mail address for someone who had done research on Hooker’s Bend and he got the two of us in touch with each other. That sweet woman got me in touch with my daddy’s cousin in Savannah, TN
and he knew all about our family and lives within a few miles of where my daddy grew up. On one of our next trips to visit Ken in Memphis, we drove the 2 hours to Savannah and met Jim Garey and he took us to Hooker’s Bend and to the cemetery where my grandparents and great grandparents were buried. He had pictures and letters and all kinds of information. Wow! He opened up a whole new world to my family. He even gave me a hand written letter that my Grandma Clara Clementine Garey Joyce had written just a few months before she died! He let me copy any pictures and information that I wanted. I still stay in touch with my cousin Jim and thank God for leading me to him.

Well, so much for the genealogy thing for now. I could write a book about that and hopefully I will someday. But through all the family research, I have realized more and more how much I missed out by not knowing my grandparents and great grandparents. Because of that, I am determined to be a good Nana. I want to be a part of my grandchildren’s lives. I don’t want my grandchildren to miss having a relationship with their grandma.

Because of where God has placed us, I am fortunate to live just a few minutes away from 3 of my grandchildren…Sam, Jude and Naomi. Because of the closeness of our homes, I am privileged to see them really often. Normally I keep them all one day a week and I always look forward to that day. I try not to plan anything else on that day, because I want to devote every minute that I can to them. I love to play with them.

Sam likes to paint and his Nana does too, so we try to spend some time painting while the other two are napping. Sam likes to make cookies and of course his Nana loves to cook, so that’s usually on the agenda, too. Sam really likes for me to play with him. He’s never spent a lot of time here playing by himself. He seems to need that companionship. I love to hear him say “Nana, will you come and play with me?” You know Sam is very musically gifted and he loves for us to play the piano together or do some percussion or get out my old alto saxophone and show him how to blow a few notes on it. When you think about it….Sam and his Nana have many of the same interests. I like that. Sam likes to be held and loved on and I love to accommodate him.

Jude and I probably don’t have as many things in common, but I love to play with him. He likes to play outside with water guns and water balloons and he likes to ride his bike. Jude plays really hard and wears himself out and then he likes to “watch a show” and have a snack. He takes really good, long naps at Nana’s house. The dark quietness of our downstairs is just what he needs to get some much needed rest. I’m always excited to see him when he wakes up. He’s got a huge smile on his face and it’s one of those rare moments when I can hold him and get some snuggle time in.

Naomi is our first little girl in the family. You know, I wasn’t sure how it would be to have a girl in this family. I had no sisters. Art had no sisters. We had two boys and then they gave us 5 grandsons. I knew how Pawpaw would react and that kind of scared me. But it’s been just fine!! Naomi seems to really like her Nana and the feeling is mutual. I can hardly wait for her to get big enough for us to do things together. There is so much I want to teach her.

Aken, Austin and Aaron have always lived far from us…first in Memphis and now in Birmingham. I miss them so much. I didn’t realize how much until I had grandchildren right here in the same town. Now I know how much I’m missing in their lives. Each one of them is so special.

Aken is a very smart little boy and can carry on a conversation with you just like an adult. He spent a week with us last summer and oh how I enjoyed that. There is just something really special about your grandson visiting with you all by himself. We could give him our full attention and do what he wanted to do. Aken was our very first grandson and for that reason he will always be special. He’s growing up too fast. I hope he will always want to visit his Nana and Pawpaw.

Austin is a very sweet little boy. He loves to dress up like his daddy and oh how handsome he is. Austin is thoughtful and caring for everyone around him. I’ll never forget his words to me the first time I visited them in Birmingham. As we drove into their driveway and parked, Austin said, “Nana, this is Alabama”.

Some of my best memories of being with Aken and Austin are reading to them before they go to sleep. Those have always been special times for me…just Nana and Aken and Austin in their beds reading books.

We haven’t gotten to be around Aaron as much as the other kids. I hate that. I feel like I just don’t know him very well. But I do know that he a very special little boy at his house with his family. They all adore him and I can see why. He is adorable.

I hope God grants me many more years to spend with my grandchildren and I hope they will have good memories of their Nana. I love them all very much and I love being Nana.

Screened Porch

2009-04-11T09:16:00.000-07:00

I really like my screened porch. It’s now my favorite room of the house.

A couple of years ago, a huge oak tree in our back yard died and had to be cut down. We hadn’t realized how much shade it had provided until it was gone. It kind of made our deck useless. I came up with an idea to put a roof over it and screen it in. Glenn, our handyman, came over and we discussed it and he got started on it right away. Of course, one thing led to another and we decided to put down indoor/outdoor carpet and I furnished it mostly with extra furniture around the house and added lots of plants, of course. I knew it would be a great place for the grandkids to play, so we added some toys. It’s like having an extra room in our house.

I love to sit out on my screened porch and just look at the trees and all the greenery in our back yard. I really like to listen to the birds and watch the squirrels run up and down the trees. It’s a great place to watch the sun set. If you’ve seen our backyard, you know the view is good. When I sit on my screened porch…it’s like the world slows down and life seems better. God seems closer. It’s such a peaceful place to be.

Screened porches have been around for generations. Art’s Grandma and Grandpa King had a screened porch and I remember playing on it when I was a little girl. When we had big dinners over there, everyone seemed to spill out onto the porch. It was the gathering place. They had a wooden swing and everyone always wanted to sit in the swing. That swing is now hanging in Ross and Staci’s screened porch!

Art’s Grandma and Grandpa Barnhill had a screened porch, too. Many times when we drove down the road and approached their house, we would see them sitting out on that porch. That made us happy. Usually when company came, they would want to join Grandma and Grandpa B on the porch. I really think lots of people came there hoping they would get to visit them on the screened porch. They had a wooden swing, too, and that was my favorite place to sit. It was quiet out there and you could look out over the fields of cotton or just the plowed rows of dirt…and the world would slow down and a peace would come over you…like no where else. Sitting on that porch was one of the most peaceful places on this earth….and I miss it. I didn’t know any of my grandparents, but I would guess that they had screened porches, too. I think lots of people had them back then…..back when life was simpler.

We had a front porch when I was a kid, but it wasn’t screened. It was closed in with aluminum framed roll-out windows. Not quite the same as screens, but better than nothing. I liked to sit out there and watch the sun set. In that flat coastal part of Texas, you could literally see the sun go down. Every evening the Brahman cattle across the road would wind their way across the pasture, one behind the other, to the trees where they would spend the night. What a sight!

We also had a screened porch on the side of our house. That’s where everybody came into our house. If someone ever came to the front door, we knew they were strangers. The side screened porch was between my bedroom and the only bathroom in that big old house. In the winter time, that screened porch was my enemy…not something I had pleasant memories of. The only way to get to the bathroom from any other part of the house was to go through the screened porch. On cold winter nights, or days, you dreaded the trip to the bathroom. For sure it was better than going outside! I would run from my room to the bathroom as fast as I could. That old butane floor heater in the bathroom sure felt good when you got in there. Sometimes you just wanted to stay a while. Eventually you had to make that trip back through the screened porch. I’m thankful that I don’t have to run through a screened porch now days to go to the bathroom.

This world is getting faster and more hectic everyday. We all need a screened porch to sit on. I’m so glad I have one for my grandkids to enjoy. I hope they’ll have fond memories of sitting on Nana and Pawpaw’s screened porch.

To make the best better

2009-04-04T16:55:00.000-07:00

To make the best better. That’s the 4-H Club motto. Well, at least it was when I was in 4-H. Hopefully, it’s still their motto. I think that’s a pretty good goal for anyone.

4-H Motto and Pledge:
In support of the 4-H Club Motto, To Make the Best Better, I pledge: My Head to clearer thinking, My Heart to greater loyalty, My Hands to larger service, and My Health to better living, For my club, my community, and my country.

I didn’t have to look this up. It’s been in my head since I was nine years old. That’s when I joined the 4-H Club. You had to be nine to join. But I was involved long before that. My brothers were very active in 4-H and both my parents were adult leaders. 4-H was a huge part of our lives.

The 4-H symbol is a green 4-leaf clover with a white H on each leaf….with the H’s representing head, heart, hands and health.

The older I get, the more I appreciate what I learned in 4-H. The lessons learned and the experiences I had, have a huge bearing on who I am today. Basically, 4-H taught me skills I needed to be a better wife and mother.

In previous blogs I’ve written about showing steers, cooking, sewing, the county fair, etc., but there was so much more to 4-H than just those things. We were taught leadership, responsibility and record keeping. We were encouraged to learn many new skills and then teach the younger members what we had learned. We went to camps and experienced being away from our parents and families. We were taught to be independent and competitive but also to be a part of a team. In everything, we were encouraged “to make the best better”.

I can’t even imagine what my life would have been like without the experiences of 4-H. When I stop and think about all the things I’ve done in my life, I know without a doubt that the knowledge and skills I learned in 4-H have had a huge impact on me.

Our 4-H meetings were very structured. We opened with prayer, said the pledge of allegiance to the American flag and repeated the 4-H motto and pledge. We elected officers, followed parliamentary procedure and conducted our meetings in a very respectful, disciplined, grown-up manner. We wore our 4-H Club uniforms to many of our activities. And we also had lots of fun. There was always music and dancing…folk dancing and square dancing. Some of my fondest memories are of sitting around campfires at 4-H camp and singing.

Every summer, we had our county 4-H camp at Marble Falls, Texas, near Austin. I was so ready and anxious to get into the 4-H Club. I remember that our county agent was at our house one day and he told me and my parents that he would let me go to camp the summer before I turned 9. I was so very excited. I went every year for many years. Camp was rather rustic, now that I think back on it, but at the time, I thought it was great! At camp, we slept on cots in dorms.…the girls all in one dorm and the boys in another. The camp grounds were next to a big lake. We played, cooked, ate, danced, sang, etc. in a big screened in building across the way from the dorms. There was no air conditioning and it was terribly hot in the Texas Hill Country in the summer. But none of us were accustomed to air conditioning, so it was no big deal. I always looked forward to camp. There were kids there from all over the county, so we got to be good friends with kids from other communities….Wharton, El Campo, East Bernard, Hungerford, etc.

We had a county 4-H council and a county 4-H banquet where we interacted with the same kids we went to camp with. We also competed with those same 4-Hers at the county fair and at other county contests. The winners of those events went on to compete on the district level and then on to state. State winners had the opportunity to receive college scholarships. Record keeping was an important part of all the contests, and for some reason, I really liked doing that. I still have the last 4-H record book that I compiled and entered in a contest.....almost 50 years ago.

Another highlight of each summer was our trip to the Texas A&M campus for the annual 4-H Club Round-up. That’s where most of the state competitions were held. A group of girls from our Iago club competed in the “share the fun” contest, which was basically a talent show. I was a part of that. We didn’t win, but we had lots of fun and it was a great experience to stay on campus and meet and compete with kids from all over Texas. After I was married, I had the honor of serving as a judge for the state cooking contest at round-up.

I don’t know what 4-H is like in 2009, but I have an idea that it’s very different than it was in the 1950’s. I know things change, but that’s one thing I wish had stayed the same. I wish my grandchildren could experience the 4-H Club that I knew, or something similar.

I hope that the 4-H motto….to make the best better….continues to be a part of my life.

A stitch in time............

2009-03-21T13:21:00.000-07:00

There’s an old saying “a stitch in time, saves nine”. I like that. I like to sew. I’m in the midst of sewing for my 5 month old granddaughter, Naomi.

“My granddaughter” is still a new concept for me. Being the only girl in a family of 6 children and then having two sons and five grandsons, I have few experiences with little girls. In fact, except for baby shower gifts, I’ve never sewn for a little girl, other than myself.

I have a feeling that I’ll be sewing more for this little girl than I have for my grandsons….and I hope God gives me lots of years to do that. I made pajamas and a few other clothes for the boys when they were little, but as they got older that wasn’t in their plan. Sam and I have sewn some silly little outfits for him and Austin has helped me sew some things, and I’ve made some bedding for the grandsons, but that’s about all the sewing I’ve done with or for my grandsons.

Since I started making Naomi’s crib bedding a few days ago, I’ve had time to think about sewing and all my memories of the stitches I’ve made. While sewing, I can think a lot. I realize that I enjoy doing things that allow me to think and work at the same time. I mean that two ways. I like using my brain…which is required in sewing…and I’ll explain more about that later. And I also like to have the quiet time while I’m working alone, with my hands. Sewing is good for me.

I had no grandmother to teach me to sew and my mother couldn’t even sew on a button, so I had no experience with sewing until I was 9 years old. The 4-H Club introduced me to the art, and science, of sewing and from the first moment I sat at a sewing machine and realized what I could do….I loved it! The summer after I had turned 9 in January, I took a sewing workshop at Wharton County Jr. College and made my very first thing. I don’t recall what it was…..maybe a simple gathered skirt. I just remember that I was so proud of it.

In high school I got a double dose of sewing lessons as I took home economics classes each year, along with my continued time in the 4-H Club. I started out making very simple articles of clothing and moved on to make tailored, lined suits with bound buttonholes. I made lots of my own clothes and loved the creativity of it. I would dream up an outfit or see something in a magazine that I thought was really cool and I would go look for a pattern and fabric and make it for myself. Even when I didn’t have time to sew, or couldn’t find the right pattern, I would take the fabric and the idea to a seamstress in Wharton, and she would make it for me. I can remember to this day, 50 years later, some of those cute skirts and tops and dresses that I created. Sometimes people say ugly things about “homemade” clothes. I made sure that my “homemade” clothes were made better than ‘store bought”. In fact, I would compare my “homemade” clothes to the “store bought” ones and realize how much better made mine were….and so much cheaper! I’ve saved lots of money by making my clothes and being able to alter the ones that I did buy.

As I mentioned, my mom couldn’t sew on a button or hem her own skirts, so I did a lot of that for her. I even made dresses for her.

In 1961, during my junior year in high school, I won the Wharton County Dress Revue and went on to win the district (19 counties) competition at the University of Houston and that qualified me to be in the state competition at the State Fair of Texas in Dallas. There I modeled my outfit on a stage in front of hundreds of people. For this little country girl, that was a pretty big deal! I still remember that outfit. It was a 2-piece suit made of dark charcoal 100% fine wool that was very soft and light weight. The straight, just below the knee, skirt had a black lining. The jacket was lined with white and charcoal print Italian silk. My accessories included a black wool beret (hat), black fabric gloves, and black calf heels and hand bag. That’s the way we dressed up in those days…hat, gloves…the whole deal!

Somewhere in my later years I stopped making my own clothes and I also stopped “dressing up” like I did when I was younger. I think some of it is laziness and some of it is because of our current culture. People just don’t seem to “dress up” like they used to. In some ways I like that, but in other ways I kind of miss it.

In college I took more sewing classes, as a home economics major, and improved my sewing skills even more. In one sewing class I remember making a good looking
lined wool suit with bound buttonholes and fur trimmed collar and sleeves. I wish I had saved those suits. They were beautiful works of art….probably my best sewing efforts. Anyway, I continued to sew. I designed and made my wedding dress and lots and lots of other clothes for myself.

I continued to make my clothes and sew for other people after I got married. In fact, for many years I was a seamstress, on the side….one of those many jobs I’ve had. I took several different classes from a very professional seamstress and learned to make my own
patterns, and from those patterns I made some really awesome pants and blouses. That was really when the geometry and math came in. My teacher was from Austria and she only knew the metric system. I really had to use my brain for those classes and learned so very much.

When Art was in the Army we lived in Virginia and we were poor, I made his dress slacks, leisure suits and even a regular tailored suit. Now that was a real accomplishment. One of the most difficult things about making a man’s suit was to find the fabric. Most fabric stores don’t have fabric suitable for making a man’s suit. I felt like I had really reached the top of my sewing career when I finished that project, but I knew I would never do it again. I like challenges, but that was a bit much!

Sewing requires lots of things…..patience, math, measuring, knowledge of fabrics, patience, flexibility, measuring, creativity, more measuring and more patience. I see some young ladies sewing now who don’t have the basic knowledge that I was fortunate to get in the 4-H Club and my home economics classes. They don’t seem to have a clue about the selvages, the bias or the grain, pressing each seam after it is sewn, using a pressing cloth, a sleeve board and pressing ham, hand stitched hems that don’t show, precise measurements, straight stitches or buttons sewn on properly. All those things really do make a difference in the finished product. I’m afraid that those basic things are a dying art, because it’s not popular anymore for girls to be in 4-H and take home economics in high school or college. That makes me sad. It also makes me glad that I grew up in the country when and where I did. I got some really good training. I could write a book about the training I received from the 4-H Club. The 4-H Club motto “to make the best better” was instilled in me. Maybe my next blog will be about that.

Proverbs 31 speaks to us about a ‘virtuous woman”. The verses that mention how she seeks wool and flax and works willingly with her hands and how she lays her hands to the spindle; and makes herself coverings of tapestry; and she makes fine linens and sells them; and she perceives that her merchandise is good..…….all those things tell me that sewing is a good thing for a woman to do. Proverbs 31:31 says “Give her of the fruit of her hands; and let her own words praise her in the gates.”

I hope Naomi will want to learn to sew and I hope and pray that I’ll still be around to teach her. I so want to share with my granddaughter what I know about sewing and maybe I can share with her some of my wisdom and with God’s guidance, she will strive to become a virtuous woman.

My College Days

2009-01-23T14:02:00.000-08:00

I graduated from Boling High School in May of 1963. There was never any question about me going to college. In our family, it was just a given…at least that was what my daddy wanted for us. I always thought that my mom really didn’t care if I went to college or not. One time she said something about the only reason I should go to college was to find a husband.

Anyway, the summer after I graduated from high school, I enrolled in Wharton County Junior College and took 6 hours each summer semester. At the end of that summer, I had 6 hours of freshman English and 6 hours of history.

In the fall, I moved to Huntsville, Texas to start classes at Sam Houston State. The main reason I chose that school was because they had a very good home economics program and that was the only thing I had ever wanted to major in. My brothers had gone to the University of Texas (or what I soon learned to call tu) and Texas A&M. At that time, A&M was not an option for me, since girls were not accepted there, and even back then, I had absolutely no desire to be a t-sip.

My parents drove me to Huntsville and dropped me off in front of Estel Dormitory, my home for the next nine months. It was kind of sad for me, and a little frightening, but I was really excited about this new chapter in my life.

I had dreamed of meeting my roommate, having meaningful discussions with her and developing a wonderful relationship with my first college roommate. What a surprise! Donna was from Austin and I never understood how she ever graduated from high school and was accepted into college. She couldn’t spell or write a complete sentence and was the sloppiest person I had ever been around. She might have taken 3 baths the entire time we lived together for 9 months! You might ask how I know that? Well, let me give you several reasons…the smell and her bar of soap. Have you ever seen how a bar of soap will get deep cracks in it when it never gets wet? I know, not many people use bars of soap these days, but back then we didn’t have body wash and shower gel, etc. We just had bars of soap. The same bar sat on the side of the tub for 2 semesters and didn’t get any smaller. Nor did she change the sheets on her bed the entire 2 semesters. I know…you’re wondering why I stayed with her all that time and didn’t ask for a different roommate? I don’t know. Maybe I felt sorry for her and thought I could help her. Who knows? She seemed to like me and I thought she needed me. Whatever….

I made good grades at Sam Houston. It was known (maybe still is) for being a party school, but I didn’t party while I was there. I went to class and studied, went to the BSU (Baptist Student Union) and apparently ate a lot. I gained about 10 or 15 pounds that year. My home economics classes were interesting and informative and I got involved in the home economics club. I met some really good friends….mostly in my dorm. My suitemates and I got along really well. Ruby was from Splendora and Francis was from Woodville, I think. On another floor, in my dorm, I met some great friends, Sandra and Janet. They were from Schulenberg. Sandra married Howard, who Art knew from the Corps at A&M, and I think they’ve lived in Franklin for as long as we’ve lived here in Bryan. We see them once in a while.

President Kennedy was assassinated in November while I was at Sam Houston. I remember where I was on campus when I heard the news that our president had been shot.

For some reason, I wasn’t satisfied with Sam Houston and thought that I wanted to go to a more “Christian” school and decided to go to Baylor the next year. My dad wasn’t really excited about that. He knew it would cost a lot more, so he told me that if I went to Baylor, I would have to use the money that had been set aside for my college fund in a savings account, and he wouldn’t help me at all. So, that’s what I did. When I was very young, daddy had started a savings account for me at Colorado Savings and Loan. I had a passbook and could keep up with how much money I had.

My parents drove me to Waco the next fall and let me out in front of Memorial Dormitory…my new home at Baylor. I had no car and knew no one there, but I thought it was where I was suppose to be. Other than my shoes, I don’t recall what I had on that first day on the Baylor campus, but I immediately became aware that I wasn’t dressed like everyone else. Now keep in mind, just a few months before, I was dressed very similar on the Sam Houston campus….and everything was okay. The main thing that stood out to me was that I was the only girl who was wearing little white socks with her penny loafers. They were just fine at Sam, but all the little rich city girls at Baylor laughed at my socks. They were wearing hose. Well, this little country girl didn’t want to be laughed at and I sure as heck didn’t want to be out of style, so as soon as I got my stuff in my room, I asked for directions to the nearest department store. I was told that Cox’s was in that direction not too far from campus. Cox’s was in downtown Waco and if you’ve ever been to Waco, you know that downtown isn’t just real close to Baylor…especially if you’re walking in central Texas heat and you really don’t know where you’re going. Anyway, after what seemed like hours, I got to Cox’s and bought myself a pair of hose, took my socks off in the dressing room and wore my hose and penny loafers back to the campus. You know, if I had been thinking clearly, I should have called my mom and dad that night and said, “come get me”. But I didn’t and that was the beginning of a miserable year at Baylor.

I just didn’t fit in. To start with, Baylor turned out to be a big disappointment to me. Maybe I was expecting too much. It seemed to me that if you were a girl at Baylor and you weren’t in a sorority, you just didn’t quite fit in…and I never have been nor ever will be a sorority girl. It was at Baylor where I met the first atheist that I had ever encountered. Yes, at Baylor. Also, at Baylor, I first found out about legalism….just didn’t know back then that there was a name for it. I only knew that I didn’t want to be told that I had to be at chapel at a certain time however many times a week. And I didn’t want to be told that I had to take religion courses. They were good classes with great professors. I just didn’t think I should be made to take them. I didn’t think I should be told that I had to be in my dorm room by 10 o’clock every night (or some such ridiculous hour). I discovered that everyone there wasn’t Baptist, nor was everyone a Christian, nor did it seem that anyone but me was poor and from the country. On top of all that, the home economics department was much weaker than the one I had left at Sam Houston. What was I doing there? I was miserable.

My roommate at Baylor was much better than the one I had at Sam. At least she took baths daily, changed her sheets often, could read and write and generally was okay. But she didn’t do much to help my self esteem when she made fun of my “country” accent and asked me to say “little ol’ me” and act like that was the funniest thing she had ever heard. She couldn’t believe that there was such a place like Iago, Texas. She wondered out loud where I was from when I would call home and talk to the operator and ask if she knew if my parents were at home or if they were at my brother’s house. Apparently in Houston, where she was from, she didn’t know the telephone operator that well.

I really liked my suitemates at Baylor…..Helen and Millie. Helen played the organ at our wedding and it was at our wedding that she met her future husband, Tom. Helen was Baptist and was a great pianist and organist. We still stay in touch. Her husband Tom was one of Art’s corps buddies at A&M.

I do have some fond memories of Baylor…it wasn’t all bad. I don’t recall how we met, but I had a great friend there, David. Every Sunday (that I was in town), David picked me up in his old, raggedy car and we drove to a tiny church on the other side of Waco where he led the music and I played the piano. I can still remember it, like it was yesterday. David had all the traffic lights timed just right and as we drove through downtown Waco on Sunday mornings, he would scare me crazy. There was very little traffic and he was always driving the top speed that he could without getting a ticket. I would be screaming for him to slow down and just as I would think that we would be running a red light…it would change just as we got to it…..sometimes just as we were going under it! I remember that car being so cold in the winter and air just whistling in from everywhere. I guess it didn’t have a heater. David had a girl friend and I was engaged to Art, so it was just a very good friendship. We had so much fun at that little church. Everyone there was very poor, uneducated and pretty much lower class folks, but they loved us and seemed to really appreciate us helping them out on Sunday mornings. It was cold in that little drafty church, too. I remember playing the piano with my coat on and my fingers were cold and stiff. I really felt that God was using me there. David’s parents had a beach house in Freeport and that’s where Art and I spent our honeymoon. David knew that Art and I had very little money when we married and his family offered that beach house for us to use at no cost. I’ve lost touch with David. I need to try to find him. Thanks again to the good old internet, I just found him and called him and we had a wonderful visit and plan to stay in touch!

Other fun memories that Art and I talk about frequently are the “moose pots”. Let me explain. Art was going to A&M and at that time, there were no girls there. Aggies were always looking for dates at other colleges. When Art decided he could get off to make a trip to Waco for the weekend, he would line up a bunch of his buddies to come with him. He would let me know how many were coming and I would line up that many Baylor girls for blind dates. On the way to Waco, the guys would put money in a “moose pot” and whoever got the ugliest date would get all the money from the “pot”. Of course, we never told the girls about it. This was just between me and the guys! To this day, one of those guys says something about it every time we see him…and he is a big time hot shot at Texas A&M!

A couple of girls across the hall from me were really sweet, but I don’t even remember their names. I just remember that their sorority or some club they were in sold donuts every morning and one of the girls ate a whole dozen donuts every day! Yep, she gained a little weight that year. I can still see that girl. Wish I could remember her name.

I didn’t make very good grades at Baylor. My heart just wasn’t in it! Art and I had decided to get married the next summer. I spent lots of my time designing my wedding dress and planning our wedding. Some of my friends at Baylor gave me a lingerie shower just before we left for the summer.

At the end of the spring semester, I left Baylor and moved back home to Iago to spend the summer getting ready for the wedding in August. Art had not done well at A&M that year either and there was a little discussion about him getting to go back in the fall. At that time, Dr. Potts was the man to make that decision. He was the Associate Dean of Agriculture. Anyway, when he found out that Art was getting married, he asked for us both to come and visit with him in his office. I felt a little anxious, to say the least, and a little intimidated to be in that office. Dr. Potts asked me lots of questions and made it clear that if Art was to succeed in college, as a married man, it was up to me to make that happen. Wow! He said that whether or not married guys made it in college depended totally on the woman they were married to. What a load for me to carry. I assured Dr. Potts that I would help my husband every way that I could. He told me that I would need to allow Art to study and to encourage him along the way. Evidently I said the right things and he felt that I was sincere, because he allowed Art to register for the fall semester of 1965. I was so grateful to Dr. Potts that I made him a pie and took it to him.

That was the end of my full time college days, but not the end of college for me. After Art and I married, I continued to take classes at A&M. There was no home economics department there and I was told that there never would be. I didn’t want to change majors and I didn’t want to commute to Sam Houston, so I just took random classes at A&M. During my time as a lab technician, they allowed me to leave work and take one class each semester and I did. In those days, girls could only go to A&M if their dads were professors or their husbands were students. In most of my classes, I was the only female. Most of the time I didn’t mind it, except for when I took a sociology class called “marriage and the family”. It was a little embarrassing at times. I took economics, political science, botany, some education, psychology and sociology classes. I took first aid in the athletic department and criminology and toured a unit of the Texas Department of Corrections. I just signed up for classes that interested me…with no degree plan in mind. I ended up with about 100 hours of college credit, but no degree. After the boys were born, I checked into commuting to Huntsville in hopes of finishing my degree in home economics, but I decided it would be too much for me to be a wife and mother and student. During Art’s last semester as an undergraduate, the Ag Ed Department presented me (and other wives) with a PhT diploma. Pushing Hubby Through! They had a very nice banquet and made a really big deal out of it. And I am just as proud of that as I would be of any other diploma. The night I received that diploma, I thought about my visit with Dr. Potts. He was a good man who gave us some really good advice and he made a very wise decision. Art graduated and his last semester he was on the dean’s list and named the outstanding student in his department.

I have no regrets about not finishing college. If I had gotten a degree, then I might have been tempted to work full-time while the boys were growing up and I don’t think that’s where God wanted me. Financially, maybe we would have been better off, but money’s not everything! And you certainly don’t have to be taking college classes to learn. I love to learn new things and I hope that desire never leaves me.

My brother, David

2009-01-17T13:59:00.000-08:00

My brother, David Ray Joyce, was four years older than me. He was a very handsome red-headed young man and lots of people called him “Red”. I didn’t. He was always David to me.

David graduated from Boling High School in May of 1959. He was a pretty good athlete and had been the quarterback on the football team. He was a leader. He had been president of the student body his senior year. He was respected and lots of younger kids looked up to him. He had followed in his brothers’ footsteps and raised and shown prize winning steers at the Houston Fat Stock Show. He was smart. He had made good grades in school and he had been accepted into Texas A&M for the upcoming fall semester. David had not quite decided what he would major in. For years he had wanted to be a veterinarian, but during the last part of his senior year, he believed that God was leading him to go into the ministry and was considering seminary after he finished college or maybe even changing plans and going to a small Christian college. He was really growing in the Lord. David was in love. He was engaged to marry Polly, a beautiful red haired girl from Wharton.

David was my hero. Unlike my other brothers, at times he was in the same school as I was. We were closer in age and I knew him better. I was so proud to be his little sister. He didn’t tease me unmercifully like my other brothers did. He protected me as a brother should. I wasn’t really looking forward to him going off to college and getting married. I would be going into the 9th grade and I wouldn’t have him at the high school to watch over me. But he was growing up and I knew he had to leave.

As soon as he graduated, he enrolled in summer classes at Wharton County Junior College, about 10 miles down the road. Every week day morning, he and two other guys and two girls carpooled to Wharton. They took a couple of morning classes and then headed back home before noon. David had a black and white ’55 chevrolet and on the morning of July 1, 1959, he was driving.

Mom and I were in the kitchen cooking a big lunch using our fresh vegetables just picked from our summer garden. We always cooked a big lunch (back then we called the noon meal dinner and the night meal supper). David should be home any minute. The table was set. We were getting the meatloaf and baked beans out of the oven and putting the food on the table. I remember it as if it were yesterday. We were scurrying around in that hot kitchen anticipating David’s arrival from school. Daddy walked in unexpectedly and told us that David had been killed in a horrible car wreck.

The next few hours and days are kind of a blur to me. We heard the details of the wreck. David was driving, one of the guys was in the front with him and the other boy and the girls were in the back seat. As they approached Burr, a very small community between Wharton and Iago, a young man, whose driver’s license had been suspended for drunk driving, came speeding across the railroad track and didn’t stop. He hit them broadside and pushed them into a beer truck that was meeting them. David died instantly. The other boys died, too and the girls were seriously injured, but survived.

Iago, Boling and Newgulf…..very small towns. Everybody knew everybody. They had all been in the same high school. All smart, popular, young people going to college. Devastating to everybody who knew them and even people who heard about it, but didn’t know them.

Our house was flooded with people….relatives from out of town and out of state and it seemed like everybody we knew and even some people I had never seen. People from all over Wharton County and who knows where else. David’s funeral service was unbelievable. The little Iago Federated Church was packed…even people were in the Sunday School rooms. The church yard was overflowing…people standing everywhere and there were cars parked down the road for miles and miles. I have never, before or since, seen that many people in Iago, Texas.

I have the dozens of cards and notes that people sent to us and I have the personal things that were his that my mom still had when she died….his report cards, high school yearbooks, pictures, and his favorite book that he got when he was a toddler, ‘The Littlest Angel”, given to him by our brother, Bub. I even have the envelope from the funeral home, marked “Joyce personal affects”…..the things that were on David’s body that last day of his life here on earth……his pocket knife, his Boling High School ring, four nickels and one penny and his wallet. In his wallet are several pictures of Polly, David showing a steer in our front yard, a picture of our brother, Bub, David’s social security card, the receipt for the diamond engagement ring bought at Sharman’s two months before that, some newspaper clippings, and other papers.

It’s been 50 years, this year….2009. And I still can’t write about this without shedding a
few tears. I’m sure I did ask “why” at the time, but I have never been angry at God about it. That day, as soon as I heard the devastating news, I went to my Protector, my Comforter, my Shield….my Heavenly Father and He took care of me. I was only 14 years old, but I already knew Him and I knew who was in control. Many times when things like this happen to people, they get angry with God and turn away from Him. God blessed me. Through this trial, He brought me closer to Him and I learned to trust Him even more. That’s when He became my best friend. At a very young age, I found out that others may leave you, at any time…we have no guarantee of how long we will have someone in our lives…..but God never leaves us.

We were all grieving. I don’t remember much about how we comforted and consoled each other. We weren’t a very intimate family….no hugs…no kisses. We were in shock. Devastated. I just know that I found my comfort and consolation in my Lord. At that very young age, I knew that God was there for me, if no one else was. There were so many people hurting, especially my mom and dad. They had suddenly and without warning lost their baby boy. Daddy had to identify him in that horrible state. That horrific wreck had left David’s body in such disarray….no daddy should ever have to witness such a scene. He never talked about it, to me. We didn’t talk about things like that, but I’m sure he was never able to forget it.

Things were never the same around our house. It took a toll on both my mom and dad. I’m not sure they ever got over it. I was not the same. I learned many things from
that terrible time in my life and many years later, some of those memories lingered and
influenced me in a huge way. I guess they still do. Because of the situation of that
wreck…a driver who shouldn’t have been driving because of alcohol…pushed my
brother’s car into a beer truck. He hit David’s car with such force that the imprint of his license plate was embedded in the passenger side door of David’s car. Get the picture? I hate drinking and driving and beer and drunkenness. Sorry, but for some reason, I just don’t like that! Some people don’t seem to understand why I don’t tolerate that very well, but then most people don’t know how that affected my life. When our teenage boys started driving and came home a little late, I panicked. Why? I know how quickly tragedies can occur and I know that no one is immune. It can happen to anybody at any time. I learned how to comfort someone when they experience the loss of a loved one. Words are not necessary. But hugs and prayers are. I learned how important community is. Living in a small community and going to a small church where everyone is close…..I experienced community at an early age. That’s something that many churches are stressing now and sometimes it seems that they think it’s something new. It’s not. I experienced community growing up and especially during that turbulent time in my life. The whole community suffered together.

I recall that in my room, alone, at night I talked to God and I talked to David…and that brought comfort to me. I think…no, I know that I grew up really fast when I was 14 years old.

The most important thing I learned from this experience was that I never wanted God to leave me…and he never will! How can people go through such heartache without Him? I was so blessed to have Him already in my life and there beside me, holding me and comforting me. I learned that with Him, I can do anything. I learned how very important it is to know when you lose a loved one that there is no doubt that they are in heaven immediately. There are theological disagreements about that, but not in my mind. David had a close relationship with the Lord and I knew where he was and where he is today. I learned how important it is to know the Lord at a very early age. David was just 18. I was just 14. But we knew Him! I learned that God’s plan for your life cannot be questioned. Of course, I missed David and still do. Many times I’ve wondered how my life would be different if that had not happened. I’ve wondered how much different our family would have been? Would it have been closer? I wish my sons and grandchildren could have known their Uncle David. I think they would have loved him. I’m so glad that my husband knew him and loved him. David would be 68 now. I just turned 64. I think we would have been close….much closer than I am to my other brothers. But I quickly turn from those thoughts and know that it was not in God’s plan for David to live to be an old man. Instead of becoming bitter when things like this happen, I think God wants us to learn and grow in Him. God wants us to trust and depend on Him. He wants us to use these experiences and trials to help others. He wants us to learn how to better serve Him.

I thank God for my brother David and I so look forward to seeing him one day soon.

Country Girl

2009-01-02T11:33:00.000-08:00

I’m a country girl…..and proud of it. A couple of years ago, I heard a woman in Art’s office make a derogatory comment about another woman…..saying that she was from “the country” and I don’t really remember the exact words that followed, but she obviously thought that being from “the country” made the woman less than fitting to her standards. That made me angry and I wanted to say something, but didn’t. I guess that’s a good thing, otherwise we might not still be friends. But I haven’t forgotten it and I’ve thought about it more than once and maybe someday I will talk to her about it or maybe just tell her to read this.

Growing up, I never recall wishing that I lived in a city or even the little bitty town a mile from our house. I never considered myself missing out on anything that was happening in a town or city. The older I get, the more I appreciate what I learned from country living. Looking back, I guess I should have felt lonely, and maybe I was, but at the time I didn’t know it.

We had a big family…..mom and dad, five older brothers and me, but we never all lived in the same house together. When I was born, my two oldest brothers were already in college and living in Austin. By the time I started to school, the third oldest brother was in college and living in College Station. Do you see a problem already? Two sips and an Ag. Then the next brother was eight years older than me and the last one was four years older than me. We lived on 37 acres and the closest neighbors were about a quarter of a mile down the road and they had boys. Needless to say, there were no girls around for me to play with. I spent lots of time alone.

Alone, but not idle. I’ve always wanted to learn and explore new things…not adventurous, but cautiously curious and very observant of everything going on around me. As a child, I was very quiet. So quiet, that some of my mom’s friends thought that I couldn’t talk. For years, they never heard me say a word. I would go with my mom to her Home Demonstration Club meetings. All the other ladies in the club were older than my mom, or at least they had older children or only boys, so I was the only kid there. I would just sit by my mom and listen and watch. I learned a lot.

I remember spending hours walking and sitting in the pasture, picking wild flowers and examining them carefully. Buttercups were my favorite and I was always sad that they wilted almost immediately after I picked them. The delicate pink petals…so thin, you could almost see through them and the buttery yellow center. The flower looked like a pale pink cup with butter in the center….thus, buttercup. And then there were the little yellow flowers called dandelions that turned into a ball of fuzz that could be blown away into the wind. And the lacy clusters of Queen Anne’s Lace growing wild in the ditches beside the roads and in the pastures….snow white, tall and regal. I can still remember how the fresh green clover felt and smelled in the springtime. I would sit in it for hours and look for the coveted 4-leaf clover. Oh my goodness…I just thought of a song that I haven’t sung in years. “I’m looking over a 4-leaf clover that I overlooked before. One leaf is sunshine, the second is rain, third is the roses that grow in the lane. No need explaining the one remaining is somebody I adore. I’m looking over a 4-leaf clover that I overlooked before”. Then there were the hours that I spent in the hay barn…climbing on the scratchy, dusty, dry hay and searching for eggs that the chickens had just laid. I would climb to the highest stack and touch the rafters in the top of the barn. I felt like I was on top of the world. In the fall, there were the long walks around the perimeter fence of our 37 acres looking for and picking up pecans….the little native pecans. Our big yard was full of pecan trees, too. Picking up pecans is still one of my favorite things to do. I had lots of time to bond with nature, and think, and spend time with God. Alone, but not idle.

There were always lots of animals around….our dog Patsy, chickens, the dreaded mean rooster (that I was scared to death of), pigs, cows, horses. When I got older and in the 4-H Club, I helped my brothers raise steers, chickens and pigs to show at the Wharton County Fair and Houston Fat Stock Show (now called the Houston Livestock Show). After school and on weekends, we spent lots of time walking the steers and training them to be judged. Lots of discipline and learning there.

Across the road from our house was a big, open pasture with some woods at one end. The pasture was the home to a big herd of Brahman cattle. We called them “bramers” and for years I didn’t know that they were really Brahman cattle. Anyway, I don’t remember who owned that land. I just know that as a kid I thought they had to be rich. Late every evening, just as the sun was going down, those cows would slowly walk one behind the other in a long line…headed for the woods for the night. That was a beautiful sight! Even then I recognized how special it was to live where I could see that every evening. I so wish I had a picture of that….but it’s in my mind as clear as it was 60 years ago.

We had a big garden and I helped my daddy plant it, water it, weed it and gather the harvest. I learned how to tell when vegetables and fruits were just right to pick and then I learned to shell peas, shuck corn, snap beans, cut okra and get all itchy, dig potatoes, make pickles out of cucumbers, make plum, grape and berry jelly, crack and pick out pecans, kill, dress and cut up a chicken, freeze, can, cook…..you name it. How many city kids learn to do all that? I even picked cotton. I didn’t have to…nobody made me. I just wanted to. I put that big cotton sack on my shoulder and I walked between the rows and picked off those beautiful fluffy cotton bolls and filled my sack, or at least as much as I could carry back to the scales. They weighed it and paid me by the pound. Seems like it was less than 10 cents a pound and it takes lots of cotton to weigh a pound!

I haven’t even skimmed the surface, but I know one thing…….that woman in Art’s office obviously has none of these memories. I wouldn’t trade my life growing up in the country for anything. Yes, I’m a country girl…..and I’m proud of it. The things I learned, the experiences I had…..the simple way of life. I’ll never forget. God’s creations and their beauty were so evident to me as a very young child. Sitting in a lush green bed of clover with a fresh spring breeze blowing through my hair, studying the beauty of a buttercup……a lonely little girl knows there’s a God. A God who has made all this and so much more.

Casa Rod

2008-12-28T14:46:00.000-08:00

Casa Rodriquez. My favorite place to eat out. Art and I just got home from eating breakfast at Casa Rodriquez in historic downtown Bryan, Texas. We enjoy doing that. It's been a family tradtion for many years for us to eat breakfast on Saturday mornings at Casa Rod. We look forward to it. They are open for breakfast only on Saturday and Sunday mornings. We don't usually eat breakfast there on Sundays...just Saturdays...but today we skipped church and went there.

Because of the holiday time, our church was just having one service today and no Sunday School. It's probably not a good excuse, but we didn't go to church because we knew that it would be a traditional service with traditional organ music and traditional music... period. We're old, but we don't like that. We worship better with contemporary music. Maybe that's wrong, but whatever, we just really like the guitars and the drums and the keyboards. We're so glad that our church offers us the opportunity to worship like that. Anyway, we went to Casa Rod. We always see lots of familiar faces there. Today we saw Coach Blair (the Lady Aggies basketball coach), the Chavarria family and Steve, and the Orozco family. Kelly and Rae (from our Sunday School class) were there and sat at our table with us. They skipped church too. I firmly believe that church is a great place to worship and I think I should be there as often as I can, but I also know that I can worship God anywhere....even at Casa Rod.

We know the owners and their family, the manager and all the wait staff there. This morning everyone seemed to be overflowing with Christmas joy! It was so fun. Most of the wait staff stopped by our table to hug us and ask us about our Christmas. Several of them just seemed to want to share their lives with us. It is so good to eat at a restaurant where everyone who works there knows you and seems to care for you. Most of them know where we want to sit, what we want to drink, what we usually order, and that I like to have a to-go cup of diet coke. They're like family. We love that place. It's almost as good as home. And the food....oh my goodness....it's just the best! We have eaten Mexican food all over Texas, in many states, including new Mexico, and even in Australia, where believe it or not, it was pretty good Mexican food, but none of them can even come close to being as good as Casa Rod.

We started eating Casa Rodriquez food when it was just a tiny drive-up and take-out on South College Avenue. Richard Rodriquez ran it. Then it moved to downtown Bryan into what was just a little "hole-in-the-wall" on Bryan Street. That's when we became regular customers and Ken was a regular lunch customer with the guys from First Federal. By then, Richard's wife, Bea, was in charge. It was what the food network would now call a "dive". It was kind of like family even then. For Art's 55th birthday, I wanted to give him a surprise party and could think of no better place then Casa Rod. At that time they weren't open at night. But Bea made an exception and let us have his party there on the evening of his birthday. She got her cooks and wait staff to come and opened up just for us. It was there that night in Casa Rod that we learned that our first grandchild was on the way! Three years ago, Bea's son-in-law, Tommy, quit his job and became the manager and co-owner and they bought the former Gina's location and moved into a much larger space just a few doors down. Word spread like wild fire and now it's THE place to go for Mexican food in B-CS. On some nights, you have to wait an hour for a table. It was in the new Casa Rod location just a little over two years ago that we saw our baby Jude for the very first time. Ross and Staci have made Casa Rod their Saturday morning tradition, too. All the regulars there know Sam and Jude and now little Naomi. Sam's favorite food is Casa Rod rice with Casa Rod queso on it. Our whole family goes there to eat when Ken's family is here for a visit. When Art and I come back home from an out of town trip, we can hardly wait to get our Casa Rod "fix".

Casa Rodriquez. My favorite place to eat out.

Christmas

2008-12-27T12:38:00.000-08:00

I've taken a break from my writings...for several reasons. I did a really stupid thing and opened up a "no-no" on Facebook and my computer was immediately infected with a virus. I could still send and receive e-mails and get to all my files, but could not access the internet. That happened a couple of weeks before Christmas and I was really busy with other things, so it was really not a huge problem. The same thing happened to Art and some other folks I know....young ones I might add! It made me feel better to learn that it didn't just happen to old, computer illiterate people like us! Anyway, thanks to a very smart, very kind young man in our Sunday School class, I'm now back on line. During those few weeks, I had just about decided to get off Facebook, but now I think I'll give it another chance. I don't enjoy it as much as some people seem to, but it does keep me updated on family and friends. I had some time to think about my next blogs and as usual, I've thought about lots more stories I want to share. During my time off, I've only had one person to tell me that they missed my writings, so I guess I'm not entertaining very many people with this. Oh well, that's okay....I'm enjoying it!

Christmas 2008 has come and gone.....well, not really gone yet.....I still have my decorations up and putting them away is always a big chore for me. At least this year it won't be quite such a big job since I didn't put up a big tree. Call me a scrooge...I don't care. I realized this year that it's the big tree that I don't like to put up and take down. I love to decorate.....just not a big tree. At least I did better than last year. Christmas 2007 I put up no Christmas decorations.

For many years, I have been one of those people who gets depressed at Christmas. Seasonal Affective Disorder. SAD. Yes, they even have a name for it now. I can't quite put my finger on when it started, but I think it was when Art and I married and began the ever so common problem of where to spend Christmas. Our parents lived just a few miles apart and wouldn't you know....both sets of parents wanted us to spend Christmas at their house every year. Not possible. To make matters worse, or I guess I should say more complicated....Art had two sets of grandparents who lived just a few miles from our parents....and wouldn't you know it....they wanted us to spend Christmas with them! It was so bad that one year we actually ate Christmas lunch at one house and got up and went to the other parents for dessert! Yep, that really happened. And guess what....that didn't seem to be good enough. We also got to where we counted the hours that we stayed at each parents house, and made sure that they were equal to the minute! Sounds a little much, huh? Well, we were just trying to please. It seemed to make life easier, but did it really? But you know what? You can't please everybody all the time. My parents were usually feeling the most slighted because we spent more time with Art's family. After all, he had more family for which we had to divide our time. I know some couples just split up and she goes with her family and he goes with his. Art and I never chose to do that. It was not an option for us. We wanted to be together.

Now for some advice from someone who's been there and done that. Family traditions are great, but traditions can cause heart ache. I have seen family traditions cause lots of problems in marriages. Art and I went through some tough times trying to observe so many different family's traditions. Early in our marriage I started wondering when we were going to be able to start our own family traditions. As long as his grandparents were living, it seemed that their traditions were at the top of the list. I started looking ahead, thinking....okay, when do his parent's traditons get moved to the top and then when do our family traditions reach the top of the list? Does any of this make sense? Maybe I think too much, but somehow I just could never see when we would ever be able to have our own family Christmas. You hear people say that each family needs to start it's own traditions and somehow I just couldn't see that ever happening. Anyway, back to those early years of marriage. After all the shopping, wrapping, decorating, cooking, packing, etc, we would get in the car and head toward Wharton County and I would start to cry and usually cry the two hour drive there. It seemed to me like we were heading toward stress and worry and frustration of the unknown. Were we going to be able to please everyone? Was someone going to be offended. Were unkind words going to be said, or unkind thoughts left unsaid? I just couldn't seem to find much Christmas cheer in what was ahead. Then as we had kids, I so wanted to spend Christmas at our home. Somehow that seemed to be safer, less stressful and much more peaceful. But how do you tell family that you're not coming "home" for Christmas? By this time "home" was in Bryan, Texas, not Wharton County, Texas. I know....you're thinking I'm a crazy person right now....but remember I have SAD. Does that explain it?

Then as years passed, some really very sad things happened around Christmas time that made my Christmas blues worse. Some very dear friends of ours, our age, were killed in a car wreck on Christmas Eve....along with their son and her parents. It was awful. Kent and Sherry were in our Sunday School class. Kent had helped us with auctions. They had just spent Christmas Eve in Wellborn with Kent's parents and were driving back into Bryan. A drunk driver hit them head on and Kent and Sherry and her parents were killed instantly. Little Jody was life flighted to Temple fighting for his life. The next day, James, Jody's older teenage brother had to make the decision to take little Jody off life support. That was a very tough Christmas. Our Sunday School class spent Christmas day and the next few days at their house greeting those who came to pay their respects. The tree was up and the gifts were under it. A few days later, we all mourned as three caskets lined the front of our church and we said good-bye to our dear, sweet friends. Our hearts ached for James, left alone. An older couple in our church took Ken and Ross and tried to help make their Christmas as good as possible under the circumstances. James is special to us. He grew in the Lord and is still today one of our very dearest friends.

Just a few weeks before Christmas another year, my dear friend Ginger was murdered. She was a realtor and she received a call to go show a house in the country. It was a set-up and the man who had called her was not wanting to look at the house. For some unknown reason, he just wanted to kill her. He was never found. Ginger had a husband and two precious children who spent that Christmas and all those since without her.

Every Christmas I think of Kent and Sherry and Jody and Ginger. I think of other loved ones who are no longer with us here on earth.

For those reasons and many others, I most always get the Christmas blues and shed some tears around Christmas. This year was the same, but I am happy to report that I had fewer tears and much less depression than in past years. I think there are many reasons for this that I'll explain later. But first I want to say that I used to think that I was the only sad person at Christmas. I have since discovered that I'm not alone. There are lots of people who have Christmas depression. I can usually spot them. I'm pretty observant of people around me. I notice things that a lot of people don't seem to see. Last Sunday in church I noticed a young woman who was having a very difficult time singing the Christmas songs. The whole service seemed tough for her. I can relate. I always cry in church when we sing Christmas songs.....especially Silent Night. Don't ask me why. I can't explain it. It has to do with the dreaded SAD. Anyway, I went to her after the service was over and hugged her and told her that I understand. We bonded. We understood without saying much. Remember...God has instructed me to be a mentor and I want to be obedient. God has placed that young woman in my life and I hope to be able to help her. I know that God placed me in that pew so that I could see her and He has a plan.

Christmas 2008, we had an early Christmas time with Ross, Staci, Sam, Jude and Naomi and then Art and I went to Birmingham. The day that Ross and his family came over, I had a little touch of SAD, but I prayed and asked God to take it away. The rest of the day was good. Christmas in Birmingham was good. Art, Ken and I went to Ken and Michelle's church for their Christmas Eve Service. That was special. Being able to sit by our son and worship The King, especially this year, was an overwhelming experience. Knowing what Ken has gone through and continues to.....we have so much to be thankful for this Christmas. Both Art and I shed tears during that service, but they were tears of joy. I was not depressed. I was filled with joy and thanksgiving for being able to celebrate Christmas with our oldest son, who as Ross says "ain't afraid of cancer". I was overwhelmed with adoration for the One who came to earth to save us all. The music was awesome. There is no other way to describe it. The instrumentalists were incredible. Their music minister sang "O Holy Night" better than I've ever heard it sung. The people there love Ken and Michelle. Everyone we met and shook hands with showed us how much they love them and how grateful they are for God's blessings on them this past year. We were so blessed to be there.

So Ken's continuing good health is one of the main reasons that Christmas 2008 has been good for me. That dreaded cancer hit our family with a mighty force, but our Great Physician is healing Ken and for that we are so grateful. Through this experience I have learned what praying without ceasing really means. God in His wonderous ways has grown us all through this. It's made Christmas a little more special than ever before.

Another reason is our sweet Naomi. God blessed us with our first little granddaughter in October. Our little angel. We can hardly wait to see how much she will grow and change during the coming year. Watching her grow up with her two special brothers.....words are inadequate.

Being able to celebrate Christmas with our two sons, whom I am so proud of, and their beautiful wives, and our six precious grandchildren.....how could I be sad? One day while we were in Birmingham, Aken was having a rough time. As we sat and talked about his unhappiness at that moment, he said "Nana, it's Christmas. Christmas is suppose to be the happiest time of the year." Aken is a very smart little boy. Aken is growing up fast. He knows that Jesus is His Savior and for that I am so happy. Our grandchildren have parents who are training them up in the Lord. That makes me really happy.

Other reasons that Christmas has been happier for me this year.....a book I just read and another one I'm reading now. My long time friend, Ginny, told me about a book "90 Minutes in Heaven" that has changed my way of thinking about heaven. The one I'm reading now, "Safely Home", is impacting my life, too. Our Sunday School class just competed an indepth study of heaven. All these things combined have given me a new vision of heaven, almost a yearning to be there. I know where Kent and Sherry and Jody and Ginger are....they were all believers and followers of Jesus Christ. I know where my Mom and Dad and my brother David are. I know where Art's dad and grandparents are. They are all "safely home" and someday I will be there, too. I know that my husband and my sons and my daughters-in- law and my grandchildren will join me there. If you are reading this, I ask you to read those two books. If you're one of those people like me who have experienced Christmas depression, ask God to take that away from you and next year you can experience Christmas in a new way.

Seasonal Affective Disorders can be cured by the One whose birthday we just celebrated. If you have it, God can fix it.

Merry Christmas!

Our first home

2008-12-03T13:38:00.000-08:00

A-7-X College View…our first home.

We moved into A-7-X College View on September 1, 1965. I’m not sure, but I think we probably moved in one trip in our car. We got more than a car full of wedding gifts, but that little apartment wouldn’t hold it all, so we left a lot of our gifts at my mom and dad’s house.

One of the reasons we were able to afford to get married when we did, was because the rent in the College View Apartments was $48 a month, furnished, with utilities included. Sounds like a real deal, huh? Well, let me explain. College View was rows of old 2 story military barracks that had been moved from the old Bryan Air Force Base (now where the A&M Riverside Campus is). They were located across from the campus on the corner of University Drive and South College Avenue. Each building was divided into eight apartments…four upstairs and four down. Each row was lettered A, B, C, etc. Each building in the rows was numbered 1, 2, 3, etc. Each apartment was lettered W, X, Y, Z on top and I don’t recall how the bottom units were lettered. So we were the first row in the back…A, in building #7, and in the second unit (X) on top. Our back windows looked out on the “new” brick Hensel Apartments, which are still there today. The College View buildings were torn down many years ago and replaced by new apartments. At the time we lived there, all the apartments on that land were called Married Student Apartments, but better known as “sperm village”. Now that area is occupied by international students and their families. When we were there, we all were poor, struggling college students. The guys were students and the wives were working to pay the way.

I’m not sure of the square footage of our apartment, but thinking back…I would say it was about 500 square feet, at the most. There was a tiny kitchen with an apartment size range and a small refrigerator, and room for only one person at a time. That was no problem since Art never went in the kitchen in those days! The living/dining room had a small wooden table and 2 wooden chairs and a bus seat (for a couch). You think I’m kidding? It was a grey vinyl bus seat with no arms and it slanted down, so that we had to lift the front legs with something to keep from sliding off. It held two skinny people…which at that time, we both were! There were two bedrooms. The master had a full size bed and a chest. The “guest” bedroom had wooden bunk beds and that’s about all you could put in there. The little bathroom had a commercial toilet and small sink and a very tiny shower stall. Since we lived in an inside apartment, we were blessed with a “bonus room” that we called the “tomb boom”. That was the area that had been the hall in the barracks, so they cut that in half and the people who lived in the inside apartments had that little extra space. We loved it. I made a curtain to hang over it and we used it for storage. Art named it the “tomb boom” because the architecture students had a Halloween dance every year that they called the tomb boom. I think he thought that our big closet looked like a tomb, so he named it that and we always referred to is as the “tomb boom”.

Each unit was heated with one big gas space heater located just outside the kitchen in the living/dining area. The apartments were very drafty. In the winter time when the heater was on, if you were standing up you would be warm and toasty from the waist up. In fact, if you were moving around a lot you might start sweating and as the sweat ran down past your waist and down your leg, it might start freezing before it got to your feet. There was no air conditioning. I repeat…no air conditioning. If you’ve ever lived in Bryan-College Station in the summer, you probably can’t even imagine living here without air conditioning. Well, let me tell you…it was tough. We tried everything to be cool in the summer. Art and some friends installed a water cooler in our second story living room window. That was a story in itself. Water coolers in this area are horrible. All they do is put more moisture in the air…..something not needed here! Someone suggested that we put a bowl of ice in front of a fan. We hauled our mattress in the living room and for weeks we slept in there, closer to the water cooler, with a fan blowing over a pan of ice.

Earlier I mentioned our commercial toilet. When it flushed it sounded like an airplane taking off and water rushed up into the bowl like a raging river. It would swallow anything and we were afraid it might swallow small people. We always warned guests to stand up before they flushed or else we might never see them again. Well, one day our commode wouldn’t stop flushing. We called maintenance and they told us they couldn’t come to fix it until the next morning. We didn’t know what to do. That was when we were sleeping on the floor and we were afraid that the toilet might overflow and with the pressure it had, we thought it might come into the living room and drown us in our sleep. It also made a very loud noise (get Art to describe the noise sometime) and we didn’t know if we would be able to go to sleep. That was before we got to where we had trouble sleeping and before the invention of the “sound machine” that we use now. My ingenious husband decided he had it figured out, so he stuffed towels under the bathroom door and in any cracks he could find. That helped muffle the noise and he said it would save us from the rushing toilet water…in case it overflowed. There was no way we were going to sleep on the bed that night…we might die of heatstroke! We awoke the next morning to the muffled noise of the constant flushing toilet and our floor was dry.

Back to the space heater. There was a vent pipe, connected to the space heater, that led from the apartment beneath us through our unit and up through the ceiling and out the roof. The hole in our floor was a little bigger than the pipe and there was no caulk or anything sealing it. One day I was taking a long shower, shampooing my hair and shaving my legs. Art was sitting right outside the bathroom door, studying at the table. He said he noticed his feet getting wet and just about that time the neighbor from downstairs came running up the stairs yelling that water was running down his vent and getting into their apartment. Apparently, I had not put the shower curtain inside the shower stall and water was running out of our bathroom under the door, and down the vent pipe to the apartment below us. You see, I was from the country and we didn’t have a shower stall, just a tub. In fact, I’m not sure I had ever lived anywhere that I had a shower stall. This little ol’ country girl didn’t know that you had to make sure that the curtain was securely inside the stall. I learned real quick how that works!

Life in A-7-X was good, but remember it was our first two years of marriage and those times can be pretty rough. I had that miserable job at Ag Information where I cried almost everyday. Finances were tight. It was there that I learned to cook fast and efficiently. When we went home to see our parents and Art’s grandparents, they would send us back with meat from the cattle they had butchered. The problem was that we had a tiny freezer compartment in our little refrigerator. I soon discovered that ground meat and round steak were the meats that I could really stretch. I could make a few packages of meat last for weeks.

There was a small space across from the “tomb boom” that had a washer connection. I quickly got tired of going to the laundromat, so we bought our very first “pay out on time” appliance….we went to Sears and bought a washer. There were clothes lines in the back of our apartment to hang the clothes to dry. We became very popular in our neighborhood. Everybody wanted to use our washer. Not a good thing. We did let our good friends/across the hall neighbors use it. They were Lynda and Bobby Ray Hathcock from Tennessee. They had both graduated from the University of Tennessee. Bobby was in graduate school in agronomy. We became very close friends. They were country folks, too. In fact, they made us feel like “city slickers”. One day I came home from work and as soon as I stepped in the building and started up the stairs, I smelled the most unusual (not very good) odor coming from their apartment. I knocked on their door to see what it was. Lynda was cooking “coon and sweet potatoes” and was just giddy. They had found a raccoon to cook and wanted to have us over for dinner. We decided real fast that we had other plans for that night. Bobby and Lynda were a great Christian couple and we stayed in touch with them for many years. I think I’ll try to find them soon and catch up.

Well, those are some of the highlights of our first two years of marriage living in A-7-X College View. Our next home was a house…a very small rent house…probably one of the smallest houses I have ever seen. It was a little, new, white, frame, two bedroom, one bath house on Adams Street, just a few blocks north of the campus and a few blocks west of College View. It’s funny…we’ve lived in six different places in Bryan-College Station and they are all within walking distance of each other. I guess you could say that we like this area of town. The house on Adams was not much bigger than our apartment, but it was a house and we were so happy to be there. I had gotten my new job as a lab technician in the Plant Sciences Dept. We bought a new sofa (a sleeper sofa) that we kept for many years. We got my bedroom furniture from my mom and dad’s house. We got our first dog, because we had a little fenced back yard and we had both grown up with dogs and had missed having one. Art was finishing up his last semester and about to graduate. I was involved in the Ag Ed Wives Club and received my PHT (pushing hubby through) diploma. Things were going great the fall of 1967. The Vietnam War was raging, but we felt very safe and secure in Bryan-College Station in our little house.

Then 1968 came and things started going down hill. My daddy died suddenly the night before Art was to graduate in mid January. In those days, you had to have a really good excuse not to walk across the stage to get your diploma, but Art called Dr. Holt, one of his favorite professors and got an excuse to miss graduation. Just a very short time after that was when the “greetings” letter arrived in the mail from the President. The rest of that semester was tumultuous…so much uncertainty. We conceived our first child in that little house in mid-May just a few weeks before we left 504 Adams Street. We moved everything to Iago and stored it at my mom’s house. I stayed there and Art left for basic training at Fort Bliss, El Paso, Texas. We had no idea what the future held for us. We were scared. Going into the military during a time of war is something that can’t be explained unless you’ve been there. These were not our plans, but they were God’s and He carried us safely through the next three years.

Our wedding

2008-12-02T06:00:00.000-08:00

Our wedding. Not my wedding. That’s a pet peeve of mine. I don’t like to hear women talk about my wedding and how it’s her day. No, it’s not just her wedding or her day. It takes two to have a wedding and in a wedding the man is just as important as the woman. Okay, I got that off my chest. Now I can tell you about our wedding…the wedding of Arthur Kenneth King, III and Lylabeth Joyce.

Before I start, I have something else I want to mention. I think people spend way too much time and way too much money on the wedding. I believe that if couples spent as much time preparing for a good marriage as they do on the wedding, I think there would be far fewer divorces and many more successful marriages. The wedding lasts just a few minutes and the reception a few hours. The marriage should last a lifetime…’til death do us part.

Our wedding was very simple and very inexpensive. Not just because we led a simple life and our parents were not rich, but mainly because I am, and always have been, a very frugal person. I made most of my clothes, so it just came natural that I would make my wedding dress. I needed a pattern and couldn’t find one that I liked, so I took several patterns and I designed and made a dress that was very simple, but I thought rather classy looking. Art and the other guys in the wedding wore tuxes with black pants and white coats. That was common then. I designed and made my bridal bouquet. I made the bridesmaids head pieces and designed and made the flower bouquets that they carried. I decorated the church and the reception hall with flowers from the florist and weeds that Art and his groomsman, Tom Ross, picked that day from the pasture on Art’s parents’ farm. Those weeds are called “Snow on the Mountain” and I’ve always thought they are so pretty. During August, they grow wild and cover the fields with their pretty white leaves. There were lots of them and they were free.

By the time the wedding started, I was very tired from all the work I had done. I really didn’t have a lot of time to do my hair and makeup, but I remember thinking that it didn’t matter….I just wanted to walk down the aisle and say “I do” to the man I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. I was so ready to get married and live with my husband. I was ready to leave my family and cleave to my husband.

The pastor who married us was Bro. John Paul Jones, one of our former pastors and a dear man whom we both loved very much.

We each had five attendants. Art’s best man was his brother Dwight and his groomsmen were longtime high school friend David Gilbert, A&M buddies Tom Ross and Cecil Compton and Art’s cousin Don King. My maid of honor was long time childhood friend Dixie Pyssen King (no relation), Sam Houston suitemate Ruby Einkauf, Baylor suitemate Mildred Henderson, Baylor roommate Kay Creel and cousin Don’s wife Wanda. My suitemate from Baylor, Helen Parrish, played the organ at our wedding and a wonderful thing happened…Helen and Tom Ross met at our wedding and got married. We still stay in touch after all these years.

Most people have not seen pictures of our wedding…for a reason. There was only one photographer in the nearby town of Wharton and they had three weddings to do that evening. They sent one of their not so professional photographers to our wedding and he did a not so professional job. Maybe in those days they took only one shot of each situation…I’m not sure, but whatever….they had very few pictures for us to choose from and most of them were horrible. Anyway, it didn’t bother me much. We were married and that’s what mattered to me.

Our reception was simple and inexpensive, too. In those days, it was common to just have cake and punch at the reception and it was usually in the church fellowship hall. That’s how ours was. There was always a receiving line where the bride and groom, their parents and the bridal party stood and all the guests came by to shake hands and wish us well. Then we cut the cake, drank punch and ate cake, and visited for a while. We changed into our “going away” clothes, ran out the door as everyone showered us with rice and jumped into the car and sped away.

Art didn’t want our car to be painted, as was the usual procedure, so he and Tom Ross had hidden it that afternoon in a turn row in a cotton field on their farm. We were speeding down country roads and into the cotton field with the groomsmen chasing us. I was getting a little upset that we were going to such extreme measures just to keep the car from getting painted. As the driver, Tom, turned corners on two wheels and Art and I were thrown back and forth in the back seat….I was getting more upset by the minute. At times I wondered if I would live…seriously. When we got to our car, Art threw open the door, shoved me out of the car, opened our car door and pushed me in. In the process, I hit my ear on the car door and I started crying. I also had a few choice words for my brand new husband and was not at all happy about how the honeymoon was starting. But Art was so pleased that our car didn’t get painted.

We drove that night about 20 miles or so to Bay City, the first town that had a motel. I remember being a little scared to come out of the bathroom. But I finally did and found Art watching a football game on TV. Then we realized that we were hungry and ordered hamburgers delivered to our room. Anyway, I think we finally consummated the marriage sometime that night…after the football game was over and we had eaten. The next day we drove to Freeport where we found our cabin that was given to us to use for free. It belonged to the parents of a guy that I knew from Baylor…David Terry. David and I met at Baylor and on Sundays he would pick me up in his old, old car and we would go to a tiny church in Waco where David preached and led the music and I played the piano. David knew how poor we were and he offered his parents beach cabin for us to stay in on our honeymoon. Speaking of poor…we pooled our two bank accounts together the day we went to buy our marriage license and we had a total of $107. Even in 1965 that wasn’t much money. Anyway, back to the beach cabin. We got there and had a little trouble finding the hidden key and then had lots of trouble getting the key to open the door. After some phone calls and what seemed like hours of using all the tricks we knew, the door finally opened. We spent 3 days and 2 nights there and got really, really sunburned.

On September 1, 1965, we moved into our first home…A-7-X College View, College Station, Texas. And that will be another story for another time.

That was 43 years ago. I’m glad our wedding was simple and inexpensive. I’m glad that our marriage has been more important to us than our wedding. When we said “for better or for worse, in sickness and in health, for rich or for poor, ‘til death do us part”, we meant it.

I’m so glad that I was listening when God spoke to me that day in the Iago Federated Church and told me who to marry. I’m glad that God was present at our wedding.

In the church nursery....where it all began

2008-12-01T10:46:00.000-08:00

I’ve always wondered how my mom and dad met, and now it’s too late for to me ever find out. Guess I just never thought about asking them when I was growing up and while they were still around to ask. I wish I had. I don’t want my kids and grandkids to wonder about things like that and not be able to get an answer. That’s one of the reasons I’m writing these blogs. I want to leave a lot of information about my life…just in case someone ever wonders.

Art and I met when we were babies. Art tells people that we slept together for the first time in the church nursery. That’s a true story and it always gets a laugh. Our parents all went to the Iago Federated Church in Iago, Texas. It was a small church with a small nursery. I doubt if there was more than one baby bed in it. Art was born July 23, 1944 and I was born just 5 months later on January 1, 1945. It is quite possible, and very likely, that we did indeed sleep together in the same bed in the church nursery. I just know that I’ve always known Art King….all my life. Although he was a grade ahead of me and we didn’t go to the same elementary school, we were always together at church. His family lived in Pledger, so he went to school in Newgulf. My family lived in Iago and I went to school in Iago. But we all went to the Iago Federated Church.

Church was a really big part of both of our family’s lives. We were always in Sunday school and Sunday morning services. Sunday nights we went to the young people’s activities called Christian Endeavor and Sunday night services. Sunday nights were always lots of fun. Everyone hung around outside after church. The kids ran around and played and the teenagers and older people stood around and talked. Sometimes we would go over to someone’s house and eat dessert. We were there on Wednesday nights and any other times that there was anything going on at church. Every summer we had a week long church revival. An evangelist would come to preach, usually “hell fire and brimstone”, and we always had a visiting song director, as we called them then. Every summer we had a week of Vacation Bible School. Art’s mom, his grandmothers, his aunts, and my mom taught classes. We were always together and I knew his family as well as mine. He had lots of aunts and uncles and cousins at the Iago church.

As we got older and were allowed to sit with the other young people…on the back seats of the church…I remember how Art always sat behind me and picked on me, pulled my hair, etc. I thought he was a pest and didn’t like him picking on me.

When we got into junior high school and then high school, we went to school together in Boling. Art was a grade ahead of me, so I don’t recall us having any classes together. I had a “steady” boy friend and really paid no attention to Art until the end of my junior year. My “steady” was two years older than me and was in college at Texas Tech. Just for the record, his name was Charles Allen. Anyway, during the junior-senior prom at the end of the year, Art and I started looking at each other in a new way. He asked me to dance while his date, Margaret, went to the restroom. I didn’t have a date since my boyfriend was away at college. As we danced, I think we both realized that we were more than old friends and we knew that we wanted to be together. We somehow managed to escape the prom activities and spend a little time “making out” in his car. Margaret’s sister saw Art in the car and came to talk to her sister. Oops….her sister wasn’t in the car with him. She had a few choice words for Art and went and told Margaret what she had discovered. Art left the prom and took his date to a dance hall/beer joint in Taiton near El Campo while I stayed at the prom and did my duties as a class officer and member of the prom committee. After Art spent a little while with his date, he decided he wanted to come back to see me, so he asked one of his friends to take his date home. She was mad, of course and they weren’t having a very pleasant evening together. Anyway, I think Art broke the speed limit trying to get back to Boling before I left the prom…and he did.

I’d like to say that we were happy together ever after, but not quite. Remember, I had a boyfriend at Texas Tech and he was just about to come home for the summer. One night I did a terrible thing. I had dates planned with two guys the same night! I went to my daddy crying and asking him what I should do. Both Art and Charles were going to be driving in my driveway any minute and I had to tell one of them to go away. My daddy told me that I had to make the decision myself…he couldn’t make it for me. I honestly don’t remember which one I had a date with that night, but I did break up with Charles soon after that. The next fall, Art started to Texas A&M and I still had a year left at Boling High School. We dated a little bit that next year, off and on, but mostly off. Our relationship was really rocky.

The following year, I moved to Huntsville, Texas and started going to Sam Houston State. Art had dropped out of A&M (actually, I think they asked him to leave) and we didn’t see each other much that year…..just when I came home once in while, we would see each other at church and maybe dated once in a while. That summer, when I came home, we started dating again. One Sunday, sitting in the Iago Federated Church, I looked at Art up at the podium singing, and just as clear as could be, I heard God tell me that he was the man I would marry. I was a little surprised, but I knew that it was God’s command and I didn’t argue or even hesitate. God spoke and I listened and I obeyed. I think God knew that without a very clear word from Him, I might be too stupid to know that Art was the man God had chosen for me.

That fall, Art went back to A&M and I went to Baylor. We saw each other almost every weekend. Either I would find a ride to Bryan-College Station to see him or he would get some guys together and go to Waco to see me. He would let me know how many guys were coming and I would get them dates. When I went to see him, I would stay with my brother and his family. At some point during that year, we started planning our wedding. Art “pinned” me with an A&M pin and that was like an engagement ring. We couldn’t afford a ring, and that was fine with me. I just knew I wanted to marry him.

We planned our wedding for the next summer…August 28, 1965…in the Iago Federated Church, where it all began.

Pie

2008-11-26T12:07:00.000-08:00

Recently I read an article titled “The Art of Pie” and it gave me the idea to write about pies. In the article they mentioned that making pies is a dying art. Oh, I hope not. Pies are good. Homemade pies are the best! I consider myself to be a pretty good pie maker. You know, just about anybody can make cookies or cakes, but I do believe that there is an art to making pies. And I’m not talking about buying one of those crusts in the frozen section, or where ever they are in the grocery store. You see, I’ve never bought one of those, and don’t intend to start now. Those store bought crusts don’t taste anything like a good homemade one. And in my opinion, if you don’t have a good crust…you don’t have a good pie.

For some reason, pie crusts scare some cooks. I’m going to share a pie crust recipe with you that is absolutely, totally fool proof. I’m serious. It never fails. It’s always good.

Pie Crust
(makes 5 pie crusts)
4 cups flour
2 tsp salt
1 T sugar
1 ¾ cups shortening (I use Butter Crisco)
1 T cider vinegar
1 large egg
½ cup water
Mix flour, salt, sugar and shortening with a pastry blender or fork until crumbly. Add the water, egg, and vinegar and mix together. Divide into 5 equal portions and put each portion into a zip bag and flatten. Freeze until ready to use. Thaw, but use while still cold. This crust is not fragile like most pie crusts. It can be rolled out or just patted out into a pie dish. It is always good, tender, and flakey. It never fails. This is great for pies and quiches.

Even if you think you’re not a good cook, try it. I’ve had people tell me that they never liked pie until they ate mine. Have you ever seen someone just eat the filling out of a pie and leave the crust? I must admit that I’ve done that before, but not with this recipe. This crust is sometimes better than the filling.

You know, there’s really nothing like a good homemade pie. We’ll be celebrating Thanksgiving this week. What would Thanksgiving dinner be like without pies for dessert? I’ll be making several……probably pumpkin and buttermilk and maybe a dewberry cream pie, too. The pumpkin and the dewberry will need to be topped with some whipped cream and I am not talking about that stuff in the can or the plastic tub. That’s not whipped cream. If you’re going to make a homemade pie, for goodness sakes, go to a little extra trouble and whip up some fresh some whipping cream. It doesn’t take but a few minutes and it’s well worth it! If you need instructions for that, here goes. Go to the grocery store and buy some whipping cream in the dairy section. Chill the cream, along with a metal or glass mixing bowl and your mixer beaters in your freezer for a few minutes. When they are all very cold, start beating the cream. As it begins to thicken, add a few heaping tablespoons of powdered sugar and about a teaspoon of vanilla extract. Continue beating until stiff, but not until it turns into butter (it will). You need to eat it soon. It won’t stay stiff very long. Put a dollop of whipped cream on each piece of pie and dust with powdered sugar. Ummm good.

Okay, now that you have a really good recipe for pie crust, try making a pie soon. If you need some recipes for fillings, let me know! I have lots of favorites.

Make a pie for Thanksgiving! Your family will be glad.

Jack of all trades....master of none

2008-11-17T12:31:00.000-08:00

A few days ago I was discussing my blog with my friend, Irma, and she suggested a topic for one of my blogs……all the different jobs I’ve had in my lifetime. Irma always tells me that I live a very interesting life. We’ve always laughed about how I get all excited about something new, get bored and drop it, and move on to something else. I guess I have a short attention span. Anyway, I’ve been thinking about that since then and decided that it might be a good idea for me to make a list of the jobs that I’ve been paid for. I told Art about it and we discussed all the jobs that I could recall. He didn’t even remember some of them. Some were very short term, some just keep reappearing, and some went on (off and on) for years. Thanks, Irma, for giving me the idea.

The easiest way for me to do this is in somewhat chronological order. I say somewhat because in some cases I really don’t recall the correct order. A warning….this is a very long list and this covers about 43 – 44 years.
My very first paid job was wrapping Christmas gifts at Joe Schwartz in Wharton, Texas during the Christmas holidays when I was in college. I’ve always liked to wrap presents and much prefer that to the easier gift bags. There have been many times that my wrapping was much more impressive than what was inside. For those who don’t know….Joe Schwartz was a store in Wharton where I bought most of my clothes when I was young. I even liked to shop there after I married and left the area. It was a small department store, but it’s not in business any more. I miss it.

When Art and I married and moved to A&M for him to finish college, my first job was at the A&M Bookstore on campus. I don’t even recall what I did there, but I didn’t stay long. It didn’t pay very well. The only memory of that job is the time I went to the YMCA around the corner at noon and got locked inside a bathroom stall and had to crawl under the stall door to get out. I just prayed that no one would walk in while I was on the floor slithering under the door.

In our first year of marriage, Art and I saw an ad in the newspaper about a funeral home needing help. We went and talked to them and thought we had found a good thing. They could use my piano and organ playing talents and Art could assist with whatever needed to be done. They came to our apartment one day. We heard a horn honking and looked out to see a hearse. They were there to get Art to go with them on a “run” to pick up the body of a deceased elderly woman at the hospital and take her to the funeral home for whatever they do with a body there. Art never would talk about it much, but needless to say after we helped with one funeral, we decided that might not be our calling.

After my short stay at the bookstore, I got a job working in the mailing room of what was called Ag Information located in the old horse barn on campus. My job was to help 15 – 20 women of all ages send out information to the employees of the Texas Agricultural Extension Service. There was a very diverse group of women from my age (21) to women in their mid sixties. We, by hand, collated, folded papers and flapped, stuffed and sealed envelopes eight hours a day. I got really good at it and to this day can really help someone who needs that done! We sat around a big round revolving table and did what any good trained monkey could do. We lined up at the door a few minutes before 12 noon and waited for the whistle on campus to blow. Art would be in the car waiting for me and I would get in the car crying. We rushed home to our tiny apartment and I would prepare lunch, we would wolf it down and rush back to the campus. I had to be back at work at 1:00 and not a minute later. That’s when I learned to cook fast and eat fast. I also learned that I never wanted to work with a bunch of women ever again. When anyone got up from the table to go to the bathroom, they all gossiped about that person. I learned to hold it and wait until I got home. I’m not so sure that was a good thing. At 5 o’clock we would line up at the door again, and I would go to the car crying. I had been to college for 2 ½ years and knew that I was capable of doing something more challenging. After two years, I got up the nerve to just quit without giving one day of notice. I went to the administration building and told Mrs. Pearce, the top boss, that if I stayed another day, they would have to carry me off in a straight jacket. We prayed that God would provide me another job where I would be happier…and He did.

During those first few years of marriage, I started sewing for other women and doing alterations. I was good at sewing and knew that it was a way I could make some extra money at home. So at nights and on weekends I was a seamstress….sewing for myself and others. In those days, a lot of women had their clothes made by seamstresses.

One of Art’s friends had a wife who was a lab technician in the plant sciences department and when she found out that I had taken college chemistry and biology, she told me that I could be a lab technician and make twice what I had been making at Ag Information. As soon as I quit that job, she got me an interview…. and I went to work as a lab technician in the Virology lab in the Plant Sciences Department at Texas A&M. It was great and she was right….I was making twice what I had been making in that awful mail room. There were a couple of other female technicians in our lab, but mostly men…..my boss Dr. Robert Halliwell and several male graduate students. I loved it. We had intelligent conversations, I made many life long friends, I learned to use lots of scientific equipment and even had the opportunity to work with soil from the moon! I was finally working where I could use my brain and doing things a monkey couldn’t do! Things were more flexible there, too….no waiting for the whistle to blow, etc. In fact, it was there that I found out about “working for the government”. Guess I best not write these thoughts down, but you if ever want me to know, just ask me. While working there, they allowed me to take one course each semester, so I did. This is back when the only females at A&M were professors daughters or students wives. In most classes I was the only girl. I worked in the Virology lab until the Army called Art and he left to go to basic training and I moved back home to stay with my mom. I was pregnant when I left Plant Sciences and they gave me a baby shower.

That summer I looked for a job in Wharton and the only thing I could find was working in an office at Gulf Coast Medical Center in Wharton. I think I might have stayed with that job a couple of days. I have always hated hospitals. I was pregnant and my husband was gone far away and I was miserable. Working at a hospital was not for me!

After we got settled in Virginia that fall, I knew I would have to find work to help with the income. We had taken a huge pay cut in the Army. I asked at one of the dry cleaners if they needed someone to do alterations. They did and I started picking up alterations and taking them home to do. One day, the owner of the cleaners asked if I knew how to reweave fabrics. I had no idea what he was talking about, but he assured me that if I would learn, he could give me lots of business. That sounded good to me, so I spent some time trying to find out where or how I could learn and one day I saw a small ad in the back of a magazine. I called the company in Chicago and found out that it would cost me $5 to just get the information about it. Art and I discussed if we should risk the $5…yes, we were that poor! The information came and we decided that we should take the chance and order the correspondence course. We could pay it off in small payments and they guaranteed that I would make the money back, plus more, in a very short time. We took the leap and did it. The reweaving needle and the instruction book arrived and I started learning. In just two weeks I took my samples to the dry cleaners. They were very impressed with my work and said I was ready to start reweaving. That was the beginning of many years of reweaving and making lots of extra money from home. After we moved back to Texas, I continued reweaving for cleaners and men’s clothing stores and lots of other people. Apparently reweaving is a skill that is rare. It provided me with a way to make money at home…my very favorite way to make money…….at home. For those of you who don’t know what reweaving is…….it’s a very tedious process of weaving individual tiny threads back into fabric to cover a moth hole, tear, burn, etc. Probably 90% of the reweaving I did was on men’s suits. Most of the people who brought things to me were very surprised that I was so young. Apparently most reweavers are old! Now that I’m old, that makes no sense to me. Reweaving requires very, very good eyesight and old women don’t usually have that!

Ken and I moved back to Bryan while Art was in Korea for a year. We found out that Art could come home for Christmas, but the Army wouldn’t pay for it (something I never understood). We had no money to pay for his flight home, so I had to do something besides alter and reweave. I found out that I had enough college credits to substitute teach, so I applied to do that in both the Bryan Schools and the College Station Schools. The first year, I agreed to sub in kindergarten through high school. After a few months, I stopped substituting in the College Station Schools. College Station kids were not as disciplined, were more into the “hippie” way of life, and the administration didn’t seem to be on the teachers’ side. Bryan kids, at that time, were more conservative and I really liked the principals and they were very good to me. Let me give you a typical situation that I encountered. One day while teaching at a College Station Elementary School, I was eating lunch at a table with other teachers. In the Bryan Schools, the teachers ate at the tables with their students. Anyway, as I sat there eating and trying to carry on a conversation with the teachers around me, kids were crawling on the tables, yelling, throwing food, etc. and we were having to yell at each other to be heard. I asked one of the teachers if that was typical of the lunch hour. She replied, “Yes, we believe in giving the kids freedom”. I told her that I believed in giving them “freedom” on the playground, but not in the lunchroom. She replied that she had heard that kids at Crockett School in Bryan had to whisper at lunch. I told her that was correct and just how I thought it ought to be. Anyway, after almost having a race riot in my high school home ec class one day and asking the principal for help and not getting it, I told them to take me off the sub list in College Station. The principal had told me if I couldn’t handle it, not to come back. I said that’s fine, don’t call me anymore. Funny thing…..they called me almost every morning for the rest of the semester. Seems they had trouble finding subs. Wonder why? That’s when I decided that when Art returned we would live in Bryan and our kids would go to the Bryan Schools. We did that, and as a matter of fact, our kids went to Crockett School. I continued to substitute in the Bryan Schools for several years, but gradually moved down from high school to just elementary school and toward the end I was just teaching the lower grades in just a couple of schools that I really liked. I met lots of people teaching and really enjoyed it. I really liked the flexibility of working only when I wanted to. During that time, I found a sweet mother with small children who kept Ken for me in her home on the days that I substituted. I have lots more interesting stories to tell about my substitute teaching days, but I’ll save those for another blog.

When Art came home from Korea, his Army days were over and he got back into grad school at A&M…working on his masters degree. We decided that I needed to help a little more with our income, so I contacted Dr. Halliwell to see if he knew of a lab where I might work on campus. He immediately said he wanted me to come back to work for him in Virology……and I did. It was actually during this time that I worked with soil that our astronauts had brought back from the moon. I worked there less than a year. When I left, they gave me another baby shower. I had gotten pregnant two weeks after Art got home from Korea.

Well, I’m not even half way through my list of jobs and I’m tired of this! I think I’ll just list the remainder and try to finish them on another blog…another time:
Gift shop worker, jewelry home party sales, wallpaper hanger, election clerk & judge,
auction sales clerk, newsletter staff, Realtor, real estate appraiser assistant, land man, oil painting artist, oil painting teacher, calligrapher, florist assistant, registration/add-drop/Biomedical Sciences A&M, property manager/co-owner of property management business, caterer, china/porcelain restorer, auction company co-owner, antique appraiser.

I am probably forgetting something. This just doesn’t seem like everything I’ve done. I’ll wake up in the middle of the night and think of something that needs to be added to this list. If anyone reading this can add to it, just let me know. What does this say about me? I’m not sure I want to know. But one thing is for sure…Irma is right….I have led an interesting life. None of these things have brought me a lot of money, but God has blessed me with an eagerness to always want to learn something new. I’ve never been bored…at least not for very long.

Army Life

2008-11-10T11:59:00.000-08:00

Writing yesterday’s blog about our years in the US Army has brought back lots of memories. I’ve been thinking a lot about our first year at Fort Lee, Virginia. That year was quite eventful…to say the least.

Our first task was to find a place to live. There were three towns around Fort Lee….Petersburg (the biggest), Hopewell and Colonial Heights. Lots of people in those towns, especially little old women living alone, rented out parts of their houses to army couples and families. We found such a place on Colonial Avenue in Colonial Heights that we could afford. I don’t even remember the woman’s name, but I do remember that she turned out be a little strange, actually very strange. The house was brick and in a nice neighborhood. The lot dropped off in the back and to get into our entrance to the house, we had to walk around to the back and climb some very tall, steep stairs. The basement of the house was under our living quarters.

Our next task was to get rid of my mother. Now wait a minute…don’t think too badly of me until you hear the story. Maybe you had to have been there, but whatever, I think you’ll understand. My mom had come with me ….mainly because I was pregnant and needed to drive our car loaded down with most of our worldly possessions all the way from Iago, Texas to Fort Lee, Virginia. I don’t recall how many miles that was, but it way too far for me to drive by myself and I had no one else to go with me. It seemed like a good plan at the time, but we had not discussed how long she would stay or how she would get back home. Our house consisted of a small kitchen, a small living room, a tiny bathroom and one small bedroom. Art and I had not been alone in 4 months!!! Well, after mom helped us get settled in, Art and I were wondering when she would start planning her trip home. Weeks went by… 4 weeks to be exact and she was still there trying to decide when and how she would get back to Iago. You see, my mom was absolutely scared to death (literally) of flying. A bus ride would take days and days and days. You need to know that my mom had led a rather sheltered life, especially in the traveling world. She had been a widow less than a year and was not yet accustomed to doing things by herself. We needed time alone and it was past time for her to go home.
Somehow, we finally convinced her to take the bus. I think it took her too many days than you would even want to think about, but she got back home safe and sound, determined never to get that far away from home again.

Winter came and it got so very cold. It snowed several times and we had lots of ice….all new experiences for Texans. My front side was getting bigger and bigger. We were meeting new friends and just about the time we were having fun with them, they were getting the bad news….sad wives were heading back home and scared husbands were heading off to the jungles of Vietnam. We found a good church in Colonial Heights. The people there were really nice to us. Tension was building as we got nearer the time that our baby would be born. The war was raging. Many Americans hated the war and gave no respect to the military. We were a long way from home. We never knew when the bad news might come to us. Every day when Art came home, I looked at his face to see if he had bad news for me. Did one of our friends get orders or did maybe Art get orders? It was a very hopeless, helpless feeling.

We spent Thanksgiving that year (1968) with our dear friends, Kent and Judy Crakes, from Florida - near Orlando. We put our money together bought everything needed to cook a Thanksgiving dinner. We cooked a turkey and dressing, cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes, etc. Not long after that, Kent got his orders and we had a very hard time telling them goodbye. Judy went back to Florida and Kent was shipped off to Vietnam. We were so sad, but thankful that God had put them in our lives. We’re still good friends today! We had other good friends there, too…like Janice and Val Pritchett, from Normal, Illinois and Linda and Don Dorrance from Iowa. We had lots of fun together in the midst of tough times.

During my pregnancy, the Army doctors told me that if I gained one ounce over 20 pounds, I would be admitted to the hospital and given water and orange juice. You think I’m kidding? Think again. I saw a different doctor every time I had an appointment. Praise God, I had a very easy pregnancy, never got sick, not even once, and kept my weight under 20 pounds. Ken was born on the day he was due, February 14, in Kenner Army Hospital at Fort Lee. I was in hard labor for 18 hours alone, without my husband. I was on the third floor and they wouldn’t let him past the first floor of the hospital. Part of my labor was spent on a bed in the hallway…there was no room anywhere else. I remember having the most unsympathetic nurses with absolute no bedside manner yelling at me to push. PUSH. One drill sergeant type nurse kept yelling…”Don’t you want to have this baby? Push!!” Not a very good experience for me or my husband.

We took our baby boy home and no one was there to help us. No family came and it was at a time when we were between friends. That happened a lot in the army. We’d make friends and they’d get orders for Nam and then we’d make some more and they’d get orders. Anyway, we just toughed it out on our own and I’m telling you …it was tough!
Art took two weeks leave and for those two weeks neither of us got much sleep. My stitches got infected and I was too dumb to know it. I thought I was just going through the normal after birth problems. I could harldy walk and we spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to make me better. I won’t go into detail, but it involved a donut (not the kind you eat), table lamps laying on their side (when you’re broke, you gotta invent a heat lamp), lots of crying, and listening to a crying baby all night, phone calls to my dear sister-in-law, Frankie, for advice. Finally after pure hell for two weeks, Art had to go back to work, Ken became the perfect baby and I started getting better.

About this time, we started noticing that our part of the house was very cold, but guess what? The thermostat was not located in our part…it was on the owner’s side. We didn’t want our baby to get cold, so we bought a little electric heater (the kind that makes the meter turn really, really fast). Also, we couldn’t afford to send Art’s uniforms to the laundry, so I washed them at the laundromat and ironed them at home. Mrs. Whatshername (the home owner whom we shared the house with) didn’t like her utility bills going up and came over to see what was causing the increase. She came in and saw me ironing and she saw the electric heater and had a fit! She demanded that we get rid of the heater and told me that I had to stop ironing! During that same time, I had started noticing that there was a horrible smell coming from the heater vents during the day when Art was gone. When he came home, I would tell him about it, but I think he thought I was losing my mind. He didn’t smell anything. Well, one day he happened to be home when that awful stench blew into our rooms and he said, “that smells like burning feces!” What? Burning feces? How would you know what that smells like? Okay, we have to find out what’s going on. The next week I found an excuse to knock on Mrs. Whatshername’s front door and pay her a visit. I did a little snooping and discovered that when she split her home into two living quarters, she got the living room, dining room and a bedroom and we got the kitchen, two bedrooms (one served us as a living room) and we got the one and only bathroom in the house!!!!!!! I saw her bathroom…a white enamel pot with a handle and lid. When I reported back to Art, he figured it out. She would go down to the basement and throw the contents of her pot into the furnace and burned it!!! Still don’t know what she did with it in the summertime. Guess it ended up in our backyard. Whatever, I knew that I didn’t want our baby living in that house any longer. We immediately started looking for another place to live and soon found a much better house….a big, old, two story house just a few blocks away. We lived on the first floor and another army couple (Christian Scientists from Omaha) lived on the second floor…another blog for another time.

Yes, that first year, actually half a year, was quite memorable. But God was very good to us. He brought us new adventures, life-long friends, safety from the war, the opportunity to visit Washington, D.C., Williamsburg, Jamestown, and best of all, our precious first son, Ken.

Veteran's Day

2008-11-09T17:44:00.000-08:00

Veteran’s Day….an American holiday honoring military veterans.

This afternoon, we went to the Veteran’s Day Parade, sponsored by the Bryan Rotary Club, in downtown Bryan. There’s nothing like a small town parade…..especially one honoring our veterans. Marching bands, floats, military vehicles, people waving American flags, patriotic music, salutes, tears, smiles, red, white and blue……there’s just nothing like it.

My husband is a veteran and I’m so proud of him.

It all started in the early spring of 1968. Art had just graduated from Texas A&M in January. Back then graduation was in January…..not December, like it is now. We had been married for 2 ½ years. My daddy had just died suddenly. It was during the Vietnam War. Tens of thousands of American soldiers were dying. Art had just started to graduate school at A&M. The world seemed to be in turmoil, but we felt safe at Texas A&M. War protesters weren’t tolerated here. Vietnam seemed so far away. One day, we read in the paper that graduate students were no longer deferred from the draft. Panic. Sheer panic. What are we going to do? A few days later, we went home for lunch and opened our mailbox to find a letter addressed to Arthur Kenneth King, III with a return address from the President of the United States and we read……Greetings…………

Oh please God, no!!!. Please, please no!!!

You see, back then there was a draft of all eligible young men into the Army. Up until then, you were not drafted as long as you were in school. So many more men were needed that Congress had lifted the graduate school deferments and apparently my husband was among the first to get that dreaded letter that we all had heard about. I cannot possibly explain the emotions that I went through. I had just lost my daddy and now there was a very strong chance that I would lose my husband, too. I had always been a very patriotic person, but this was hittin’ just a little too close to home. I must say, that I had all kinds of crazy thoughts, like….can we join the Peace Corp? Can we move to Canada? Lots of young people were doing those things. What can we do to hide? No, we’re good Americans…we can’t do that. But Art’s in school, he’s on an assistantship…..we’ve already paid tuition, bought books, finally got out of that horrible apartment and rented a cute little house. This can’t be happening! What are we going to do?

My husband was smart enough to know that everyone being drafted was sent into the artillery or infantry and shipped to the front lines in Vietnam and that’s not where he wanted to be. With the help of our congressman, Art was allowed to finish the semester.
He began trying to get into the Air Force as a pilot. He went to San Antonio and passed the flight physical and paper work was being processed for him to get into the Air Force. The Army didn’t seem to want to cooperate and kept on with plans to draft him. Seeing he had no alternative, Art went and signed up for the Army and was able to choose the quartermaster corp. That meant 3 years instead of 2. The Air Force route would have meant 5 years. Two weeks after Art left for the Army, I received his orders to report to Air Force flight school.

I don’t like to think about what it was like to tell my husband goodbye. It was for sure one of the worst days of my life. Our life together as a young married college couple was turned upside down and we knew it would never be the same. I didn’t know if I would ever see him again. Where would I go….what would I do? I left Bryan-College Station and moved back home with my mom, who had just lost her husband. Two lonely, miserable women. Oh, and I was pregnant! That was planned. Two weeks before Art left, we decided to get pregnant, and just that easy…we did! I knew if he didn’t come back….I wanted to have his child.

Oh there is so much more to write, but I’ll sum it up. I spent the summer with my mom in Iago, TX while Art spent the summer in the desert at Fort Bliss in El Paso, TX. One weekend, I took my first airplane trip from Houston to El Paso…another story for another blog. That fall, my mom and I drove to Fort Lee, Virginia, where Art was in school and we rented a house….more stories for more blogs. Ken was born there in February of ’69. In the early summer of 1970, Art left for Korea and Ken and I came back to live in Bryan-College Station. Ken and I spent a very long year waiting for our soldier to come home. Other than a couple of weeks at Christmas, Ken didn’t see his daddy from the time he was 15 months old until he was 27 months old. It was a very long year. Art was discharged from the Army in the late spring of 1971.

There is so much more to share about those years. Maybe I’ll be writing more blogs about them.

My husband is a veteran and I feel like sometimes I am, too! It was a very tough three years…..mainly because it was during a war. I prayed a lot. I learned a lot. I matured a lot. I learned to not take my husband for granted. I learned to truly appreciate military families and their sacrifices. I’m still patriotic…maybe more so than ever. And on those occasions, like today at church, when they ask for the veterans to stand and be recognized, I am so very proud of my husband.

I love Veterans Day parades. I wave the red, white and blue and thank God that I live in this country and I thank God that my husband is a veteran. If you haven’t done so lately…thank a veteran. When you see a person in a military uniform…thank him or her. Pray for the families who wait at home for their soldiers to return.

God Bless America.

Fall

2008-11-06T11:05:00.000-08:00

I really like this time of year…..the pretty fall colors, the cooler weather, pecan picking season, Thanksgiving.

I think the colors of fall are my favorite colors. The cool fronts blow in (when I was kid, they called it a norther) and give us some relief from the hot summer. The wind shakes the pecans off the trees and I get to do one of my favorite things…..pick up pecans! I love going outside early in the morning and hearing the Aggie band practicing not far away on the A&M campus.

Fall always reminds me of the Wharton County Fair….one of the highlights of my life when I was growing up. It was always the last of September and one of those northers would always blow in during the fair. The fair was a big deal for our family. We entered our prize animals…chickens, steers, hogs and had to spend lots of time getting them ready to show. The steers had to be fed the proper feed, led, be trained to stand just right for the judges, washed, brushed, and combed. These things had to be done daily in order for them to be competitive. My brothers always picked out the best animals for themselves and gave me the leftovers. That’s what happens to you when you’re the only girl and the baby. I always got new jeans, belt, shirts, hat, cowboy boots or squaw boots to wear to the fair. Bet you don’t know about squaw boots! I always seemed to stand a little taller when I had on my “cowgirl” clothes. I thought I looked pretty cool.

My mom and I examined all the canned vegetables, fruits, jellies and preserves that we had put up during the summer and picked out the very best to enter in the canning contest. My mom was really very good at this. She knew what the judges were looking for and taught me to can just right! We made sure that the jars were spotless. We very carefully baked biscuits, pies, cakes and cookies and entered almost every category. In the sewing contest, I entered many of the garments that I had made. School was out the week of the fair. I’m telling you, it was a big deal! We packed everything in the car and drove the 8 miles to the fair grounds and proudly checked in our entries. Then we had to wait patiently for the judges to decide the winners. No brag…just fact…..we won lots of grand champion banners and blue ribbons. It made me proud and taught me so very much…….discipline, leadership and maybe most of all….. to do your very best and to live simply.

Lots of big companies had booths at the Wharton County Fair…..displaying their newest products. One of those booths that I remember more than any other (and I don’t recall what the company was) served fresh homemade, piping hot biscuits and little cups of chili…free! Oh my goodness…so good. I can still remember it so well. I can remember how we could smell those hot biscuits coming from the oven and rush over to that booth to get some! So I always think of homemade biscuits this time of year and that makes me think of my daddy. He was a good biscuit maker. Unfortunately, I never got his recipe…if he had one. I think he probably cooked like me….just threw some stuff together and he had biscuits! I now actually have a very good recipe for biscuits that I’ll share with you. Try ‘em…you’ll like ‘em! This kind of weather is great for stew, too, and biscuits and stew are great together. Enjoy!!

Flaky Biscuits

2 cups flour
4 tsp baking powder
4 T sugar
½ tsp salt
½ tsp cream of tarter
Sift together dry ingredients into a large mixing bowl.
Add:
½ cup (1 stick) cold butter
Cut in butter until bits of butter are the size of peas.
Add:
¾ cup milk (at room temperature)
Mix only until ingredients are blended. Do not overmix.
Form into a ball and pat out to ¾ - 1 inch onto a floured surface.
Cut into biscuits and place on an ungreased cookie sheet or in a 9 x 13 inch pan.
Bake in a preheated 475 degree oven for about 10 minutes or until golden brown.
Eat while hot. Makes about 10 biscuits.

Beef Stew

1 ½ pounds lean beef stew meat, cut into bite size pieces
¼ cup flour
½ tsp seasoned salt
1 onion, cut into1 inch chunks
¼ cup cooking oil
1 (14 oz) can beef broth
1 (8 oz) can tomato sauce
2 potatoes, cubed
3 stalks celery, cut in 1 inch chunks
2 carrots, cut in 1 inch chunks
½ tsp salt
½ tsp black pepper
¼ tsp marjoram
½ tsp thyme
In a plastic bag, toss beef with flour and salt
In a dutch oven (or large pan with lid), in hot oil brown beef with onions until onions are tender and beef is brown.
Add remaining ingredients, stir until well mixed.
Bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer, covered for 90 minutes or until beef is tender.
Makes 8 cups.
A bowl of this delicious stew with cornbread, homemade biscuits, or crusty roll will warm up any cold winter night. Stew may be made the day before and reheated.

God Bless America

2008-11-05T07:31:00.000-08:00

In my first post I talked about my passions. I didn’t mention politics. In past presidential elections, I was very involved….putting up signs, knocking on doors, making calls at phone banks, attending conventions, working at the polls, celebrating at victory parties, and sometimes not celebrating.

During this election season, especially during the primary elections, I was solely concentrating on my son recovering from cancer surgery and struggling to survive the horrific side effects of chemo and radiation. Needless to say, I could have cared less about who was running for president. I was praying for my child to survive…..begging God to heal him.

A couple of months ago, I was invited to join a group of women who were gathering in a home one morning a week to pray for the presidential election. Ken was healing, so I decided that I could now focus some of my prayer time on the future of our country. What an experience! There was no chit-chat, just focused prayer. Like-minded women, ultra-conservative grandmas praying. We worshipped and praised God. We prayed for John and Cindy McCain, Sarah and Todd Palin, prayed scripture over them and begged God to heal our nation. We even prayed for Barak Obama. There was no doubt who we were voting for and who we wanted to win, but we ultimately wanted God’s will to be done and His name to be praised. We prayed our guts out…then we held hands and sang……God bless America, land that I love, stand beside her and guide her, through the night with a light from above. From the Mountains, to the prairies to the oceans white with foam.......God bless America…my home sweet home.

Yes, I’m disappointed this morning. In fact, I’m just a little bit fearful. But God has given me peace. I know He’s still in control and we must keep our eyes on Him.

This blog’s purpose is to mentor, so I’m going to share some things. I don’t think it’s a bad thing to be passionate about politics. In fact, some years ago, God made it very clear to me that I had wasted a lot of time on things that weren’t very significant and he spoke to me clearly about focusing my time on church and politics. Sound strange to you? If you are familiar with the political party platforms, think about it. If you’re not, and you just voted, then I highly recommend that you read them. I have tried to stay very informed about the things I’m passionate about. There’s much more to who you vote for than just a personality, looks, speaking ability…whatever. There are very distinct differences in what our two political parties stand for. I am not at all ashamed to say that I’m a fan of Rush Limbaugh and the Fox News Channel. Rush is able to verbalize things that I could only imagine. I’m not a mind-numbed robot…to the contrary…I think for myself, but am not very good about expressing my thoughts. Rush has an incredible ability to put into words what I was just thinking! And after watching other networks, I’m convinced that FNC is the only fair and balanced one. I believe that we live in the best country on this earth and I’m proud to be an American. But I also think along with that comes responsibility. Stay informed. Stand up for good and right and honesty and don’t be ashamed to be passionate about it.

I have lots more to say about this subject, but I need to go pull up the McCain-Palin sign from my front yard. I will pray for the McCains and the Palins and for their sons who are serving in Iraq. I will thank God for them. I will pray for Obama. And God…please bless America.

Homemade....from scratch

2008-11-04T13:10:00.001-08:00

I love to cook.

My daughter-in-law, Staci, asked me to include some recipes on my blog, but before I do, I thought I would give you a little history of my passion for cooking.

I grew up in the country, and I’m so glad I did. My daddy always planted a big garden and I loved to help with it….especially picking the fruits of our labor. I also like to pick dewberries and pecans, but that’s for another blog.

As a little girl, I was right in the middle of cooking and canning and freezing the fresh vegetables that we grew. My mother let me help with all that. Then when I was 9 years old I joined the 4-H Club and in high school I took home economics and realized at an early age that I really loved to cook. Art says often that if I hadn’t been such a good cook, he wouldn’t have married me….and he means it! And that’s okay with me.

During the summer months, when the vegetables were picked, was a very busy time at our house near Iago, Texas. Don’t know why our church didn’t plan better, but we were always right in the middle of all that when Vacation Bible School was scheduled. Mom and I would spend the morning at church and then the afternoons and evenings were spent putting’ up (canning and freezing) everything. By the end of the week, we were exhausted.

We always picked field corn (the kind the horses and cows ate) while it was still young and tender. I learned how to go out to the corn field, pull the shuck down a little bit, stick my fingernail in a kernel and know if it was just right to pick. We shucked the ears, picked the silks off and made the best creamed corn you ever tasted. My mom had the very best way of doing that I have ever seen. We would go outside and work on a picnic table because corn “juice” was gonna fly everywhere! We used a very sharp butcher knife and just barely cut off the ends of the corn kernels. Then we took that same knife and scraped down the corn cobs and got every ounce of juice off the cob, leaving just a cob with nothing on it. Momma always said that field corn was better for this because the sweet corn that most people ate didn’t have all that good starchy milk in it. When we got through we had corn and juice all in our hair, on our face and all over us. We would take it in the house and put it into a big iron skillet, put it on the stove and start adding boiling water to it and stir it until it started changing color and thickened. Then we put the skillet in a sink of cold water and cooled the corn down quickly. Then it could be put in containers for the freezer. Of course we always saved some out to eat for supper.

During that same time, we would have fresh okra, tomatoes, onions, squash, potatoes, cucumbers, green beans, pinto beans, and peas of all kinds. To this day, my favorite meal is one of fresh vegetables right out of the garden…..okra and tomato gumbo, yellow squash, cucumbers and onions, corn, black eyed peas and cornbread.

In 4-H I entered my canned goods and baked goods in the Wharton County Fair and won lots of ribbons for my efforts. The Texas Rice Food Show was held in our county each year and I entered original recipes and prepared dishes for that contest and won the grand prize. When it was time for college, I never had to think about what I would major in……home economics was the only thing I ever considered.

Cooking was a big part of my life and still is. For years I’ve thought about publishing a cookbook and still plan to do that when I can “get around to it”!! Writing a cookbook will be tough. I don’t follow very many recipes. Most of my cooking consists of tasting and adding a little of this and tasting and adding a little of that, etc. How do you write that down? I’ve always wanted to enter some cooking/recipe contests, but since I don’t measure anything…it’s almost impossible for me to submit a recipe.

Well, unless you want to make some homemade creamed corn, I still didn’t share a recipe. But I will. Just give me time. Oh, and I almost forgot to say……our creamed corn tasted absolutely nothing like that stuff you buy in a can at the grocery store! That ain’t creamed corn!

2008-11-03T18:03:00.000-08:00

A name like no other (continued)…..
After posting my last blog, I realized that I have more to say about my name. Having an unusual name probably had more effect on me than you might think. I grew up in a very small community and everyone there knew me, so in my early years of school, there was no problem with my name. In high school, as new teachers came in to the community, and especially in college…..oh my goodness….how I dreaded those first days of the year or the semester. As the teacher or professor looked at the roles and started calling out the names, I always knew when they had gotten to my name. They were stumped! They looked at the name, hesitated, and then I never knew what crazy name I was gonna hear….. Lilly Beth, Lela Beth, Lula Beth, Lula Belle, Lida Beth, Lilla Beth, Elizabeth…that last one I never could figure out. Do you see a “z” in Lylabeth? Of course, everyone laughed and thought it was so funny….everyone but me. Then after that I had to endure being called that name and being laughed at for several weeks. Oh, I almost forgot to say that my last name was Joyce, so many times my name was listed as Joyce Lylabeth, as if anyone’s last name would ever be Lylabeth? So that meant that I had to anticipate the humiliation when the J’s or K’s were called. Maybe you’re thinking that I was too sensitive. Maybe I was. But all I know is that many times I wished my name was Mary Smith.

Another thing about a name like Lylabeth is that I have always had to spell it for everyone…usually very slowly and several times. Plus, I have to explain that it’s one word..…not two. When I say that, they get all confused and I have to start all over again.

I’ve had several nicknames in my lifetime. Wonder why??? My brothers call me Sis. Most of my nieces and nephews call me Aunt Sissy. Some guys I knew in high school called me Little Tot. When Art was in the army and we lived in Virginia, I was known to our friends as LB. It seemed that the Yankees couldn’t pronounce my name….they said it sounded so southern and thought it was funny, so I just decided to make it simple for me and them and go by LB. Some people just call me Lyla. Oh, I almost forgot……some who have known me for many years think my name is Lalabeth…..or at least that’s how they pronounce it. And then there’s Lyla Ruth. Kay (my long time friend) had two good friends – Lylabeth (me, of course) and Ruth – her mom called me Lyla Ruth. Go figure! I’ve learned to answer to most anything.

I knew when I had children I didn’t want them to have a name that would cause them so much pain. We named our sons Ken and Ross….easy to spell, one syllable, and not at all difficult to pronounce. I do hope they like their names.

I say all this to say…….choose your children’s names carefully. It stays with them all their lives and beyond. You may think it’s so cute to spell a name some crazy way, but think about it before you do that.

As I said in an earlier post…..I like my name now. I don’t have to wait for a professor to try to figure it out. I’ve moved on and I am proud to be maybe the only Lylabeth in the world! I think that’s pretty cool!

A name like no other...........

2008-11-02T18:01:00.000-08:00

When I set up this blog, I had to give it a name. Well, first I thought of what my daughters-in law called their blogs........kingfamilythings, maks3sons. I tried to think of something clever that fit me and I thought of a couple and entered them.....each time being told that it wouldn't work....someone else had already thought of those names. Then I remembered that I already have a unique name...one that I used to be not so fond of. When I was a little girl, I told my mom that I wanted to change my name to something easy like "Mary". I'm sure that must have hurt her feelings. It would have hurt mine if my child had told me that he didn't like the name we gave them.

Names are important. Recently when Ross & Staci were trying to decide on a name for their baby girl, I was reminded of how important names are. They chose a good one.....Naomi Joy Christine. That's a beautiful name. And she's a beautiful little girl. I think she will be pleased that her mommy and daddy chose that name for her. Naomi means delightful, we all know what Joy means, and Christine is for her birthmom.

I love all my grandchildren's names. Aken, our oldest, has a very important family name. He is Arthur Kenneth King, V. That sounds very important. I am so glad that I knew all the Arthur Kenneth Kings. The first one, Arthur, was Art's Grandpa King. I went to church with him and as a little girl, I visited in his home many times. I can still remember being there just like it was yesterday. The next one was Kenneth, Art's dad, my father-in-law. I knew him since I can remember and went to church with him, too. Then there is my dear, sweet husband, Art...Arthur Kenneth King, III. There was never any doubt that we would name our first child Arthur Kenneth King, IV and call him Ken. All the names had been used up, but Ken and Michelle were very creative and came up with the cool name of Aken. Ken signs his name A. Ken...thus Aken!

Austin Ross King, our second grandson, is named for the city of Austin, TX where his mommy and daddy met and fell in love and for his Uncle Ross. Our second son, Ross Sullivan, is named after our dear friend Tom Ross and the great Aggie and Texan, Lawrence Sullivan Ross, and just because we liked the name, for my mom's maiden name Sullivan.

Our third grandson, Samuel "Sam" Isaac King, has such a strong biblical name. His mommy and daddy honored his birthmom and kept the name Isaac that she had given him.

Aaron David King, our fourth grandson, also has a very strong biblical name. He shares the name David with my dear brother who died when he was only 18 years old. I am so pleased that they chose to give him that name. That's special to me.

Our fifth grandson, Jude Sullivan King, has another biblical name and then his daddy's middle name. A strong name for a strong boy.

Yes, names are important and parents should choose them carefully. As I have grown older and wiser, I have come to love my name. I wish that would have happened before my mom died. I wish I had told her, but I didn't. I feel so unique. I know of no other Lylabeth and I think that is so special. Thus..the name of my blog.....Lylabeth.

2008-11-02T14:55:00.000-08:00

I have to admit that I don't know of another 63 year old woman who has a blog, but I'm sure there are others out there. I've come a long way in the past few years. Just a year and a half ago, my daughters-in-law introduced me to the blog world and now I'm hooked! Now you need to know that this is the woman who was probably the last person I know to get a microwave. I've always liked doing things the old fashioned way, but computers, the internet are fascinating to me.

I have a lot that I want to share with the younger generations and maybe this blog will help me out with that mission. A couple of years ago, my pastor, Tim Owens, preached a sermon about the older people in the church mentoring the younger folks. For some reason, I had previously thought of myself still to be a young woman who needed to be mentored by someone older than myself. Through that sermon, God made it very clear to me that I was now that older, wiser woman who must mentor the younger women.

The past two years, 2007 and 2008, have been very memorable, full of trials and triumphs. I have thought many times that I needed to be recording my thoughts and experiences. Now I have a way to do that and hopefully through this blog I can share some of the wisdom I've gained.

If you don't already know it.....I'm very opinionated. I used to think that was a weakness, but as I get older, and hopefully wiser, I realize that people with strong opinions are usually very passionate. I like passionate people and I think God wants us to be passionate. He just wants us to be passionate about the right things.....and that's where wisdom comes in. In my older years, I've learned more and more about what God wants me to be passionate about. When I was younger, I wasted a lot of time and effort on being passionate about things that probably didn't matter much to God. And there still may be a few of those things hanging on in my life.

I will list my current passions and these will be the things that I will probably be blogging about.
Hopefully in some way my blogs will tell you a little bit more about me.....and maybe even tell me more about me!

My Passions.....
my Heavenly Father....."the longer I serve Him, the sweeter He grows"
Jesus........the sweetest Name I know
my husband of 43 years.....the more I know him, the more I love him
my sons.......I am so blessed
my daughters-in-law.......the best
my grandsons........my sweet little guys
my granddaughter.....my precious little girl
my home..........thank you, God, for my nest in the trees
my church.......thank you Jesus
my country......God bless America
cooking.....homemade - from scratch & eating good food
working in the jungle....love those loppers
sewing.....a stitch in time.....saves nine
flowers....God's beautiful creations
genealogy.....my family history

'til next time
LK