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HomeMy WebLinkAboutEarly Education II Panel Group 2Group 2 Charles Davis John L. Davis Don Carroll The Historic Preservation Committee Memory Lanes Oral History Moderated by: Charlotte B. Bergs Interviewees: Charles Davis, John L. Davis, Don Carrol July 31, 1996 CB Your Married Name? S No, I had people, I mean professors in A &M that would call roll, and they would look up, they'd call Charles L, and they'd look up and say "Is that you Stony ?" Nobody knows me by Charles L. If you asked all the people out there who Charles L Davis was they couldn't tell you. They could tell you who Stony Davis was. CB How did you get your nickname? I don't know. JD Let me tell that story, I'll tell you how he got his nickname. Stony was small, was real frail, he almost died when he was ten years old, nine years old, whatever, You know how kids pick on other kids. If you're fat they call you skinny, if you're skinny they call you fat. Stony was thin so everybody picked on him because he was so frail. Then, I suppose I was me or somebody fat to calling him Stonewall Jackson which is the opposite of being frail. CB Oh I see. JD Then it come on down to Stony. CB Ok, and what's the P40. JD Well that's a different story. CB Oh, OK is that your nickname? JD That's my nickname. S I'll tell you that story. Jimmy Cashion could probably tell it better but he's not here. Jimmy was quarterback for thr Consolidated JD Are you recording this? CB Yes, sir. S Football team. This was back during World War II and the P40 Fighter Planes were the best thing out, that was long time ago. Anyway, Jimmy called a pass play and John L. was supposed to catch this ball in the secondary. Jimmy started calling signals. John L. just took off he was all the way down there where you were supposed to catch the ball before they even centered it. Jimmy told him when he came back `Boy you took off like a P40," and that was the beginning of that. CB And Mr. Carrol you don't have a nickname? DC No Madam. S Yes he does, a bunch of them and none of them good. CB OK, now my understanding is that you live beside each other. S Well no not really. CB But when you were younger? S Yes, Don, lived on one side of Wellborn, and we lived on the other side. CB Oh, ok. DC They lived a mile the other side of Wellborn on Wellborn Road and I lived a mile back toward College Station. CB Oh I see so you all went to the Wellborn Schools then? S Don didn't John L and I went to Wellborn the first 3 grades. CB Ok DC So? I lived in Rock Prairie way back down in Rock Prairie. CB Oh all the way down in Rock Prairie way back down in Rock Prairie. DC I mean end of roads, We caught a bus had to walk about a half a mile to catch the bus, them drove on in to College Station. CB Ok S That was in grade school. DC Huh S That's when you were going to grade school. DC Right, Stony? CB OK, so when did you all start going to school together? S In the 4th grade. CB In the 4th grade, ok. S I think Consolidated was still in what was called the music hall but, I don't know, it was where Consolidated was just before it moved over to this location. CB Oh when it was on campus? S Yes, on campus. and the high school kids went to Pfiffer Hall. I remember when I was in 4th grade, they built the athletic dorm right behind the school. John Kimbrough, Jack Kimbrough, and all those guys came through and played marbles with us. On the way to football practice, John Kimbrough loved to play keeps - he'd walk off with all our marbles. OA CB Now who is John Kimbrough? S John Kimbrough was an All- American fullback for A &M in 1939. CB Oh, ok. S He was probably one of the most famous football players A &M has ever had. JD 1939 was the only year that A &M was National Champion. S That's right. CB Oh. JD And they had six, seven I guess All- Americans on that team. S Oh yes. CB Oh, so he was nothing but a big kid. That's what he was, a big 4th grader. S He'd take our marbles but he'd make sure we got knothole tickets A &M had then. They were end zone tickets for kids you know. And he had his own rootin' section there every home game. I tell you, we thought the sun rose and set on John Kimbrough. CB And you never got your marbles back? JD Never did. We all wondered what happened to those marbles. S He was just a big old country boy. He was just a kid. His brother was a little more sophisticated - he was big tall boy. John Kimbrough was a big guy, but he wasn't all that tall. Jack Kimbrough was about 6'4 ", and he played end for A &M. He never was as good as John. But he and Jack, and I can't remember who else, but it seems like Marian Pugh... JD Oh yea, Chip Rout and Joe Rout S Yep, I don't remember them playing marbles with us, but JD I think they all played marbles. S They all walked through there everyday and we knew `em all. JD Homer Horton was coach an he'd be down there pulling his hair out. They'd always be late for practice after taking all our marbles away from us. CB Ok, now let me ask you, how am I going to say this? Okay, start recording, darn now see you missed a really good story. That's ok, we'll have some more. I guess I could cheat and see when your birthdays are, but when you were in the 4th grade - you were in the 4th grade there Don? DC Huh, um CB And you were? JD I probably was in what grade Stony 5th or 6th, I was in the 5th grade I think. 3 CB 5th grade JD Cause I spent two years in the 5th grade. CB You did, you liked it that much? JD No I didn't like it that much. S He started out early back in those days, he'd only a year and a half older than I am. JD Something like that, but anyway let's get back to it. S He was two grades ahead of me at first and then he dropped back to being one grade ahead of me. CB Ok JD As a kid, the first three years we went to school all went well. Just one room, one big schoolhouse, one teacher Ms. Laura Eidson, she taught school for 40 years or so. S Yeah, I think so. JD And everybody was, youknow, all in the some room. 1st grade, 2nd grade, and 3rd grade were all in the same room for tose 3 years. That sounds bad but when you think about it, how many kids get to go to the first grade for 3 years and how many kids get to go to second grade 3 years and how many 3rd graders get 3 years. CB That's right, if you didn't get it the first... JD When you stop and think about it. S I still think Ms. Laura probably was one of the best teachers I ever had. She taught 3 grades and she taught them. I mean you learned three things. You learned how to spell, you learned how to read, and you learned how to do arithmetic. CB I understand and I won't get on to my feelings about today's schooling, but we are here about the early part. PE You say her name was Ms. Laura S Miss Laura E I D S O N JD There was 3 old maids that lived on a hill about a half a mile south of Wellborn, Laura, and Beulah and what was the other one's name Stony? S Lulah JD Laura taught school. S She was a big lady, probably weighed close to 300 pounds. When she said something you'd better listen. 4 JD Back to my story about how I failed the 5th grade. I left Wellbourn after the third grade and entered the 4th grade in College Station (A &M Consolidated). Ms. Lomax was my teacher. How about that for a memory? CB That's better than mine. JD Well in the 5th grade Ms. Caroline Bright was my teacher. Me and Norman Royder fought every day in the first 3 grades in school. We got into a fight on the last day of school in the 5th grade and Ms. Bright took us both back in the cloak room and informed us that neither one of us had enough intelligence to go to the 6th grade. So, although we were both fair students, we spent another year in the 5th grade. CB And fought the whole time? S No, they couldn't fight. JD Because we were fighting. CB Well now, ya'11 ate lunch together and you brought lunch from home. S Yes, we were poor. JD Dirt poor. S Most of the kids back then were and we took our lunch to school in a syrup bucket with holes punched into the top. Usually it was a biscuit with syrup poured into it. We called that `Syrup in a hole'. We found out after we came to Consolidated, where the city kids were, that they'd trade you ham sandwiches for that. We thought we were having to eat this stuff and got up there and found out it was pretty good trading material. We ate pretty good after we got to Consolidated. There's a couple of things I remember about the old Welborn school that I think you might be interested in. The cemetery, right next to the school is on an outcropping of rock, so back in those days when they were digging a grave they had to blast. Ms. Laura would take us all out of the schoolroom and put us underneath the school. The old schoolbuilding was not like a community center down there now. The old school was built on high supports and had a very large set of steps. I think there must have been 10 or 15 steps to go up to the front porch which had big columns. It was really a nice looking school. It had one big room and then in front it had a cloak room as you came in. And then she had a curtain down one side of it where we all ate. When the weather wasn't bad we ate outside. But when they blasted the cemetery she sent one of the older boys to scare all the snakes from under and we'd all go under that thing. Lot of people might remember that differently and I just barely remember it. Duward Parsons and I were talking about it the other night and both of us remember it the same way, so I'm sure that's... CB Well so that makes it fairly accurate S Fairly accurate. CB Do you have any stories Mr. Carrol? DC Strictly a rich boys life. CB A rich boys life? DC We live back there almost on Carter Creek down in Rock Prairie on my grandfather's place and we'd have to catch the bus and come into town. Back then we went to school on campus and I had a sister a couple of years older than I was so she had to kind of look after me when I first started. And I remember they had lots of grassburrs, on campus, cause campus was just on gravel, the parking lot where we played. Anyway I was barefoot like all the other country kids were, and I got one of those no good grassburrs in my foot. If they'd just been regular grassburrs I could walk through those because I'd done that all my life. But these goat heads were real sharp. My sister decided she needed to go to the bathroom. I wasn't going to stay around without her, so I started trailing her. I was going to go into the girls bathroom with her. Naturally she had to put me outside, standing in the grassburrs. we'd get an early start and the bus driver would come on down through those dirt and gravel roads. When it rained a lot of time they'd nearly get stuck and the big boys would get out. They were supposed to be pushing on the bus, but they'd be pulling, you know, because they didn't want to go to school either. But, I think we were very fortunate to be born and raised right around here, because to us going from high school to college was like going from grade school to high school. It didn't cross our mind not to go to college because we were here all of the time and most of our school teachers were wives of professors. We always thought that those people that lived here on campus the professors were rich and later on, we found out that they didn't have much more money that us farmers did. They were just struggling like everybody else but they had put on a whole lot better front. Instead of wearing overalls their kids wore short legged britches. Then we moved over. We bought a place over on Wellborn Rd. and that's where I got acquainted with Stony. I already knew them anyway at school but now it's in the city limits in College Station. CB OK, now let me ask you this then, the reason it's A &M Consolidated School is because Wellborn came in? S No that's not exactly right. Back when College Station School District was formed they made some kind of agreement with Wellborn to take their kids, Wellborn and one other community as I remember but they took their kids above the 3rd grade into... CB Oh, I see. S It was just a part of the school district. Wellborn never was an independent school district as I remember. It might have been just before Consoliadted moved on the campus I don't know. CB You weren't informed? S I wasn't inform about what they did before I got there. But when I went to Wellborn School. It was, a part of A &M Consolidated. A &M they didn't call it A &M Consolidated then I don't think. I think when they brought everybody in was about the time they built the new school over here. DC Say Peach Creek High School out here about where Holleman crosses just south, on highway 6, they had a school. And Minter Springs had a school. DC Right. CB Oh I see. S Minter Springs had the same kind of agreement, I believe that was the other school that the agreement with what is now A &M Consolidated to send their older students. They ran a bus out there had it? Of course we rode the bus all the way through grade school and high school. CB You didn't walk 3 miles to school. S I did not walk to school but I walked from school home. Johnny and I both did janitor work after school and he played a lot of sports. We did a lot of running around too. CB Chasing the girls. DC You know after football practice we'd run, and about everything else out there, then we'd have to walk home. There was one old fella, who worked in the meat market at an old grocery store in College Station. If he was in the right frame of mind he'd stop and pick us up and give us a ride part of the way home, he didn't live quite as far out as we did. Anyhow we'd have to walk the rest of the way, sometimes we'd get tired and lay down in the highway. S In the middle of the road, we did that. You have to remember, back in those days, there it was gas rationing and nobody was driving on the road. Your chances of catching a ride from here to Wellborn were very slim. CB That's right you were in grade school during the war JD Can I say something? CB Sure go right ahead Mr. Davis JD Have you ever wondered what we did before we started school back in the old days. You know, now days kids always get into trouble doing dope and all that kind of stuff. Country boys back in the old days consist probably 2 things that I can talk about . We'd take a stick and we'd stir doodle bug holes and try to convince the doddle bugs their house was on fire. CB Now run through that again, a doodle bug? JD A doddle bug. You know what a doodle bug is? CB No sir, I'm a city girl. JD They make a little round hole like a funnel. S They eat ants. They make these holes in sandy soil that is kind of cone shape down at the bottom so the ants fall in, and they can't get out , then the doodle bug gets them before they get out. Just a little bug about that long... JD We'd take a stick and stir that hole, telling him his house was on fire hoping that he would come out. Then another day, I ranout with a pocket full of salt because my mom always told me that if I put salt on a birds tail that I could catch that sucker. CB I've heard that, I heard that when I was growing up. JD Between hunting doodle bugs and putting salt on a bird's tail that was our main entertainment. CB And here I thought that you were all country boys that you all had to do chores before you'd go to school. JD Oh we did our chores. S We did our share of those, too! CB Before or after school? S Both. DC Now you can tell why we had to go to the same class 2 or 3 times. JD I had to milk 2 cows while Stony was asleep. DC Oh come on now 2, JD my word, I worked at a dairy we'd get up at 3:30 in the morning and get over there and start milking by the time we got through milking it was time for me to go to school. I got in from school in the afternoons, why, they would be through milking, so I had to clean up the dairy barns, and clean up all the milking. CB But this is while you were in high school. DC Yes, I was on that in the high school. But then in grade, see they were pretty rich they didn't have to work much, but we picked cotton and then if we got our cotton picked, we pick somebody else's. CB Was that before school. DC Well after school, when we got our cotton picked. CB Is that before school? DC Well after school, cotton. CB I'm teasing you. DC I can tell you talking country, but cotton wasn't ready to pick until about July JD It was hot wasn't it Don? JD Let me tell you the prettiest thing in the world that a country boy ever seen. Did you ever think about that Don, the prettiest thing in the world that a country boy ever seen. CB What's that? JD You are picking cotton out there in July or August and it's hot and your knees are bleeding and your hands are bleeding and man it's hot, you look up over the trees and you see this big dark thunder cloud coming up and then the wind starts shuffling that sand about a little bit and then you hear thunder Ain't nothing no prettier than that. CB Does that mean you have to quit picking cotton? JD Yeah, you have to quit picking cotton. DC But those clouds followed the Navasota River most of the time or the Brazos River and we'd be in between. CB I tell everybody we lived in a donut hole around here that's why we don't get any rain. DC First time I ever went to town I was 6 years old and we had to go into town there wasn't any doctors out here. So we had to go to town to get vaccinated so I could start school but at the same time Dr. Lee had an old oscillating fan, no A/C failed I had watched my mother on her sewing machine while go around with my finger, I was going to let my finger follow that electric fan. On the way home he stopped to get some gasoline and bought me a bottle of soda water and that's the first bottle of soda I ever tasted. CB WOW. DC But that's the last one until I was probably in high school. CB Well when you had your classes all in one room. DC That's in Wellborn. CB yes, I know that was in Wellborn when the teacher was teaching say the third grade, what were the first and second grades doing? S They's better have their heads down studying, doing homework, she was a big one on for homework. She'd give you a spelling list that you better work on. Sometimes in the afternoon you were going to have a spelling bee. It wasn't a bee. She'd line you up around the whole thing, you know all 3 grades and then she'd line you up and then she'd start out on these spelling words and when you miss spelled one you'd have to sit down. You didn't get anything for winning except you're a hero in her mind. You never did any cutting up or things like that when she was teaching school. She wouldn't tolerate it. When she was teaching other classes and she'd go from one class to the other. The other two classes were working on the stuff that she assigned to them while she was going over the assignment. Then she just rotated. CB OK now, let me ask you this, during the spelling bee, I would imagine that the works for the first graders were simpler than the ones for the third graders. Or did you all have the same work and you learned from each other. S She just gave you a word. I don't know whether she thought about whether you were a first, second or third grader or not. You know she just gave you a word, if you could spell it, you spelled it and if you couldn't spell it you sat down. DC I'd expect she had first grade words for the first graders. S She might have but knowing Miss Laura she expected a lot of you. She expected a lot out of you and she got a lot out of you. I don't know of anybody that came out of Wellborn Elementary that couldn't spell. Almost all of us are good spellers, that was the one thing she really concentrated on. Also reading too we had to get up and read in front of the classroom, and do arithmetic on the blackboard. She was a good teacher, she really was. I don't know whether she used the methods teachers were taught to use or not but she was effective. None of us had any trouble when we were transferred up to the big school. (As we thought of it.) None of us had any trouble academically; some of us had a little trouble otherwise. CB Discipline problems? John, did you want to add to that? JD Well you know Charlotte, when I was advised f this thing I had mixed emotions about memories. you know some people think they remember, some people wish they could remember, some people like Stony, says he remembers. He remembers things I've never heard of. What is memory? I look at all these faces I went to school with, I don't even know most of `em. CB They've changed so much. JD Your memory fades on ya'. How much of this stuff do you actually remember, you know I told Stony coming up here I can condense my memory real quick. I spent three years in Wellborn. I went to the 4th grade at A &M Consolidated, Mrs. Lomax was the teacher. I went to the fifth grade, Mrs. Bright was the teacher. I failed because I got in fight with Norman Royder. I went to high school, met Sue Alice Brock, the prettiest girl in the country. JD You can write that down. Baby! You can print that! DC Did you know Louise Jones, here in town? CB No sir, I didn't. I didn't come here until 1974. I'm a newcomer. DC Anyway his daughter went to school with us. Old Gion Hall had a picture show back then on campus. So we boys all slipped in, we never did pay for the picture show, we'd just slip in. S Didn't have any money to go. DC I finally got enough nerve to ask Louise if she wanted to go to a picture show one afternoon after school. JD Who was that? DC Louise Jones, she did cause she was going to have to ask her Mom and her Dad. So the next day she asked me are we going to slip in? CB Did you get that, Pam? JD Talking about a picture show, I was talking about Sue Alice Brock. I finally talked her into going to the movies. She was kind of classy, you know, I was just an old country boy. She was going to see a movie with me, Lou Gherig, starring in Pride of the Yankees and she promised me she wouldn't cry if I took her to the movies. Well, she started crying during the comedies, before the movie even started. CB So when did you al graduate from high school? S `45 JD `44 DC `45 S John L. JD Well I was `45, ya'11 were `44. No I was `44, excuse me. S His memory is bad. JD Well I was in the war and ya'll wasn't. DC I would of graduated with John L. in `44 but back then the only ones that got to go to football banquets were the players and their dates and I had a date with Juanice Bruecher go to the football banquet and she was the senior favorite and I came down with the flu, distemper or something. I got up anyhow while I was still sick, and come on to the football banquet because she needed to go to that thing. I came back sick so I missed about six weeks of school. DC I came back but I was still 17 when I graduated from high school. Back then everybody was so patriotic and I couldn't wait to get out and go to the service. So I got out and went straight into the Navy, (the air recruitment program) came back and went to A &M. There wasn't going to be another war so I took ROTC. I couldn't see going to A &M and not being in the corps. I did all that and finished in 1950. The Korean War started right before I graduated from A &M and so there I went again. In the Air Force this time. Then I left and came back and started trying to make a living. 10 CB So back in the late 40's, you could go to college and not be in the corps or was it because you had gone into the service. JD After WWII you could S After WWII when I started at A &M I started right out of high school. You had to be in the corps. When the veterans started coming back most of them didn't want to be in the corps. So then they made it fairly optional. JD Well that was the G. I. Bill of Rights. S You had to be in the corps, unless you got credit for military service. CB I see. S If you didn't have any credit for military service you had to be in the corps. JD Then they really went to hell when they started letting women join. DC I tell you I always felt different about that. I thought women would be good for A &M and I still think that. S One other thing about when we were growing up that you might find a little interesting, we had no utilities what so ever in Wellborn until I got to be oh it must of been the or 7th grade. JD had no what? Utilities, no electricity CB Now are you talking about your home or in school? S Our home or school either. Well the Wellborn school when I went to it had electricity but that's as far as electrical lines went and we were on past Wellborn so they didn't bring the REA past Wellborn. Oh I think I was about in the 5th or 6th grade but we studied by Kerosene lamp and out door and all those things that we take for granted just weren't there. We, John L and 1, by the time we were 6 or 7 years old, were working hay fields and trying to drive a mule in a straight line with a plow. CB Did you succeed? S Not me. JD Yeah let me tell you a story about my dad. Old Shorty they called him, a real short guy, and I've always had a reputation for being kind of wild. Really I'm not. But I've always had that reputation in my life. But I'll always go back to what Old Shorty told me, these old country people could really say things that would stay with you down through the years. We were plowing one day, I met my daddy's mule and he said, "Junior, Mama's worried about you. She things you're going to get in trouble with all these high folutting girls in school" and I just grunted. He said let me tell you something. He said, "A measure of a man is not how much of it you can get but how much of it you can leave alone. Go back to work." That had stuck with me all down through the years. S Of course, nobody had a car either back on those days. I can remember going to Bryan in a wagon and taking 2 to 3 hours to do it. So we didn't go in to Bryan very often. you got whatever you wanted at the general store. Mr. Neely had the general store there n Wellborn. And you know when we 11 went back and forth, this walking back and forth, I'll tell you a story and the reason this story is interesting is that if my kids did what I and everybody else in those days, I would have worried myself sick. We didn't have any utilities, heck we never did get the telephone. Now even after I graduated from college. We had no way to notify our parents if we couldn't get home. And I remember one night walking home on that highway by myself and a thunderstorm came up and you could just see balls of fire coming down. They'd hit the ground and roll and every time this happened my hair would stand straight up. I thought, man I don't know what's going on here but I don't like it. But I was just about at Dons house and it was about 11 or 12 o'clock at night when I walk up to his front door. Mr. Carrol had an old barn where Don built a room out of his own and he slept out there. I knocked on the door and Ms. Carrol came to the door and she said, " Good Lord, Stony what are you doing out in this ?" "I said that's what I'm asking myself." She told me to go out there where Don was and I spent the night there. I had no way to tell my folks wherre I was since niether families had a telephone. There were several times that I did not come home at night and I think my parents probably realized that I was probably all right. It was just a little different if my kids didn't come home at night. I probably would have been out looking for them. But my parents didn't have a way to go out looking for me, since they didn't have a car or anything. A little different way of life, I'll tell you that. CB But it wasn't something that you did all the time either. S No very rarely. I usually came in. They knew I worked after school, they knew I went over to Willie Lancaster's house a lot. Willie, Don, and the rest of us would get together on campus and pester the campus cops. DC Tell `em about throwing turkey eggs. We might get in trouble with stories like that. DC Old Loupot was trying to stay out of WWII you know so he started farming and doing all these kind of things he went into the poultry business and he had a bunch of old turkeys, he's bring his old rotten turkey eggs that wouldn't hatch up there to the store and throw them in the garbage can. An we'd come by and pick up eggs and we'd hide around over at the campus. The campus police back then had a old Oldsmolbile... JD A little Studebaker. DC You could hear it coming from the time that they started it up. We'd hide when they would get right up to us we'd pound them with turkey eggs. We were a lot younger, during WWII the had some pretty old policemen that were doing those things. I don't know if you know it or not but they have underground tunnels all around on capmus for utilities and things like that. If they got behind us, we'd drop down those tunnels and travel around then pop up somewhere else. They should have taken their pistols and tried to shoot us but they couldn't catch us. S I don't think they really care, I think they enjoyed it just as much, broke up their monotony. CB You didn't participate in all this John L. JD Well not I wasn't really in their gang, this is more serious stuff now. Chasing Girls CB Well this happened while you were in high school JD But you know Stony told a story a while ago that I could add to about the football game. About Kimbrough had given us tickets to games. Well what we did a lot of the time after school was out we'd go down to Kyle field and we'd crawl back in these store rooms where they stored their tarps to cover the 12 fields and wed hide all Friday night and Saturday afternoon. When the ball game started we'd slip out and make out like we were selling something and find us an empty seat. If somebody came and took the seat we'd move down to another empty seat. We saw a lot of football games that way. DC When I first came to A &M I had an uncle who was probably 10 years older than I was, he said come go to the football game with me so I went. He just picked me up and pitched me over the fence so I waited. And he went somewhere and climb up the tree and jumped over and we went right on in watch the football. S There's not too many people in the endzone You could always find a seat in the endzone. DC They always sold soda water in bottles there in the field. Well somebody had to pick up the empty bottles so they would pay us kids about a nickel or 10 cents a case for picking up the empty bottles. CB So they actually paid you to go to the game. S Well that's about right. But they didn't lose any money cause we weren't going to pay to watch the game anyway. DC That nickel or dime a case that sounds mighty light now but back then that's pretty good pay. S Yeah, you could buy a whole lot with a nickel back in those days. CB You're talking about the 1930's then. S I remember going to the General Store. If you could go down there with a penny it's worth the walk. A mile from our house to the store. You could get quite a bit of candy with just a penny, with a nickel you could but a coca cola or a candy bar. Candy bars that are selling for 50 cents or more now were a nickel. Some candy bars, Baby Ruth, Hershey Bars and all those. DC We still pick up pennies that a lot of people don't even bother to pick up. CB Oh yes some of us will. DC May not be able to straighten up again. JD You know, Charlotte, we all have a claim to fame and mine was, and I guess Stony's too, but mine more so was Dizzy Dean. Do you remember Dizzy Dean? CB Yes sir. JD One of the greatest pitchers in baseball. CB I remember him on the radio. JD Paul would pitch too they also had a third brother, his name was Elmer, he was mentally retarded and all he wanted to do was chop cotton and hoe corn. He lived right behind us with some people named Price. Dizzy tried to get him to play baseball. Elmer could throw the ball faster than Dizzy, or Paul either one. You know they couldn't make him play ball so he chopped cotton and hoed corn, Dizzy Dean would come up to see his brother, he'd bring some old baseballs with the red thread hanging out of them and some ready- rolled cigarettes . We didn't have enough money to buy gloves so we'd take bid heavy paper sacks, great big heavy paper sacks, stuff them full of clover and me and Elmer would play catch. When Elmer had enough of me, he'd turn that ball loose. I went one way gloves went the other way and the sack went the other. Elmer is dead, all of the Dean boys are dead now. 13 CB I didn't realize that Dizzy Dean was a Texas boy. S He wasn't. They were from Arkansas and somewhere they knew the Prices. But anyway, Mr. Ben agreed to raise Elmer or to take care of him while Dizzy Dean was pitching baseball for the Houston Buffs. JD The Houston Buffs was the Cardinals farm club and Dizzy went on to play with the St. Louis Cardinals later on. But this was in the mid `30's, when he was pitching for the Houston Buffs which was an old Texas League team. The Texas League is gone now By the way, Dizzy Dean when broadcasting a baseball game was always singing the Wabash Cannon ball, I always wondered why he did that. I saw a television show the other night and it was showing a ten minute spin on Roy Acuff. Roy Acuff wrote that song and sang it. That was his trademark. On Roy Acuff `s desk there was a picture of Dizzy Dean. Come to find out Roy Acuff and Dizzy Dean were great friends. So that's how he wound up singing the Wabash Cannon Ball while he broadcast the ball games. CB How about that. That doesn't have much to do with school though, does it. CB That's an interesting story. Well you talk about old stories. CB That's right. That's why we didn't go to school all of our lives Stony. CB It just seem like it, at the time. DC Which one of these old buildings were y'all in? These were new buildings, school was back behind. CB Oh I used to thing that this was the school DC This was the grade school S This didn't even exist, do you remember what they used to call the chicken coops over here, four in a row and now then a long walk way and then they had the music room and the shop. And that was right out here and then this building was added sometime later. And then I understand they tore down the old high school. DC The shop and music building Well no they say the shop and music building are still there. DC The head of the A &M band came down here and taught the symphony orchestra, at A &M Consolidate. Back then when kids came to school old dogs would follow them. They would be to there sawing on their violins and those dogs would be outside howling. John I'll tell you a story. Remember Robert Lee Dowling right here in this area, when we were going to school he'd bray like a donkey. And that donkey over in the A & M College Barns would answer him. 14 CB OK now let me get this straight of course I know ya'll came over to A &M, grade school 4th grade. Was that over on campus? S Yes is was over in what they finally called the old music hall. At that time I thought it was the music hall. It was a two-story building, across from where the exchange store used to be. JD That's way back before her time, Stony was that the old stucco building with drug store right across the street? S Yeah two story building had a drug store right across the street. JD If you got on that street and went straight down toward the railroad tracks, you'd come to Kyle Field. S I don't know just where it was they built those new dormitories, they built those new dormitories just before we left there and the dormitory right behind the. The school was the athletic dorms. That's where John Kimbrough lived and they would walk right past us everyday going to football practice. CB Now what grades were you in when they went off campus? S I was in the fourth grade. Don and John L. would have been in the fifth grade. CB Yeah you were on campus then, right? S Yeah we were on campus, I was on campus one year that was my fourth year and then when I was in the fifth grade we moved over here. DC But you're still on campus. S No. DC This is not on campus? CD No sir. DC I thought it was on college campus, excuse me. S They had four what we called chicken coops and they had one high school building and then a curved walk around and they had what you call the music room and the shop. And we moved into that in 1940, somewhere in that area. CB You were in 7th or 8th grade. DC It had to be earlier than that like 1936 -37. CB OK about 1936 is when they took the grade school off the campus and put it over here, on S Whatever year that was it was more like `38 or `39. CB OK. 15 JD A &M Consolidated back in those days we're talking about, had two school buses. One went to Wellborn the other to Peach Creek, and I drove one of those. DC Rock drove to Peach Creek. John L. spent his last two year, he drove one of those buses. Stony He graduated from being a school janitor to a school bus driver. JD $15 a month I'll have you know. DC Lily ice cream truck came early every morning before school started and filled up ice cream things where they sold their ice cream during the day. Some of us old boys would get out there while he was in there filling up then we would slip over to his truck and get ice cream. You know, and so one morning we got a catch of it and took it down to a little old creek down there and by the time we got through eating it we were running a little late getting to school. So Miss Batson was out secretary over at the superintendents and I knew I was going to need an excuse, so I wrote me an excuse right quick, went in there, gave it to Miss Batson, and when she looked at it and smeared the ink because it was still wet, she said well you mother must have been right out here too, cause she knew we didn't have a car. and that my mom wouldn't have given me an excuse anyhow. Stony Back in those days if you got a whipping at school you got another one when you got home. C Well let me ask how big were your classes? How many students were in each class? Stony - the most I ever remember having in our class was 32. I think that was the biggest class we ever had. John I think when we graduated, Stony, it was 31 or 32. DC It was 31 in our class because the boys out numbered the girls so we would always elect whoever we wanted as the head but always the girls to be the secretary of the class and get the work done. Hadn't changed any has it? C I was hoping to say that but I figured I was the moderator and I was going to be nice. DC Oh me. Stony We were living out in the country and out of these 32 people that were in those classes. Half were country people. One of the things I've noticed in Navasota is that the school my grankids were at one year have a lot of factions. C Segregate Stony We didn't have factions when I was going to school. John - Oh yeah we did. I disagree with that. Us country boys there was a certain level we could go up to and then we were out of school. We were out of class with some of the girls (Sue Alice. Barbara Payne) They were out of our league whether you liked it or not. Stoney - Without cars there wasn't any way to take them on a date anyways. DC I don't know if that made much difference. 16 JD Now Stony broke that ring a little because of his darn brain. He's so smart he's crazy. Of course I didn't have that much sense so I was kind of left out in the cold. I don't know how the hell Sue Alice saw anything in me but she and I got along pretty well. Stony Well I think it was more a matter of us not having any transportation than it was a matter that we were country boys. Of course that country well it puts you 7 miles from town and no car, not even a bicycle. There's no way to go on dates unless you ride a mule. JD You know Stony it makes a difference to when your Daddy is a college professor and the other Daddy is a dirt farmer, that makes a little difference. DC You know I found out that most of these professors owed their life to the grocery stores and the clothing stores they didn't get paid all that much, so they were all in debt up to their ears, of course by the time these city boys used to like to come home and spend the night with me and all this I used to wonder why they like to come out there cause we didn't have electricity... Stony Oh yeah Know Walker loved to hunt and fish. So he spent a lot of time at our place. DC Or any of that kind of stuff but I guess they kind of considered themselves camping out when they come out there. Stony We were disadvantaged and all that sort of thing. I guess we didn't think that much about it but we certainly didn't have any money when we were growing up. JD Charlotte, let me say something else I was talking about. Of course there were no blacks in the school those days, but here's a funny thing that happened along that line. In N illican every Sunday we'd all get together, we had a baseball team and we would go down and play the blacks in Nfillican and have a game and get along good together. You know even to this day I often wonder what happened to that comraderie we used to have, you just don't have that anymore. Stony We used to do the same thing we had two teams in Wellborn which two baseball teams one was the white boys we called ourselves the Wellborn Wompus Cats and the black boys used to call themselves the Wellborn Black Panthers and we used to have some fun. DC There was a colored high school and grade school here at the same we were going over here while the colored kids went over to the west side of College Station to school and the colored boys had a football team and everything and they would come watch us play on a Friday night and afternoon and we would watch them. But you know Charlotte what our whole society has missed somewhere down the line the blacks they didn't feel suppressed they was happy as pigs in slop. Stony We didn't know exactly how they felt I guess. DC It's just evolved into you know what it is now. C I agree. Stony They had, I never will forget they had a black football team here they had a kid name was Sambo. I never I mean you wouldn't have a kid Sambo now days and C get highly upset. Stony He could kick that football. Kick it off they would have to get a new football because went so far. C Wow. 17 DC and he played till he was about 27 or 28. Stony He was 27 or 28 years old when he was doing that. DC Let em tell you about this time when we all come down without a car, broke poor and all that stuff we came back from the service. Well one Sunday afternoon (back then the Wellborn Road was laying down the west side of the railroad tracks) anyhow I saw something coming up over the railroad track and it just kept coming cross the track and finally got on up there. Stony had found the bright lights of Houston and had bought a Packard convertible. Do you remember what a Packard convertible looks like? Stony It was about as long from here to that wall over there DC That sucker drunk 1 gallon of gas and 2 gallons of oil anywhere we went. DC You know Horace Schafer, he taught here at the school anyhow he lived out in the country. C Talking about the school how many different classes did you have? Did you go to different classes like the kids do now? Or did you pretty much stay... Stony We stayed in the same room in grade school. The same teacher taught you everything all the way. DC Up until the 5th or 6th then the teacher or a little more than that. Stony About class did we stay in the one class? We didn't in high school but in grade school you stayed on the same class the whole time or course they had those chicken coops over there you couldn't very well go from one room to another there. C Did the coops smell? Stony No. ID That's just what we called them. They looked like chicken coops. Stony I guess the old things are gone now just these old white building had three or four classes in each building. C Oh they were part of a school. You had me thinking they really were chicken coops. Stony They were school buildings we moved to the 2 story music building/hall over there on campus. We immediately labeled these things chicken coops because that's what they looked like, they were white building with sloping roof you had 3 or 4 classes in each one. And then they had this big white building which was the high school and then we moved back and forth. One thing you might be interested in long about that time and I don't remember how we did it but it, they changed from 11 grades to 12. We graduated out of the 7th grade into high school now it's the 8th then four years of high school. ID Charlotte let me give you a comparison of another thing, we had two school buses. We had thirty people graduate out of our senior class. Football coaches, we had one, sometimes. Sometimes Mr. Bunting had to coach because our regular coach couldn't be there. How may coaches do you think A &M Consolidated has now? Probably fifteen. C 2or3 18 JD No, they got more that 2 or 3, they got a line coach, backfield coach I bet they got fifteen coaches at A &M Consolidated. Stony They `ve got baseball program, football program, everything, we only had the football program, no organized baseball. DC They had basketball. Stony We had county meets. C Did you have track teams? Stony county meets. You determined who the champion was in the county meets. That's when all the county schools would come in and compete. JD But we had no baseball teams, we had football. DC We didn't fool with basketball, because we lived out in the country, and by the time we got done practicing basketball, walked home in the wintertime we'd be late. JD By the way, Charlotte, not to change while we're still on the subject, you know Jimmy Cashion. C I know the name. JD And Red Cashion. CB I know Red. JD You know Red, he's a football refereeing the NFL. Stony They were all. JD Jimmy is the big brother of Mason Lee which is Red Cashion. A &M College puts our football cards and they got it mixed up on their football cards They thought they were talking about Mason Lee Cashion, but they were really talking about Jimmy Cashion. They got it all mixed up. CB And that's Red. CB How many brothers do you have? Stony I've got four, is that right? Three brothers, but there's four of us boys. JD Unless we've got one I don't know about. Stony Could have, we've got one brother that came along late , he's only fifty years old now. CB He's only fifty? He's younger than I am. Stony He's the bureau chief for United Press International in Tokyo. He's been in Tokyo for twenty five years. He married a Japanese girl. JD I fought them suckers and my brother married one of them CB 19 JD How in the hell do you figure that? CB Progress. JD Progress? CB Let me ask you how long was your school day? Was it like it is today? 8 to 3? JD 8 to what? CB 8 to 3. JD That seems about right. S 8 to 4. CB Maybe that's why you only go to school for 11 years instead of 12. JD Could be. We didn't have anywhere near the holidays that they have now. As a matter of fact we didn't have but 2 or 3 holidays the whole year. CB What about your Christmas vacation. CB Long like it is now? JD About 2 weeks. Stony You always started school the day after labor day. CB Exactly. Stony Now people starting school in the middle of August. I think that's the biggest difference in how long you go to school in terms of how many months. Used to, school started on September 1st and went all the way through June 1st. DC 12th or somewhere along there in September because you had to get the crops out. Still had to pick cotton when you got home in the afternoon. CB Just couldn't get off of that could you? How did your teachers discipline you? How did your teachers discipline you when you were bad? Stony I can guarantee you how Miss Laura teach you and I don't know whether I needs to be printed or not. She'd rap you with those siena beans and you'd know you'd done something wrong. DC I'll give you a good example, during the noon hour we'd play football or play some softball outside, it would be hot and all that stuff. Somehow or another I'd manage to get a nickel to buy a Hershey bar. It use to be wrapped up in aluminum foil, well anyhow I had that old Hershey bar in my shirt pocket and it had partly melted. My 1st class was study hall and I'd carried it in there and I tried to lick that chocolate off of the aluminum foil and the teacher eased on behind me and I couldn't think of anything to say except ask her if she wanted a lick. She thumped me on the head. Sound like a gopher, and felt bad about it She was a real nice lady and she started crying. Made me feel ten times as bad on the count of that but you know I couldn't think of anything else to say. I asked her if she wanted a lick and sure enough she didn't. Miss Laura if you misspelled a word or fidgeting in class she'd rap you 20 across the shoulders with a skinny beans. But if you really got inbad business with her she'd give you what we called a bad spanking o whipping. CB Was there alot of discipline or was there a need for alot of discipline? JD OK. Yeah. We never did figure out whether there was a need for it or not because there was no way of getting around it. That's what's wrong with the country today. My daddy never whipped me; mom beat the hell out of me; my daddy took me out to the old blacksmith shop and he had 12 of black snake whip, you know what they are Don. DC Yeah. JD He laid me against that wall and let that thing go, sounded like a.38, he wasn't missing me a half inch. I could feel the hot air off of it. I tell you what, when I came off that wall I was a Christian, baby. Stony Daddy never whipped us. Stony No I don't think he ever whipped any of us, but he always had that great big old razor strip hanging on the kitchen wall. We just got passed what mother wanted to give us but she always told us you wait till your daddy gets home. We always respected that razor strap. CB But the discipline in school... JD We had 2 China Berry trees in front of our house. Mother stunted both of those trees by pulling the limbs off of them. She was always working on one of us. CB With four boys I can imagine. Stony Well there was a daughter n there, too. JD She'd hold us by one are and whack us across the legs with those China Berry switches, we would go round and round. JD Stony was small and then we had a little brother Hank. Hank whooped him because he was big and I tried to separate them trying to be a hero and keep them from killing each other and here comes ma, with a stick and I was the one that got the whipping. CB So you were the oldest of all give, then... JD Yep, I'm big brother and I never let them forget it either. CB Well I let my little sister know that I'm the big sister. DC You know I don't know why some of these other people that live around here aren't here today. I've got a brother that's 5 or 6 years older then I am and he ought to be here today. Stony you know there's alot of people that live right here that went to school here. DC Henry Allen, down here in Peach Creek, Mary, Jimmy Cashion, Sue Alice... CB I'll tell you something. I was 56 in May and I do not, I just do not and I know I don't act it either. 21 John You know they're recording this. CB I don't care. I tell everybody my body is 56, I'm still 18. John That's a deadly combination. CB You ought to talk to my husband. JD As far as discipline in the schools. They paddled you right on up to after we graduated a long time. CB I can remember being paddled in the cloak room. Did the take you to the cloak room? JD Mr. Bunting may not admit it, but he laid on a few people. He never did paddle me. I can't speak from personal experience but... DC I was setting down in Mr. Bunting's office one time. I had a little Swedish kid, she was a freshman, Dr. Crawford's daughter but anyhow, I figured she ought to look up to me. Anyhow she was out in the hall one day and she was supposed to be in Ms. Jones' science class but anyhow I walked on out into the hall and I was talking to Gail and we were lining up, and anyhow here comes Ms. Jones and she kind of prided herself on being hot headed you know because she was red headed anyhow she came out there and asked Gail where she was supposed to be because she knew she was suppose to be in her science class and asked me where I was supposed to be, and I told her I was supposed to be where ever I wanted to be. So she sent me down to Mr. Bunting's class and I thought well there I am a senior and he's going to want to give me a whipping and I don't believe it but he figured out my thought. We got down there and he was real nice to me, he sent her on back to her class. He said son you know that she's kind of hot headed and you are going to have to go along and try and keep the peace. And he just took all the steam out of what my line of thought was. Stony You had already worked up a mad JD Same thing happened to me Don. Do you remember our civics teacher, what was her name, Ms. Ferguson? Yea Ms. Ferguson. She argued with me all the time, all the time, and on the last day of school when I was supposed to graduate she and I got into one heck of an argument. We took the whole class up and she sent me down to the office, Mr. Bunting, you know and she was going to see that I didn't graduate. She.... Stony That's Don's aunt by the way. (laughter) JD He wasn't what you would call a real disciplinarian. He was really a nice guy CB Was he your principal. JD He was the whole high school's. CB All of the high school. JD I believe he is still living Charlotte, I think he was county school superintendent for 100 years CB Until he quit being principal, huh? Stony But the guy that would lay it on you was Mr. Lyle CB And what did Mr. Lyle teach. 22 Stony He was the principal, Mr. Bunting was superintendent. He was the high school principal. JD But you know back in the old days when we got sent to the office that was the fear of the Lord, you didn't want to go, nowadays a kid gets sent to the office it's a good deal, they get out of class. Stony Going to the office was like going to death row, that carried some weight, if you had to go to the office you didn't take it lightly. CB No, I understand. Stony DC Back then to playing football, we had to furnish our own football shoes, socks and the school furnished some old hand me down equipment from old A &M. Some old shoulder pads that came down to almost your elbows, they didn't fit, little old spear legged outfits weighed about 135 pounds, and now the coach had kids that came out there like that, they'd sit down and cried. Our coach, you know we won district every year. JD We played Fairfield DC Fairfield, played them twice, 1st time we tied so they came down here to Kyle Field and then the second time we beat them. JD But when you were talking about discipline in the schools, all the people that I knew you know had the same deal if you got whipped in school and you parent found out about it then you got a worse one when you got home. We knew that. If we got sent to the office and our parents found out about it we -- were really going to get it. CB Was it mostly the boys that got disciplined? JD Do what CB Was it mostly the boys that got disciplined? JD Yea, I don't remember any girls. We were kind of a rowdy bunch. I think it was because of the war more than anything. Stony You're just natural. You know Charlotte, talking about girls. One of the most interesting things the way we judged girls at school. If a girl smoked cigarettes in school then she was a slut. She was out there. JD I don't remember anybody that smoked. Stony And nobody drank, not at Consolidated high school. Now Bryan, well those Bryan people were degenerates because they smoked and they drank and they run around. CB It's probably because they didn't have a whole lot of country boys in their class. Stony Probably is CB Ok, let's see here I think we've just about done all of the questions that they asked. Oh how about school dances, or any school traditions, did you have anything like that? 23 JD Your talking to a bunch of boys who didn't learn how to dance until they were 30 years old. CB So you didn't have any dances or any school functions JD Oh yea they had DC We'd go out to the Brazos River JD They had the school dances we had proms, Junior proms and all that, but I don't know that any either one of us went to the prom. Stony I don't think I had a date until I got out of high school. John Let me tell you the story Charlotte. We were talking about the country boys and the city girls and all that. So the city girls decided that we'd coon hunt. They decided they wanted to go coon (raccoon) hunting. So we took them coon hunting and sure enough the dogs treed this old coon. We shook him out of the tree (the dog) and they jumped on this coon you know. And the coon sounds just like a baby crying. When that coon started crying and them girls screaming and hollering, "Red get those dogs off the coon." We nearly killed trying to get those dogs off that coon. A lot of fighting going on, the girls whipping the boys, the boys whipping the dogs. Stony Our big deal when we were growing up wasn't so much the girls, it was who was going to jump off the Brazos River Bridge. Or who was going to be the first one to jump off the cliff at the clay pitts or what ever. DC The girls then were just kind of your buddies. CB Wow Stony We had a character in Wellborn. Mr. Hatfield ,he at one time was a fairly wealthy planter over in South Carolina and lost everything in the depression. Went kind of bananas and he lived over here by himself. His wife never knew where he had gone until he died. Somebody looked her up and she came to Wellborn. He was kind of half goofy, he used to go down to the river and fish and he'd sleep on the sand bar there, and during the night the river would come up and fload him down 3 or 4 miles. He'd make his way back as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. He was the only guy I ever saw that when he did something wrong he'd take a rope, put it in water, get it good and wet, and whip himself with it. JD I tell you a guy has got to be really mad at himself to do all that and still be mad enough to whip himself. I remember one time I was over at his house he chopped a tomato plant down and he had a pair of wire cutters in his pocket, took the wire cutters out of his pocket and hit himself over the head with them, blood went everywhere, he was a character. Stony He had an old mule named Sugar Foot He talked to that mule like it was a man. CB Well now what brought your parent here, how long did your parent work here. Stony My mother was born in Peach Creek community and her parents lived there. Her grandparents had moved there from Alabama. There was a drought here in about 1925 or 1926. And folks had to make some money because all their crops had failed Two or three car loads from Wellborn went over to East Texas to pick cotton. One of the farmers who had a cotton field over there was my daddy. My mother had gone from here to over there to pick cotton so that's how they met. They lived over there till John L. and I were born in Trinity. Then when my grandfather died in Wellborn, mother came back to take care of grandmother. That's how we wound up back in Wellborn. Interesting thing about that is my grandmother and grandfather on my mother's side were both deaf. My mother and her brothers and sister 24 were all raised out in Peach Creek area out in the boon docks and they could barely speak when they came into school. Since they had not been around people that spoke orally they could do sign language like crazy but they couldn't talk very well. I guess they took alot of flak from the other kids because they weren't able to communicate as well. My grandfather had a blacksmith shop there in Wellborn. He was also Mr. Tom Royder's head mechanic there at the gin. He built that little old house we lived in. People would think of it as a tar paper shack I guess these days. It had single walls and a tin roofl CB I bet it was hot in the summer time Stony Hot in the summer time JD You get so used to the air conditioning now days. It was just as hot those days but we didn't have any electricity, so we didn't have any fans or anything so you just got used to it. DC He even runs his air conditioning in his truck CB I can't say that I blame him. S I'll tell you what, if you want to get a good air conditioner, get this guys truck when he gets through with it because the air conditioner has never been used. DC I was in the contracting business and I hated to pull to a crew with the windows up and the air conditioner and them sweating to death digging ditches you know. I didn't get my supervisors a truck with air conditioning because I didn't want them doing it either. Besides that it costs $200 -$300 more. I tell you what, a lot of times right now I don't even run my air conditioner when I'm going back and forth. DC You know where Steephollow is? CB Yes DC Any how I've a place between here and Wellborn, I come over here two or three times a week just to play golf. But my folks came over here, my mother's folks came from Alabama over here right after the Civil War. My dad's folks came from Mississippi after the Civil War and my mother's folks settled around Harvey. My dad's folks settled, well, first at Harvey and then around Kurten. JD You know Charlotte every country boy has his favorite story, can I tell this story Stony? Stony Well, probably CB Is it fit for publication? Stony I wouldn't tell it for publication. JD But we had an old cat remember that old cat had his ears cut off, his tail cut off. Stony Don't tell that story. JD Got run over by a couple of freight trains, and two trucks, a mean cat. I hated that cat. We had an old sandy yard, so he humped up one day, he was going to do his job. He had dug himself a little hole. So I stuck a shingle underneath him, caught it and ran off with it, that cat dug up the whole yard and couldn't find it. My mama whipped me all over the place. CB How old were you about that time. 25 JD About 7 or 8 years old. 12 or 13, I don't know. Stony You know I don't ever remember getting any toys or anything like that for Christmas. I didn't have a bicycle until I was a senior in high school. CB And that was your dating machine. Stony Yeah, a car was completely out of the question. We had an old `26 Chevrolet, it ran one year and then daddy would put it up for 2 or 3 years because we couldn't afford to drive it. DC My folks didn't have a car either, if they'd had ten cadillacs- they'd hook mules to it to go to town in. We'd get a bale of cotton, dad would leave before daylight so when we got to highway 6 it would be daylight. Back then there wasn't anything in College Station. You'd have to go to Bryan to get it ginned and get away from there soon enough to get off the highway. Of course, there wasn't all the traffic either . then there is now. CB I know. When we moved here in 1974, there was nothing between Redmond Terrace and the Piggly Wiggly and the K -Mart, except for the Shiloh. Stony yeah CB Restaurant, Fort Shiloh, and that was it. Stony That used to be out there, there used to be nothing out there except what they used to call Shiloh Hall, which is... DC SPJST Stony SPJST Hall. CB Now where was that? Stony That was that old Shiloh Hall, which is that is right where Fort Shiloh is now. CB Oh, OK. Stony But that was always out there. CB Oh. OK. When you were walking back and forth to school. Stony There was nothing there either. CB I realize that part. But, of course, when I think of Wellborn, I go down Wellborn Rd. or I go down Texas Avenue until you hit 2818 and go over. How do you go? I'm sure it was all woods. Stony In those days, Wellborn Road crossed the railroad at Jones Crossing, which is where that bypass comes around there now. You went on the east side of the railroad, there you went over the railroad to the west side almost all the way to Wellborn and then you came back over to the east side at Barron Road. But on the west side of the road the only thing between College Station and Wellborn was the Ross House, which had 6 or 7 of the best looking gals you ever saw in your life. Stony Well there was the Gandys lived down there on the hill too. And then the Outlaws and the Hills lived on the east side of the railroad. 26 DC At one time that was the old main Waco to Houston highway. Stony Yeah, Highway 6. CB Oh, oh. DC Then they built new Highway 6. Stony Of course you had of course you had the trains that came through. Back in those days they had alot of trains. They had 3 passengers trains a day or 4. 3 or 4 on Southern Pacific and one on the Missouri Pacific which was originally the IGN. CB OK. Now so the railroad tracks have never changed. Stony No it's been the same. CB The same; but the road is on either side. Stony The IGN track has been taken out, it's just a gravel road now. So there's only one track there now. CB IGN that's why they call it the IGN road. John D Charlotte, I can think of one more thing that is interesting. Stony The International Great Northern Railroad. John D Before you close it talking about country boys but there's something that was in every country boys' life and that was religion. When we built our brush arber and things. Do you know what a brush arber is? CB I don't think so. John D. They made a brush arber and they put saw dust on the floor and they scare the hell out of you. The world is going to come to and end every night at 1 o'clock. Now this was serious stuff back when we were kids. These old fashion fire and brimstone preachers would come through and they would hold revivals. Our regular churches were a little bit more subdued but these revivals they would preach fire and brimstone. I mean you went to one of those, you thought carefully about what you were doing. They wouldn't hold them in the church for some reason, I guess mainly because it was so dad gum hot and they were always in the summer. They'd always go out and get this brush and they'd built this frame work and they'd but this brush on top so you'd get some kind of shade up there, and they'd haul out some old wooden benches like pews or something like that. Have this revival service out there in that brush arbor. John D But I tell you Charlotte you set there your 12 -13 years old and some preacher is sitting up there, romping and stomping, telling you this world is going to come to an end at 2 o'clock That will wake YOU up. CB I would imagine so. John D Of course he'd go down the aisle and says who here come the glory train and everybody gets on the train. They got to me and Roy sitting on the back row, and we didn't want to get on that train. We ran off in the woods. Got lost, 12 -13 years old, scared to death Lighting, thundering, woke up the next 27 morning, climbed a tree up there to see where we were at. We were about 50 yards from the railroad track. That's frivolous then but that was real back in those days. DC Where were you born? You've been hearing all this stuff about us. CB Well I was born and raised in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. I know I'm one of those Yankees. DC Where is that back north of Bedias? CB A little more east than that and my husband is from Oregon. Met in Charleston, South Carolina. He says I was down there trolling. JD How did you end up in Texas? CB He was a military officer and he had an ROTC assignment at A &M. And we came here in 1974 and we liked it very much. We bought out house with the idea of retiring here, possibly. We were here for 3 years. We went to the Pentagon for 2 years and decided to come back to Texas. DC I tell you the military put alot of Southern and Yankee folks back together again didn't it. But it did stir alot of the people in the United States. John D Now tell them what the price of gas was back in WWII. What was it 10 cents per gallon. DC Ten or twelve if you could get any. Of course my mother or daddy didn't drive, didn't care any thing about a car. Stony Loaf of bread was a dime. DC My brother went into the service well. Well I was next in line to drive. So I drove, I had to fill out the application for the gas of course. What you got didn't mean you got the gasoline that was just the right to buy it. I filled out a big form that we needed 6000 gallons and the would still give you the same 100 gallons or something like that. If they had given it to us we didn't have money to buy that much gasoline anyway. John D Sugar was rationed. They rationed sugar you couldn't buy that much sugar. CB I can remember when sugar was 25 cents for a 5 pound sack or 50 cents for a 5 pound sack. John D And cigarettes, there was only about 3 brands. Camels, Old Gold, Lucky Strikes. That's about it. But they had this bull Durham tobacco that came in sack, that's what my daddy smoked. You could take it out, roll it with your fingers. He could roll a cigarette in a 30 mile an hour wind storm. DC We had a quilt made out of those Bull Durham sacks you know. CB Did you really? DC Yeah took the stitches out of the sides of them and that made a little old cloth and sewed together. Stony They used to sell flour in 48 lbs. bags and that's all I used the only kind of shirts we had was ones made out of flour sacks. John They used to make a print, flour print sacks and that's what the old country people made shirts out of. 28 CB Well I've got news for ya my grandmother World War I1, made me many a dress out of flour sacks. DC And fertilizer came in a course cotton like sack and mama would make me and my brother shorts out of those. And we'd be walking kind of like dragging a tent. John D And there are several things talkin' about old times you don't see any more in this part of the country. Where's your horn frogs at, you remember them. Red ants use to be everywhere. Because horn frogs used to be after red ants. Red ants are gone you don't see very many, do you Don? DC Not very many, I `ve got a hill or two CB You don't see too many fire flies either. John D That's right, I was talking about the other day how many fire flies do you see? We called them lightning bugs. CB Lightning bugs, that's right. Stony Anything that lives on the ground the fire ants take care of CB Yeah, how much more time do we have? PE It's about 10 to 12. Pam where did you come from, you had to have come from somewhere. PE I'm from Texas born and raised, I grew up in Houston and lived in Austin 10 years and I have been here for 4. That sure was quick that in between time. PE We're not here to talk about me, not as exciting as the stories I've heard today. CB Really, really. Do you have any other stories DC Let's see, can we talk about school taxes and things like that. CB Well, I don't imagine you had many school taxes back then did you? Stony Nothing to tax CB Well we've always had taxes. Stony No it wasn't a lot but that same land now is worth about $3,000 - $6,000 an acre. John Charlotte, you hears Stony say a while ago our grandfather was a blacksmith, will the old homestead the Logan's live down there now. The little Black Smith Shop is still standing, and you can still see grandpa's writing on that little corrugated metal just like he wrote it yesterday in pencil. John All sort of conversation, he couldn't talk. 29 Stony He also worked on clocks and he did gun stocks made gun stocks for people and that sort of thing but he could do anything. Somebody asked him could you make me a gun stock and he wrote back yes. John Just like he wrote it yesterday on that corrugated metal. CB So if he was a, he lost his hearing after he had learned to read and write. Stony Oh yes he meant my grandmother at Texas School for the Deaf after lost his hearing. I think he was a teenager and my grandmother lost her hearing. She was also a teenager when she lost her hearing but it was about I think she had the one of the fevers I can't remember which one it was but both of them had the fevers. Back in those days they couldn't control fevers as well. And when they got above a certain degree you know. CB And they didn't have any antibiotics either? Stony No antibiotics to give them of course they all lived out in the country. My grandmother though she came from a fairly wealthy fancily over near Temple in Holland. They had a hardware store over in Holland. You could write a book about that. People didn't think they could raise the kids and they took 3 of the older kids off to Buckner Orphans Home and of them got appendicitis and died, and the rest of the kids did all right with their parents. My grandfather took a buckboard and drove all the way up to Dallas where the orphan home was. He knew my Aunt Jessie who was the oldest gal liked bananas so he bought himself a great big stalk of bananas and put them on that buckboard and drove back and forth in front of the gate. Of course Aunt Jessie saw him and once she saw him, she slipped across the fence and got on the buckboard and came back home with him and that was the end of the story. John D Charlotte, might as well end it up with an Aggie joke. What do you think? CB I beg your pardon? Oh, you want to end with an Aggie Joke? DC She's scared to tell him `Go head.' John D This Aggie had a cookout. He was cooking and realized that he didn't have enough food so here comes a Longhorn. So he asked the Longhorn what he was going to do and the Longhorn said well just double your recipe. So the Longhorn went off, came back about 2 hours later, Aggie is still standing there, he has all his goods laid out and doesn't know what to do. This Longhorn says, "Well, did you do what I told you to do. Did you double the recipe ?" "Sure did! But I can't find an oven that will go up to 700 degrees." 30