The Shoeshine Boy

By Wallace Brazzeal

In one brief summer a thirteen-year-old became a Texas Shoeshine Boy, creating a story to add to the family history––a springboard to link the threads of two generations.

The Houston Ice Houses played cowboy songs to lonesome folks whose shoes needed a good shine. In 1955 it was a place sandwiched between a boy growing up and a country expanding its frontiers. It was as simple as two people discovering each other and as uncharted as the Southwestern Bayous. But these thoughts could only be understood later, when growing older seasons memories and makes sense from a perspective far in the future. A place where all such stories are weaved and knitted into a tapestry that can only be seen and read after a lifetime; a place where teardrops are not lost in rain, but merge with fond memories into the lives of families yet to come.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Publisher's Place
• Release date: Jan 28, 2011
• ISBN: 9780975446058

Book preview

The Shoeshine Boy

By Wallace Brazzeal

SMASHWORDS EDITION

Copyright 2010 Wallace Brazzeal

Smashwords Edition

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Acknowledgements

"I would like to first express my gratitude to my family and friends, for their encouragement – to Mark Ballsteadt, who’s suggestion it was to write the shoeshine story, for his example and gentle reminders.

For help and a listening ear, I would like to thank my wife Katherine for her support and kind words.

Writing this book has given me a chance to visit parts of my childhood and rediscover the wonderfulness of life.

Chapters

Prologue p1

Chapter 1, The Road to Texas

Chapter 2, Gorgeous George

Chapter 3, Climbing Big Tree

Chapter 4, Secretly Liking Someone

Chapter 5, Becoming a Shoeshine Boy

Chapter 6, My Mom’s Story, Nancy, East Palatka, Florida, 1928

Chapter 7, My Dad’s Story, JC Finding Deacon Dewey Hawkinsville, Georgia, 1931

Chapter 8, Growing up in Georgia

Chapter 9, Houston 1956, Getting Started in the Shoeshine Business

Chapter 10, First Shine

Chapter 11, Florida, 1953, Growing Up in Jacksonville

Chapter 12, The War Against the Bees

Chapter 13, Leaving the Nest

Chapter 14, Christmas morning

Chapter 15, The Shoeshine Elixir

Chapter 16, Nightlife in the Houston Ice Houses

Chapter 17, The Mercury Cruiser

Chapter 18, Back in Houston: Tickets at the Belmont

Chapter 19, The Houston Shoeshine Union

Chapter 20, Saying Goodbye

Epilogue

Prologue

Like most families, ours had their fair share of stories. You know the ones that get told over and over again at family get-togethers. These stories shape our lives and put flesh around the family tree. They define the personalities that make up our roots.

Like most families we grew-up with these stories, but never really wrote them down, but that all changed about twelve years ago when my dad died as a result of a car accident.

It happened less that a mile from where my folks first met in Palatka, Florida, 53 years earlier. Back then, my dad, or J.C as most folks called him, worked at a filling station on Madison street, pumping gas and checking oil. My mom, Nancy was delivering dairy products to the local business for the family dairy. It was called the Folsom Dairy. These two were about as different as two people could be, but it was love at first site when they met at the gas station all those years ago. When they eloped at the end of summer, their story began a new chapter in their lives. It was the story of their struggles, their love and the adventures of raising their children. The problem is that no one ever wrote the stories down.

I remember the call from mom the day of dad’s accident. She said he was returning from a fishing trip on the St. John’s River when the car was hit. They were about a block away from St. John’s Memorial Bridge and the full-sized bronze statues of the infantrymen from the Great War, who stood as sentinels at both ends of the bridge. A kid had run a stop sign and crashed into the front of car in which my dad was a passenger. What seemed like a fender bender at the time, proved fatal. When JC complained of neck pain following the accident, the doctors suspected that it was whiplash of something to do with a spinal neck injury. Three days after the accident he passed away at the Gainesville Hospital. The final chapter of his life was over.

When family and friends gathered to pay their last respects in Palatka, Florida, They talked about their memories of my dad and the whirlwind life he lead. They told stories from his youth, about him growing up in Georgia, hopping freight trains as a teenager. There were also stories about racketeering and bootlegging, some fact, some fable. Others remembered his life as a journey out of the jungle of that life style and into a completely different way of being; a path that took a lifetime to travel but in the process became a blessing to all that knew him.

His story and the effect on his family would have to be told by others. The threads of his life were knitted into our family and each of our lives has become the fabric whose patterns were drawn in the fading memories of his wife and children.

Now, a dozen years later, I was making the short drive from Bloomington to St. George to see my mom. The urgent call this morning about needing to meet right away had me worried. She had moved back to St. George, Utah six years ago to be closer to family. In some ways St. George had become her second home. Joe and Nancy first moved here in 1974. Eventually we all migrated to this little oasis in the desert southwest, called Utah’s Dixie. How fitting I thought, our southern family in this western Dixie.

We are the children of this family. We are all grown now with families of our own and even a few grandchildren on the way. Joe Jr., the oldest, I came next and then Judy. We are the three children of Joe and Nancy.

Mom wanted me to make sure I brought a tape recorder this morning and a notebook. Her cozy little home carried the decorations of a lifetime. In furniture and pictures we could trace our family’s history back to our first memories, mom had begun to jot-down a few notes and make scattered journal entries. Feeling her time was near; she wanted to make sure we had the treads that link the stories together.

We would talked for hours at a time. Joe Jr. and Judy would add their thoughts. I took notes and asked questions. We spurred each other own to recount the lost chapters of our lives. As we talked together and tried to remember the fading pages, we began the chapter that included our move to Houston Texas back in 1955. I had almost forgotten that very significant journey. It was a transitional time for me, a step into the west and a farewell to adolescence. In one brief summer a thirteen year old became a Texas Shoeshine Boy, another story to add to the family history...a springboard to link the treads together.

Chapter 1

The Road to Texas

By the end of my sixth grade year, I said goodbye to all my buddies in Arlington. We were moving to Texas. Our home was already sold and somehow I knew that I was saying goodbye to a boyhood dream. Arlington was kind of a suburb of Jacksonville, Florida except it was across the St. Johns River. There on the other side of Jacksonville I could ride my bike down the asphalt road that ended on the banks of the wide St. Johns. The old dock that stood out on this mighty river must have been there twenty years or more. Miss Jennings, my fifth grade teacher, said that the St. Johns was the only river in North America that flowed north just like the Nile River in Egypt. The water was brown and cool. It was teaming with fish and all kinds of river water life. I caught a lot of fish off that old bridge; got some crabs too.

In Arlington there were lots of woods. We called them jungles because there were vines and swamps and sulphur springs. The sounds from the jungle were filled with wild things and summer breezes that whipped up a rhythm of mystery and things not fully understood. There were lakes that were over a mile across. On summer afternoons we’d go skinny-dipping and play pirates on Richard’s boat, a tinny skiff with just enough sail to make us believe we were true navigators on the high seas of Pirate-hood.

Playing jungle was serious business. First of all, all of us kids had our own knives and some of us carried machetes. I still have my machete after all these years. Playing jungle was any activity that included life as Tarzan or the great hunter on safari. All of the neighborhood guys knew this and accepted the fact that playing jungle carried certain risks, especially jungle wars with spears and arrows, but that’s another story.

My brother was Joe Jr. We called him Joe Junior because my dad was Joe. He was almost two years older than me. Together we had scouted every inch of the Arlington woods. We knew it like the back of our hands, which were always dirty. It was as if it was part of our own back yard. It was a big yard, miles and miles with only dirt roads, trails and hundreds of ravines, hiding places and wild things.

We were saying good-by to all of this and to all of the adventures of a huckfinnin-boyhood. We were on our way to Houston, Texas, a place unknown to me, a place beyond the woods of Arlington.

The road to Texas was by way of Palatka, Florida, a small town sixty miles south from Jacksonville. It was the town of my mother’s childhood and her parents’ dairy, and cows, but that was sold long ago. Grandma and Grandpa Folsom lived in-town now. I remember those years when grandpa had owned a small dry goods store and was the town barber. He still cut hair, but mostly he cut the hair of all the grand kids. All of the grand kids came from the Folsom’s three daughters––my mom, Nancy Frances, my Aunt, Josie Bell and Aunt Jean. Danny was one of our cousins. He was a boy and close to our age (four months younger than me). We still played with our other cousins and Palatka was our favorite place to visit. I didn’t know then that it would become the home of my high school years.

On my mother’s side of the family, we had two uncles. Uncle Sonny and Uncle George. Uncle George had gone to Houston with my dad. They both had found good work through the Steel Workers Union and we were going to meet them in the lone star state.

Uncle George’s wife, Aunt Edna and her son Harmon were going to be going with us. I can still remember that old Henry Jay station wagon. It was a small car; light blue oxidized paint with a rack on top. The rack held almost all our clothes and bags. It was cinched down tight with a brown tarp. The distance from the rack to the top of the tarp was almost equal to the distance from the road to the roof of the car. The appearance gave the car a comical diminutive look as it groaned under the weight laid on its shoulders. I noticed that balancing the load was somewhat tricky. The slightest turn would cause the entire car to list to the outside curve like a sailing ship tacking against the wind.

So there we were, my brother, my little sister, Judy, Harmon and the two adults, mom and Aunt Edna heading for a place that I could not imagine; a place so far away that it would take three day to get there.

Everyone had gathered at grandma’s to see us off. There were hugs and kisses and lots of tears. What I remembered most was the looks of astonishment in the faces of the adults as they waved good-by. They couldn’t understand why we were willing to go on such a dangerous unknown journey, why we were willing to leave our homes and families just to find work. Through all my journeys I still remember their faces, because most of them never left Palatka; perhaps they never will. Grandma and Grandpa Folsom are buried there. Soon others will join them.

For a 13 year old, sitting in the back seat of a Henry Jay held little promise for an interesting journey. Texas was five states away if you count Florida and we should count Florida. Almost half the journey was driving up through the panhandle of this weird shaped state. Half of the first day was gone before we reached the Osceola National Forest outside of Lake City. There was nothing special about the Osceola National Forest except the name Osceola. This was the name of the famed Seminole Indian leader who led a dissenting group of young Indian warriors against US Troops in 1835. Osceola was opposed to being forced off his tribal lands. The Indians withdrew into the alligator infested Everglades. For two years they fought Federal Troops using guerrilla tactics. He was only captured when under a flag of truce he along with his small delegation were seized and imprisoned. The story goes that he starved himself to death while trying to get thin enough to squeeze through the prison bars. He almost made it. Freedom was in sight, but the journey was never to be made by him. Eventually his tribe was taken to the west, beyond the Mississippi, to a nameless place known only as Indian Lands. Were we going that far? How nameless is a place you’ve only heard of but never seen?

By the time we reached the Florida state capital, palm trees, seagulls and billboards were not even a distraction. It was getting more fun to fight