HomeMy WebLinkAboutMy Growing-Up Years Pg. 1My Growing -Up Years
My family moved to College Station in 1948 when my father, Dr. Alfred F. Chalk,
got a job teaching Economics at Texas A & M. I was age 6, my sister Elaine was 8
and my younger sister, Marcia, was 4. My mother, Marie Giles Chalk, was a stay
at home mom. (She later taught typing at A & M Consolidated High School to
save money for our college eduations).
I
A & M at that time was an all male school and had abou4,000 students. I know
when I graduated from A & M Consolidated High School there were 7,000
students at A & M and there were also 7,000 people living in College Station.
We lived on Lee Street in an old, two story house not far from the campus. My
father came home for lunch most days. All three of us girls went through our
back yard and walked to A & M Consolidated School about three blocks away.
At lunch time, we walked back to our house to eat our largest meal of the day.
My mother had many talents, including sewing, so she sewed all of our clothes
for me and my sisters all the way through high school. If I saw a dress in a store,
or in a magazine that I liked, she would take me to pick out the material and
sew a dress for me that was exactly like the one in the store!
1 learned later that one reason my mother was so frugal was because she grew
up very poor. Her father, Elijah Green Giles, was only 26 when he died in the flu
epidemic of 1918. My mother was only 6 years old at the time and was the
oldest of three children.
My grandmother, my mother's mother, had little formal education, so she had
to go to work in the cotton mills in Waco. In the summer, all three of her
children were put to work picking cotton.
My father taught at Texas A & M until he retired, heading up the Economics
Department for many years. He hired Phil Gramm before Phil ended up with a
stint in politics.
All three of us graduated from A & M Consolidated High School. Elaine and I
attended and graduated from Baylor University and Marcia attended and