Sandown Smith

By Sandra (Westlake Smith) Ketchum

This lovingly written biography tells the story of Sandown Smith. Born in 1903 in Gainesville, Texas, he began life on his own at the young age of fourteen. He rode the rails through several states in the US until settling in Wellington, Texas, where he got married and perfected many skills, including engineering, farming, mechanic work, constru

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palmetto Publishing
• Release date: Oct 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781638379386

Sandra (Westlake Smith) Ketchum

Sandra Ketchum was born and raised in Wellington, a small town in the Panhandle of Texas. She married and moved to Wichita Falls, Texas where she and her husband were both students at Midwestern State University. She graduated with a degree in English. They had three children, Twila, Lanny and Melanie. She retired as Assistant to the Director of Athletics at Midwestern State University after 31 years with the TRS. She and her husband, Jerry Whatley, have been married 38 years. She is devoted to her family and friends, including nine grandchildren and fifteen great-grandchildren.Sandra has been active in the First Christian Churches all her life. She has enjoyed square dancing for fifty-two years, and is an ardent scrapbooker and bridge player.

Book preview

Chapter 1

My daddy’s father was Welling Pugh Westlake, his grandfather was Cyrus Westlake, and his great-grandfather was Thomas Westlake of Ohio. Thomas and his wife, Nancy, had three boys, but the marriage was not a harmonious one, and they divorced. Thomas took the older two boys when they parted, but Nancy insisted upon keeping the baby, Cyrus. However, in time Thomas stole Cyrus from Nancy’s porch and moved with the three boys to Pettis County, Missouri. There Thomas eventually married a widowed neighbor lady who also had children. Some twenty or so years thereafter, Cyrus married his stepsister, Lou, and they, along with his direct descendants, moved to the state of Oklahoma, which was still Indian Territory.

Cyrus’s son and our grandfather, Welling Pugh, was not content in Oklahoma, and he and his wife, Ellen Priscilla, moved to Gainesville, Texas, where they raised their five children, three boys and two girls. One of the girls was named Ima, after Texas Governor Hogg’s daughter, Ima Hogg; the other was Goldie. Daddy’s oldest brother Tillman was, among other things, a naturalist and a writer. He completed his first book when he was thirty, had it accepted and returned to him for corrections when the family home burned to the ground, Tillman’s book inside. Tillman’s life turned tragic after the fire, and he was never able to recover. The other brother, much younger than Daddy, was Noble, who built a successful business called Noble’s Body Shop in Des Moines, Iowa. Against my Daddy’s advice, he purchased a large tract of land in Arkansas and was a successful farmer until his barn, where a lot of large equipment was stored, also burned to the ground. Daddy’s favorite sibling was Ima, one of the dearest people I’ve ever known and the only relative we saw more than once or twice while growing up.

Daddy as a boy, already interested in guns

Daddy’s father, Welling Pugh Westlake, not unlike his grandfather, Cyrus, was a man small in stature but stout in nature and in ideas. He was a blacksmith who worked hard from dawn to dark shoeing horses and building or repairing equipment for others. He also had a small orchard and berry patch. Early on he recognized that his second son, my father, whom the family called Jack, could handle most any task with ease and precision. Consequently Jack was called upon to work in his father’s blacksmith shop whenever he wasn’t in school. My father’s ideas were equally stout, and because of the long hours and the quality of his work, he felt he should receive part of the payment his father received for the work. Mr. Westlake didn’t see it the same way, and my father’s resentment grew and festered.

One day a young man Ura knew to be a banker had brought in his new horse to be shod. Ura had seen the sleek, arrogant young man around town and had no use for him. The beautiful chestnut horse had been admired by all the young lads, but the banker brushed them aside haughtily and even spoke to Ura’s Dad as if he were his private servant. Already, at the young age of fourteen, Ura had grown to distrust bankers. Certainly, he thought, a man should be capable of caring for his own funds.

The job of shoeing the horse fell upon Ura, and though he was a slight young man, much smaller than most of his comrades, he was strong and agile and perfectly capable of handling the large animal. The chestnut, though, seemed to have his own share of haughtiness and was bent upon making the job as difficult as possible. Ura pulled the first hind leg up between his own legs and began carefully to trim the hoof until it was perfectly smooth. As he worked, the chestnut persisted in leaning back against Ura until Ura felt like he was having to hold up the horse as well as shoe him. It could not be said that Ura was of a patient sort, but he persevered until the shoe was perfectly in place. Never let it be said that he half did a job. He then moved over to the other back hoof and repeated the process. By this time the chestnut decided that if he was not to be allowed to lean upon the farrier, neither would he continue to help hold up his hoof. This meant that all the weight of holding up the horse’s leg was on Ura, and working on the hoof became backbreaking work. After several vain attempts to get the horse’s cooperation, Ura yelled angrily at the horse, Dammit, get off me! and at the same time swung the metal file into the horse’s flank. The horse started and snorted angrily, but Ura’s Dad wheeled around from his own work as if on signal, grabbed the file with one hand, and shoved Ura halfway across the shed in one swift move. Then he admonished Ura in an unrelenting tone. "Jack, don’t you ever let me see you mistreat an animal again; go on, get out