Texas Girl: The Story of a Life

By Mary Stewart Heather

The twentieth century and the first years of the twenty-first century witnessed economic and social upheaval perhaps unprecedented in history. Against this backdrop of drought and depression, Texas Girl reviews these changes from the perspective of a woman who has experienced them, revealing her hopes, frustrations, joys and despairs as she relates the day-to-day occurrences that are a part of family life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Sep 15, 2015
• ISBN: 9781491775479

Mary Stewart Heather

Mary Stewart Heather is a graduate of Texas Technological College (now Texas Tech University). She also studied at the National University of Mexico, the University of Iowa, where she taught beginning Spanish and at Denver University. As a travel agent, she has been privileged to see a great deal of the world. Now widowed, she is the mother of five children. She has six grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. Mary lives in Lubbock, Texas.

Book preview

Copyright © 2015 Mary Stewart Heather.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

iUniverse

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.iuniverse.com

1-800-Authors (1-800-288-4677)

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

ISBN: 978-1-4917-7550-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-7547-9 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015913512

iUniverse rev. date: 09/30/2015

Contents

Chapter 1 Genesis

Chapter 2 The White Place

Chapter 3 A New Beginning

Chapter 4 School Days

Chapter 5 The Farm

Chapter 6 High School at Last!

Chapter 7 A Whole New World

Chapter 8 South of the Border

Chapter 9 America’s Heartland

Chapter 10 A Change of Direction

Chapter 11 The Long Haul

Chapter 12 A New Era

Chapter 13 Life Goes On

Chapter 14 Things Change!

Chapter 15 One Day at a Time

Chapter 16 … And Now What?

Chapter 1

GENESIS

When we are young many of us have neither the curiosity nor the emotional depth to wonder about the times that have preceded us. We live in the moment and, in the arrogance of youth, we think (if we think about it at all): What difference does it make? That’s all in the past; irrelevant! We fail to perceive its bearing on our lives. But we don’t just spring from a void. We are the sum of those who have preceded us and, leaving their mark, have endowed us with our abilities and our flaws. We come tabula rasa into the world and, but for the myths, legends and truths presented to us by our forebears, may very well remain that way.

Parents and grandparents may refer to events that occurred in their earlier years but unless we care, show an interest, or ask specific questions, they may not tell us the things we should know; things that would deepen our understanding of them and of ourselves and enrich our lives. Sometimes they have forgotten or they may feel that no one is interested. Sometimes, memories are too painful to unearth. Questions unasked remain unanswered.

So many times, there were opportunities to connect with the past but, too often, I failed to inquire. Now they are all gone; those who could have filled in the blanks; the people who could have fleshed out the bare bones of tradition and lore, and I am left to cobble together their stories from the bits and pieces they left behind.

And how the years have fled! Time weighs heavily upon me now; there’s too much of it and not enough of it. Almost without noticing, I have become an old woman but, in my mind, events long gone appear as clearly as though they happened yesterday albeit, across time, my perspective on some of them has changed a bit.

Looking back, I see myself as I was: sometimes with pride but, perhaps more often, with dismay. Tempered by the passing years, I’m not that same person. We never are in our latter days. Familiar faces, loved and unloved, flash across the screen of my memory as it spans what I believe must have been one of the most eventful periods history can recall. As I unearth these memories, each awakens another until it might seem that I have filled these pages with trivia. But, to me, it is not trivia. It is my story, told as I remember it; from my own point of view, slanted to my own bias and I rejoice, or grieve, for happenings that have defined my being and have woven themselves into the fabric of my existence. I record it now in the hope that, through these words, my children and their children will have a sense of who they are, and from whence they came.

I think of my father as I write. To me Robert Marshall Stewart, Daddy, was the epitome of manhood: courageous, intelligent, moderate, impeccably honest, his was the measure by which I judged other men. In my view, few have equaled this standard and none have surpassed it.

He was born near Grinnell, in Massac County, Illinois, on May 14, 1892, the youngest but one of a family large even by the standards of those times. As a young man his father, John Wyatt Stewart, my grandfather, married Emma Lukens, the daughter of German immigrants. On the census form her parents, Charles and Catherine Hake Lukens, are listed as from Hanover. Of Daddy’s siblings, I recall the names of Charlie, the eldest, Edna, Lillian, John, Raymond, Gilbert and Emma. These were the ones who survived infancy; a perilous time in those days. My grandfather’s obituary listed other children, long deceased, including one referred to as infant daughter, unnamed.

As I grew up, legends persisted regarding some of these kin. I have a photograph of my father’s sister, Lillian, taken when she was about twenty. By all accounts a beautiful and intelligent young woman, she attended a secretarial school in St. Louis and subsequently worked in Washington, D. C., I don’t know for whom. The story goes that, while in Washington, she became engaged to a young man from Boston. She had not met his family and was planning a trip to that city to do so.

In those days respectable young women did not travel un-chaperoned with young men. Lillian asked her Aunt Ella, who lived in Illinois, to accompany her on this journey and Aunt Ella agreed to do so. Many years later, when I met the old lady, she told me she was about to go to the railway station to buy the ticket for her trip to Washington when she received a telegram telling her that Lillian was dead. Lillian never did take care of herself, she declared. I was told that she died of tubercular meningitis. I don’t know if there actually is such a disease or what it would be called in today’s medical parlance.

Young Robert Marshall Stewart, less than two years old when his mother died at his sister Emma’s birth, was a favorite of Lillian’s. She helped to care for him before she left home and it was her promise and intention to help him to go to college and become a lawyer. Obviously, this never happened.

Daddy loved his older brother Ray (Raymond) and the feeling was returned with kindness and affection. In that era, young people on farms worked. When Daddy was seven or eight years old, Ray was asked to go with his eldest brother, Charlie, to help with moving some cattle from one place to another.

Lying in a hospital bed, decades later, Daddy said that he begged Ray not to go. As Ray left, Daddy went running down the road after him, crying. His brother turned back and hugged him, saying: Don’t cry. It’s all right. I’ll be back in a few days.

I think it was the only time in all those years that he ever mentioned Ray in my presence. His voice broke as he said: And the next time I seen him he was in his coffin.

Death was a frequent visitor to that family in those days. So many of those he loved were snatched from that little boy.

John, the second son, had a gift for whimsy. Handed a kerosene can by someone (probably an older sister) he was told to go to the general store, about a mile away, and get it filled. He took the can and started walking but, apparently, had other ideas. He hopped a train to the west coast and signed on with a freighter bound to the Orient. A couple of years later, he came walking back home carrying the now-filled kerosene can. His story goes that he was in San Francisco at the time of the 1906 earthquake. John got a job with the railway, I don’t know in what capacity; engineer? stoker? what? He sustained some sort of injury and died.

It seems to me that the Stewarts were afflicted by a bit of wanderlust. Or perhaps, as many were in those times, they were only seeking opportunity and a better life. In 1836, my great-grandfather, David Stewart, born about 1809 in the Scottish town of Kilbarchen in Renfrewshire, sailed westward from Leith on a three masted sailing vessel named the Margaret Bogle. On the ship’s passenger list he stated that he was a laborer.

I have no knowledge of how or why David Stewart found his way to southern Illinois but, some years after his arrival there, he met and married a young widow: Nancy Bohannon Matthews (or Mathias, or Mathis; I’m not sure which and the existing records don’t make it clear). He was sixteen years her senior. Nancy was from Virginia. She brought with her three children from her first marriage. Her grandfather served in the American Revolution and, according to information passed down to me, was awarded four thousand acres of Virginia land in payment for his services. I have no official documentation regarding this, merely a handwritten statement from one of the long-dead aunts.

The story persists that our branch of the Stewarts (there are many) descended from the Stewart (Stuart) kings (Mary, Queen of Scots and all that bunch). So far, I have found no means of verifying this. It may well be true but, if so, I suspect it was from a relationship on the wrong side of the blanket. It doesn’t matter. I only mention it because I have long found it interesting.

My mother’s family: Crawford, also originated in Scotland; a large and powerful clan. Early in the nineteenth century, at least one of them migrated to Rockcastle County, Kentucky, and settled there. Much later in that same century my maternal grandfather, Sir James Crawford, married Elizabeth (Bettie) Mullins. The Sir was a given name, not a title and, as such, was entered in the family bible.

I have only recently learned that the Mullins family, whom I had been given to understand were Irish, really started out in France as Moulins (Mills in English). Richard des Moulins immigrated to Virginia in the mid eighteenth century. The name was anglicized, becoming Mullins. This family also settled in Rockcastle County.

A few years after the death of his wife in 1894, my grandfather Stewart began something of an odyssey. I have never learned why he left Illinois but, early in the twentieth century, he did. A middle-aged man, John Wyatt Stewart had lived in Massac County all his life. He had farmed and taught school there. He had buried a wife and children there. Now, for whatever reason, he, his eldest daughter, Edna, and his two younger sons, Robert Marshall and Gilbert Morice (Maurice? Morris?), set forth. They migrated south, a bit at a time, living in Missouri, Arkansas and, at last, in Texas. The 1910 Federal census places them in Doniphan, Missouri, the county seat of Ripley County. My grandfather was listed as merchant in a general store.¹ By today’s standards, Doniphan is not all that far from Massac County but it was a station on their southward road. Hannibal, Missouri and Batesville, Arkansas were stations on this journey as well, although I know nothing of what they did there, or how long they remained in either place.

And why did they come to Lynn County, Texas? It’s such a simple and obvious question, yet it never occurred to me to ask. Were they lured to West Texas by spurious claims and offers of cheap, abundant and fertile land made by development companies and by our own government? There’s no one left to answer these questions but I know that they settled there and farmed for a time. I don’t think they bought land. They were still in Lynn County at the onset of World War I. According to my father’s army enlistment paper, he worked for George Small, a local farmer whom I remember from my childhood. Uncle Gilbert’s enlistment paper states that he worked for Higginbotham-Bartlett Lumber Company in Tahoka.

After the war, the two brothers, just out of the army, stopped off in the little town of Roscoe, in Nolan County where, among other people, they met Lady Dobbins, the daughter of Tom Dobbins, the local banker. (Lavonia Caroline was her given name but, as a child, they called her Carrie and, later, Lady.) She thought Bob Stewart was an awfully nice person. Her mother suggested that she invite the two brothers to dinner and she did. My father was somewhat reclusive, or leery, or something, and declined the invitation. Not so my Uncle Gilbert.

Gilbert Stewart and Lady Dobbins were married in 1921 and settled in Tahoka, the county seat of Lynn County, where he resumed his work at the lumber yard, becoming its manager. I understand that he was instrumental in developing the town’s infrastructure: water, sewage, etc. I believe that, basically, he was a good man and I know that Lady (who would become my beloved Auntie) was a wonderful woman but their marriage was not made in Heaven!

My father also returned to Lynn County and found a job in a service station in Tahoka. By this time, John Wyatt Stewart had traveled on. He and Edna went to Texas City, near Galveston, and remained there for the rest of their lives. In Tahoka, Daddy lived in a rooming house, sharing a room with the local postmaster, Hap Smith.

Gilbert Stewart bought a farm and needed someone to run it. My grandfather Crawford, and his young son, Leonard, came from Hamilton County in central Texas looking for work and met Gilbert. He offered Papa the farming job.

My mother’s siblings were Benton, Zora, Elva, Jewell, Leonard, Jean and Marie. Of these many children, Leonard, Jean and Marie were still at home and they and my grandparents relocated to Lynn County. My mother called her parents Papa and Mama so I called them that as well, and will continue to do so throughout this narrative.

In addition to the barns, pens and corrals that were part of a farm in that era, there was a decent, white-painted house surrounded by a picket fence. Two silver-leafed maple trees grew in front of the house and a spreading mulberry tree shaded the back yard. The birds loved those mulberries and splashed their purple droppings all over the place. As a child, I once tried to eat a few of the berries but found them infested with some sort of small insects: mites, or aphids. I left them alone after that.

There was, of course, a windmill (arid West Texas could not have been settled without them) and a concrete stock tank. The house had two cisterns, one on either side of the ridged and guttered roof, to catch the run-off on the rare occasions that the rains came. There was no plumbing, gas, or electricity.

One of the eight Crawford children, Loucile, now in her early twenties, lived in Orange, Texas with Zora, her older sister and worked as a telephone operator. She decided to join her family in Lynn County, traveling by train to Tahoka. Lynn County, at that time and forevermore until quite recent years, was dry (alcoholically, that is). Prohibition was in effect then and the whole country was dry. It only now occurs to me to wonder: how did she come by that bottle of whiskey she brought to Papa; the one that got broken in her suitcase during the trip? It must have been from a bootlegger. There were plenty of them. Anyway, she arrived at the little railway station in Tahoka in a miasma of booze!

The farmhouse was a bit crowded and Loucile wanted her privacy; she pre-empted a corn-crib in the barn and turned it into a bedroom. After my parents and I moved to that same farm, a few years later, Mother showed me the little room and the wall of unpainted planks where, in pencil and with good perspective, she had sketched a beautiful cottage with a flag-stone walk and many flowers.

She told me that, shortly after she came to Lynn County, she and a bunch of young folks were out driving one afternoon and stopped in Tahoka to get gasoline. Later, when she got home, she told her mother that she had seen the man she was going to marry. It’s interesting how things sometimes work out: Uncle Gilbert came to the farm often, to check on things, and met Loucile. He reported back to Auntie that there was an awfully pretty girl out there. Auntie invited Loucile and Bob to dinner and the rest is history. Well, almost. Now it happens that Daddy’s roommate, Hap Smith, had met Loucile and he, too, thought she was awfully pretty. But she wouldn’t go out with him.

While all this was going on, my grandparents, Mama and Papa, ordered a batch of new-hatched chicks. They came from the hatchery by rail, noisy, hungry and more than a little smelly, in a large, flat card-board box that had a lot of sectioned compartments in it to keep them from piling together, and a lot of small air-holes so they could breathe. The chicks had arrived at the depot. Bob and Loucile had a date that evening after Bob got off work and he was going to bring them when he came to the farm to pick her up.

Hap saw his opportunity and seized it. Collecting the chicks, he delivered them to the farm a little earlier in the evening telling Mother that Swede² was sick and couldn’t come, but that he (Hap) would take her to the picture show. Mother was smarter than that. She was having none of Hap’s machinations and declined the offer.

His timing was a little off and he was still at the farm when Bob arrived. Mother and Daddy laughed about it in later years but it certainly curdled the friendship between the two men. Not too long thereafter, Bob and Loucile drove to Lubbock and got married.

Calvin Coolidge was president of the United States in 1925. The first issue of The New Yorker magazine appeared that year and, in early February, dogsleds made a thousand-mile trek from Anchorage to Nome to deliver life-saving serum. On the sixteenth day of that month, I began my own journey with the assistance of Dr. Turrentine and an elderly woman generally referred to as Granny Cree. This journey has continued over enough years to teach me that regardless of wishes, ambitions and planning, one never knows what tomorrow may dish up and drop onto one’s plate!

I have been told that I was six weeks old before they named me. Had I been a boy, I think I would have been called Robert Marshall Stewart, Jr., but, for all this time, apparently not knowing what to call a female infant, they referred to me as It. As in How is It doing? or It certainly cried a lot last night!

I guess I had some lucky near-misses in the naming department. One of these was a suggestion Auntie made: to combine the names of my parents and call me Lucy Bobette. Oh, please! What a disaster that would have been! I am not, nor have I ever been, a Lucy Bobette type. Names are important; they are part of our persona, part of a first impression; they effect our self-esteem. Had I been given this name, my life might have been completely different. I might have turned hyper, manic and off the wall. I might have run away and joined a circus! Who knows? However, those concerned came to their senses in time and, after lengthy consideration, settled on Mary Caroline. Auntie’s middle name was Caroline and her mother’s name was Mary, although, for some reason, she was called Laddie. I have always supposed I was named for them. I like my name, feeling that it is touched with elegance and grace. It has served me well.

My first photograph, taken when I was about six weeks old, shows a sober-faced infant with sunken cheeks and observant eyes. In later years, both Mother and Auntie told me that I cried a lot. My parents consulted Dr. Turrentine who pronounced me colicky and directed Mother to nurse me for only two minutes every four hours. No wonder I cried! I don’t know why Mother didn’t consult her own mother, who had successfully reared eight children, but she didn’t. Fate must have been looking out for me when Auntie’s mother came from Roscoe to visit her daughter and son-in-law. Auntie brought her mother to see me and Laddie exclaimed: That baby is starving! You should nurse her until she’s satisfied.

I guess Mother was desperate by this time and took Laddie’s advice. As the story goes, I thrived, becoming plump and rosy, at least until I came down with whooping cough.

A little group calling itself The Mothers’ Club afforded young mothers in the little town an opportunity to gather in one of their homes for a companionable hour or two and to observe, or participate in, educational programs about infant and child care. I imagine there weren’t many social opportunities for young, housebound mothers in Tahoka at that time and it was a popular organization. Mother joined the group and brought me with her to the meetings, as did other mothers with their children. Sometime during my first year, someone brought a child who had an active case of whooping cough. Guess who caught it. In those days, whooping cough was considered a lethal disease for children less than one year of age and I was sick. Mother and Daddy, as well as Auntie and Uncle Gilbert, held fearful vigil until, after a few days, the illness began to subside.

When my children were small, inoculation for whooping cough was standard procedure. I don’t know if the disease is still considered a threat; so many virulent maladies have been disarmed over the years. This was my first encounter with mortality, unless you count near-starvation, and it was thought to have weakened my system to the extent that I was delicate and prone to other illnesses.

I understand that Mother got a pretty stiff and probably undeserved lecture from Daddy about exposing me, unnecessarily, to whatever was floating around by way of contagion. She didn’t take me to Mothers’ Club anymore. I don’t know if she left the club or not but I think she probably did because, in our area, baby sitters (as such) were several years in the future and I doubt if she would have left me with one anyway, after such a desperate illness.

Sunday school, on the other hand, was a whole different ballgame. Mother used to say that no one ever caught anything at Sunday school or church because if there was the least thing wrong with them or theirs, they would use it as an excuse to stay home.

I was a member of the Cradle Roll class. In Cradle Roll, we were given printed leaflets: lessons taken from the more humane parts of the Bible and illustrated with softly tinted pictures of Jesus and lambs and little children; such things as The Good Samaritan, or of Jesus admonishing: Suffer the little children to come unto me. After the class opened its weekly session with a simple prayer, our reedy little voices would raise as we intoned Jesus loves me or Red or yellow, black or white, Jesus loves them all alike; all the little children of the world. Our teacher, Mrs. Robinson, would discuss that Sunday’s lesson and we would close the meeting with another prayer invoking God’s care and blessing in the days to come.

If someone was going to have a birthday during the coming week, there would be a birthday cake; a tube cake pan turned upside down and painted white. Mrs. Robinson stuck candles on it and lit them. The honored child got to blow out the candles as the others sang Happy Birthday. I remember being a little disappointed the first time I saw that cake; it seemed, somehow, lacking in substance; to promise but not deliver.

Mrs. Robinson claimed to be the first white child born in Lynn County. It was her mother, Effey Alley³, who took note of a small, lilac-colored flower growing in T-Bar pasture, in the northern part of the county, and christened it Tahoka Daisy. During the week, Mrs. Robinson worked at one of Tahoka’s dry goods stores. She was married to Hall Robinson, who sold insurance and had the reputation of being one of the town’s more dedicated drunks. And this during prohibition! Ethel Alley Robinson was a proud lady and a devout Methodist and this knowledge must have stung like an adder. It was, for a time, overshadowed by the fact that her son, Jack Alley, at the age of six or thereabouts, managed to burn their house to the ground while playing with matches. I remember Mrs. Robinson telling the Cradle Roll that Jack Alley had been a bad boy.

After Sunday school, Mother would come for me and lead me into the sanctuary where I sat beside her in the hard oaken pew to hear Brother Breedlove’s weekly sermon. The service always lasted about an hour and I remember being catatonic from boredom. I probably squirmed in my seat a lot but I was taught to be quiet in church. On Sundays, Mother sometimes wore a black, broad-brimmed hat made of horsehair braid and trimmed with a blue velvet flower. She was beautiful.

My father didn’t go to church. He found God in other places. Honorable in all his dealings, he held himself to the same high standards as those to which he held others.

At that time, we lived in a small and simple white frame house on the south side of town. It had electric lights and cold running water in the kitchen but no bathroom. There was a privy in the backyard. Things were pretty basic. Mother used a kerosene stove for cooking but had an electric iron. There were no wall outlets; one unscrewed a light bulb, replaced it with a screw-in outlet and plugged the iron in there.

One of the legends of my childhood was that I uttered my first word at the age of six months and was speaking in sentences by the time I was one year old. Both Mother and Auntie declared this to be true.

When I was about three, Daddy took the train to Kansas City. It may have been to accompany and sell some of Uncle Gilbert’s cattle. It may have been other family business; I simply don’t know. When he returned, he brought me a gift: a set of tiny, white dishes. The cups were only an inch high. He squatted beside me, put his arm around me and showed me a little cup and saucer he held in his other hand. Ain’t them pretty! he said. It is a sweet memory. I still have one of the cups.

Along about this same time, Mother made me a pongee⁴ dress with an embroidered collar and beautiful silk smocking at the yoke. This was my Sunday school and special occasion dress. At other times, it resided in a small cedar chest with the rest of my clothes.

It was our custom (Mother’s and mine) to take a little walk downtown each day after my afternoon nap. Not to buy anything; just to get out. One day I awoke, looked about and didn’t see her. Nor did I hear anything. I had a sense of being alone in the house. She must have gone without me, I thought. I’ll just go find her. I climbed off the bed, heaved up the lid of the cedar chest and pulled out my pongee dress. I put it on backward and, barefoot, headed for the door. As I passed the kitchen, Mother saw me and exclaimed: Why, Honey! Where are you going? I explained; she turned my dress around, put some shoes on me and we walked to town.

Tahoka was a different town in those days. Separated from Lubbock, the nearest city, by thirty miles of rutted and sometimes muddy dirt road, it was a bustling little community. The brick courthouse, on its square, dominated the scene. It was surrounded by green lawn and a few trees sheltering slatted wooden benches, usually held down by scruffy-looking old gentlemen: the spit and whittle club, convening there to enjoy one another’s company and cuss the government.

There was a watering tank; a corrugated iron trough, positioned in the middle of the street in front of the courthouse square. Not everyone had automobiles in those days and horses had to drink.

Saturday was a big day in town for farm families. They streamed in from all over the county; some in old trucks and some in buggies and wagons drawn by teams of plow-horses, carrying litters of children and whatever produce the family had accumulated to trade. Mostly, this consisted of eggs and cream collected and stored over the past few days, intended to be exchanged for groceries the farmers could not, themselves, produce: such things as coffee, flour and sugar. The cream was shipped, by rail, to a creamery to be made into butter. Some of the eggs would be sold to town folk who had no hens, the rest being sent away to parts unknown. The massive and impersonal food production industry of today did not appear to exist, at least in our part of the world.

Somewhere to the east of the courthouse was a wagon-yard where