Family Stories

By James C. McMillan

Family stories are typically passed down by word of mouth, and thus over the generations much our family history is lost forever. This anthology collects letters and stories actually written down by various people so that future generations can read them and have some inkling of what people were like. Included in the anthology are stories of what it was like growing up in the 1930’s, 1950’s, and 1960’s. Also included are detailed stories of actual events that had significant impact on the individuals who wrote them done, including:
• taking a grandmother to church on a sled pulled by an ox
• a best friend killed in action during World War I
• a tragic car accident that left a man paralyzed
• a cattle round-up
• a father’s suicide

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jun 18, 2023
• ISBN: 9798823010368

James C. McMillan

James C. McMillan is a retired Chemical Engineer. He and his wife of 50 years raised three daughters. Born and raised in East Texas, he had a keen interest in Texas history, but as there was little opportunity to make a living by studying history, other than teaching, he chose his second favorite subject, Chemistry, and earned a degree in Chemical Engineering from Lamar University. He joined an Engineering and Construction company and his career enabled him to travel the world, working on construction sites in remote locations in Kuwait, Algeria, Malaysia, Indonesia, Australia, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Iraq, India, and Peru. He also spent several years doing engineering design work in England and Scotland, where he pursued his interest in medieval history, resulting in several historical novels about the Viking Age.

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FAMILY

STORIES

JAMES C. McMILLAN

AuthorHouse™

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Bloomington, IN 47403

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© 2023 James C. McMillan. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or

transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse  06/15/2023

ISBN: 979-8-8230-1035-1 (sc)

ISBN: 979-8-8230-1036-8 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023911250

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

DEDICATION - By James C. McMillan

INTRODUCTION - By James C. McMillan

YEARLING BUCK - By William H. Moore Jr

THE JUMP SEAT - By William H. Moore Jr

THE OLD HEN WITH ONE CHICK

- By William H. Moore Jr

BENCHMARK - By William H. Moore Jr

GENE FLOW FOR LOVING HORSES

- By Nancy Ann McMillan

WORLD WAR I MYSTERY

- By James C. McMillan

GROWING UP IN THE 1930’S

- By Jennie Hutto McMillan

UNCLE LANE - By James C. McMillan

GROWING UP IN THE 1950’S

- By James C. McMillan

BIG THICKET ROUND-UP

- By James C. McMillan

DADDY SHOT HIMSELF

- By James C. McMillan

DEDICATION

BY JAMES C. MCMILLAN

This anthology of stories is dedicated to my beautiful blue-eyed, blond-haired daughter: Jill Lynn McMillan; born January 8, 1978; died March 18, 2014.

ONE YEAR ANNIVERSARY

OF JILL’S Death

Dear Jill,

We love you, we miss you, and we wish that you were still with us. I just wish that you had had a better life:

•I wish that you had not had that hearing loss that isolated you from everyone.

•I wish that you had not had that immune deficiency that caused you to get sick so easily, especially the last four months, which must have been unbearable for you.

•I wish that you had had better teachers, and not Mary Ann Gentry, who forced you out of the Deaf Education program at Lamar.

•I wish that you had not let petty, perceived slights drive a wedge between you and those who loved you: your sister Kara, your grandmother, and your Aunt Pam. That is what hurt me the most, because I loved all of you. I am at least grateful that you forgave Kara at the end.

•And most of all dear Jill, I pray every night that God will bless you in Heaven.

Good Bye Jill.

James C. McMillan

March 18, 2015

INTRODUCTION

BY JAMES C. MCMILLAN

This collection of stories is from various people who had significant influence upon my family, including my wife’s father, William H. Moore Jr, my mother, Jennie H. McMillan, and my Aunt Nancy Ann McMillan.

I never knew my father-in-law, William H. Moore Jr, but I wish that I had. He died of a massive heart attack, three years before I met his daughter, Suzanne, who became my wife. The morals and philosophy of life which he inspired in his daughters are a tribute to this loving family man. Bill Moore gave up an excellent job as a mechanical engineer working for General Motors in Detroit to take his family back to the farm on which he grew up. He wanted to ensure that his children acquired the same values of life that he had. Not many people are willing to give up the aura and pleasures of big city life to go back to the lonely, backbreaking work required on a farm.

After he had raised all his daughters to the age of accountability, the local county government forced Bill Moore off his beloved farm, the one on which he had been raised and on which he had raised his children. The excuse which the county government used was that they needed room for another industrial park. The forced retirement and relocation of this middle-aged family man hit him hard. He could tell that he did not have long to live, and in his last few weeks of life, Bill seemed obsessed with telling the stories of his youth. Using an old, reel-to-reel tape recorder which had been in his family for years, Bill recited his tales for posterity. Within a few months after Bill passed on, thieves broke into his home and stole the reel-to-reel tape recorder. Fortunately, the tape on which he had recorded his stories, thoughts, and philosophy was left behind. His oldest daughter took the tape and packed it away, moving to Texas. Then in 1982, she moved out of Texas, leaving behind the tape with her twin, Suzanne, my wife, and the one sister who had not heard her father tell his stories. Reel-to-reel tape players had become obsolete by this time and were no longer sold. In hopes that she might someday find such a tape player, Suzanne took the tape with her wherever she moved. Finally in 1990, in Perth, Western Australia, Suzanne found someone who owned an old style, reel-to-reel tape player and heard her father’s voice again, 20 years after his death.

As I listened to Bill Moore’s stories, I began to think: What a wonderful legacy this man whom I never knew left his family. This deserves to be published so that it can be shared with everyone. I had just begun investigating the publication of Bill Moore’s stories, when an event occurred which changed my life. My father shot himself. This event devastated me and my family. It was certainly a different type of legacy from what my father-in-law left his children. As a result of this event, I began writing stories of my own experiences, included in herein.

Aunt Nancy was my father’s youngest sister. She was in her teens, still living with her parents when I used to spend a week each summer with Maw Maw and Paw Paw. She spent a lot of time playing with me. I remember she would make paste from flour so that we could cut out cardboard soldiers and tank figures and past them with stands so that we could play war games with them. When we attended my Cousin Wilma Ruth Nix’s funeral together in Houston back in January 1997, I asked her for directions to the Bluewater Cemetery near Livingston, Tx, where Cousin Wilma was to be buried next to her parents (Gertrude and Dewy Nix) and grandparents (Robert and Nancy McMillan). Wilma was a Pentecostal missionary who had recently died in a car accident in Botswana. At the funeral service, I also told Aunt Nancy about my daughter, Kara’s love of horses. She mailed me the directions to Bluewater and included a letter to Kara describing tales of our relatives’ love of horses, which I have included herein.

I discovered my mother’s story, written in her own handwriting, after she had passed away in 2019. My mother was a saint who lived a meaningful life despite numerous hardships that would have broken others. She had written her story at the request of my sister, Pam, to document her life growing up in East Texas in the 1930’s. I found my mother’s story quite compelling and thought it appropriate to include her story in this anthology.

James C McMillan

YEARLING BUCK

BY WILLIAM H. MOORE JR

The early morning sounds were reassuring as I would lay only half awake. The first sound was a distant muffled rump, rump, rump as my father would pull the movable part of the furnace grating back and forth to shake out the ashes. The ashes had been carefully placed on top of the fire before bedtime the night before to bank it or slow down the burning so that it wouldn’t have to be rekindled in the morning. Shaking the grater awakened the embers and then there would be the scraping sound of the shovel against the concrete floor as he carefully scraped up and put a small amount of the fine parts of the coal on top of the then glowing embers. Next a resounding slam as he raised the shovel to close the furnace door. I knew from experience that he next would close the furnace damper and raise the draft to make the chimney start drawing, although this didn’t make enough noise to be heard from the bedroom. The next sounds came from the kitchen where he would lift the eyes of the coal stove, turn the gratings and push through with the poker any cinders that didn’t drop on their own accord. Into the firebox first went a crushed-up newspaper, then strips of wood and then coal from the coal sputter. For added insurance there usually was a small amount of kerosene, just enough to wet the coal and not enough for any excess to drip down to the ashes below. Kerosene couldn’t be used in the furnace unless it was completely cold for fear of an explosion. However, the cooking stove always cooled off between supper and breakfast. The next step in this sequence was for him to return to the basement and this time to throw five or six shovel-fulls of coal on the fire. It would be blazing well by that time and the extra coal would be enough to warm up the house without further attention. He would come back up to the kitchen, pour coffee in the percolator and put it on the stove, get into his hunting coat and I could hear the back screen door slam as he left. He practically always wore a hunting coat over his other clothes in the winter even though he rarely, if ever, went hunting and I think it was because it was water and wind resistant, fairly warm, and didn’t show dirt because of the khaki coloring. He would go to the barn and then down to the hog houses. The sows with young pigs were kept fastened up in individual pens and required watering as well as feeding. The dry sows were fed as a group and got limited feed. The fattening hogs got all they could eat and it was a matter of shoveling out all the corn they would clean up. My father always fed the sows and usually the fattening hogs himself. The cattle and horses were generally fed by the hired hands. I don’t know whether it was because he was fonder of hogs or whether it was because most of the farm income was from hogs. Anyway, he gave them his personalized attention. A few minutes after my father had left, I could hear my mother up stirring around. She might put the oatmeal on to cook in the double boiler and then get the sausage out to slice and start cooking. The sausage was homemade and had been stuffed into cloth bags about three inches in diameter and two feet long, I guess. We had killed hogs about three weeks before, so that the sausage still smelled really good to me. I thought it always got to smelling and perhaps even tasting a little strong before we finished it even though it was kept refrigerated and the outside of the bags were liberally coated with lard.

About the time the coffee started perking and the sausage sizzling, my mother would knock on the door cheerfully saying, Its time to get up. Come on, son. Rise and shine. She was real fond of that rise and shine part and it seems like she used it every morning. I slept on an antique, four-posted bed and the mattress was quite high from the floor, I would judge approximately twice as high as modern beds. It was high enough that a trundle or truckle bed could fit beneath it. In fact, during the first ten years or so of my life I had slept on the trundle bed that during the day was slipped back under this bed. My parents had the big bed at that time. I really don’t know the reason for the sleeping arrangement. I don’t recall being afraid of the dark and when I sometimes had my friend Jimmy over to spend the night, four was just too many for that small room. Many a spanking my father had given me because we woke him up during the night with our whispering. I was always the one to get the spanking and Jimmy did most of the crying, out of sympathy, I guess. Anyway, the bed was quite high; a stool came in handy when I first inherited it and my parents moved into the other bedroom leaving me it and the other furniture. There was another antique, four-posted bed in the room they moved to but I don’t believe it was quite so high. I know it didn’t have a trundle bed with it. My bed in addition to the normal sheets and blankets, had a comfort which was a quilted cover filled with down. I believe it was pink on one side and green on the other and covered with a slick, satin-like material. It was warm as toast, but you couldn’t thrash around too much or it might slide off. I had been sold on the healthfulness of plenty of fresh air so at night I would cut off the register in my room and leave both windows open. My father, thoughtfully, had left the screen up so no animal could climb in. You see, the room was on the ground floor.

This particular morning was on a Sunday in early December of 1933 or 1934, and I was just laying there half asleep when I heard my mother tell me to rise and shine. It was unusually cold as I cautiously poked my head out from under the covers and saw at a glance that it had snowed during the night and that a dazzling blanket of white covered everything outside. Some had even sifted through and was on the windowsill and down on the floor of the room. The first snow of the season was always exciting to me and so I kind of all-in-one motion pulled down the windows so hard that the counter weights clanged against the frames, turned the hot air register on with my bare toe, scooped up my clothes from the chair where I had laid them the night before and headed for the bathroom where I knew it was warm. Since I was too young to shave, it didn’t take long to splash water on my face, comb my hair and put on my clothes. My clothes were ice cold, having been in my room all night, but by standing over the register as I put them on, it wasn’t so bad. By the time I had gotten to the table, my father had already finished feeding the animals and was ready for breakfast too. We had grapefruit, oatmeal, homemade sausages, and eggs from our own chickens. They were a lot different in looks and taste from the kind available in the stores today. The yokes were a deep orange rather than a pale yellow and there was a much stronger and, I think a better taste. Probably the fact that they were fertile (we kept several roosters) had something to do with it. Also, a good part of the food the chickens ate they found for themselves. We supplied them with plenty of corn, but their protein requirements came from bugs and worms and whatever else they could scratch up. They weren’t confined and I suspect the wide variety of their diet accounted for more flavorful eggs and also chicken meat.

We generally ate breakfast in the kitchen during the winter because the dining room was slow to warm up. Later, when we got a stoker for the furnace, the whole house stayed warm so we could eat in the dining room. I was especially fond of oatmeal swimming in sugar and cream. The cream we had was really thick, thicker than whipping cream. It wouldn’t pour and had to be spooned out. In those days we hadn’t heard that cream contained cholesterol and was bad for you. I knew it was fattening, but I got lots of exercise and didn’t have a weight problem. The coffee smelled awfully good to me in those days. I didn’t drink it, only my father did, but I really enjoyed its smell as it percolated. The coffee made today is probably just as good, but my sense of smell isn’t nearly so acute. Grownups tend to forget how good some things taste and smell to a child and how terribly unpleasant things like medicine and Limburger cheese could taste and smell.

My father announced that the roads were too slick, and we wouldn’t try to drive to Sunday School and Church that day. Ordinarily, snow wouldn’t have kept us home because we had tire chains. It must have been that there was ice under the snow. Being Sunday, there had been no traffic on the roads to break up the ice. The Church we attended was in town some distance away. I didn’t mind going to Sunday School, and it wasn’t often that we missed. Church, however, was a bit dull and I am sure that I was pleased with the idea of having the whole day to do what I wanted to do. It was very exciting and appealing, like having two Saturdays. I could make a snowman or go sledding with my old flexible flyer which an uncle had abandoned, or go out tracking rabbits with my dog. I couldn’t shoot any rabbits since it was Sunday, but my shepherd could catch one if I ran one out from under a brush pile somewhere. Any or all of these things and more too, I could do on this free Sunday.

Full of breakfast, feeling content and anticipating an exciting day, I changed back into everyday clothes and started down to the barn. I had to check on my riding horse, Dixie, and my pet yearling calf, Buck, to see that they were fed and watered. The barn wasn’t far, maybe the distance of a city block or so. It was a calm day, everything was real still, you know how it is after a snow, and too, it was on a Sunday morning so that the plants and factories nearby were closed. Not even the train from town came out on Sunday. There was no breeze, so the air didn’t feel at all cold and there was no sound except the swishing of my corduroy pants. Everything looked clean and white and like a scene appropriate for a Christmas card.

In the midst of all this stillness, the bell suddenly started ringing in the bell tower of the neighborhood church; ding-ding, pause, then ding-ding. It wasn’t far away, about a quarter mile, I guess, but it sounded much closer. You know how sound carries so well when it’s cold and still. Anyway, it was usually loud, almost startling. I kept walking but the bell started me thinking that church was being held that day in the country and that some people would go and walk if there was no other way to get to Church.

The only one in our family who went to that church was my grandmother, a little lady in her middle to late seventies. Her house was just down the street from us, not more than 800 yards. I knew she couldn’t walk and that, while she had a car and chauffeur at her disposal, he wouldn’t be any braver than my father when it came to driving on snowy roads. She went to Church every Sunday even though no one had gone with her since her sister had died some year or so previously. At one time the whole family, she, my grandfather, and their children (my mother, uncles, and aunts) all went. My grandfather had died some fifteen or twenty years ago and her children since then had stopped going (with the exception of my mother), just why I never knew. My parents went to a larger church in town of the same denomination, but I don’t recall that my aunts or uncles went to any church at all. One cousin went to Sunday School with us at our church. I wouldn’t say they were atheists; their views on religion were never discussed in my presence. The fact that they didn’t care enough about church to attend was a puzzle to me, I’m sure. After all, they were intelligent people, had grown up exposed to religious teaching, then something had caused them to turn away. One aunt did admit to me that she was strongly opposed to foreign missions. In her opinion changing native peoples away from their traditional concepts of God and insisting or pressuring them to believe as we believe was a mistake.

Now my grandmother wasn’t the type of person who was interested in setting records in church attendance, you know, like hadn’t missed a single service in ten or twenty years. She always went when she could, and I don’t remember her being sick much. I wouldn’t go so far as to say she had never been sick a day in her life, but I don’t remember ever seeing her in bed during daylight hours.

Teachers used to keep track of kids in Sunday School. They put a gold star (you know, a little one with stickmen on the back) next to each one’s name when he attended. The adults weren’t watched so closely. It wasn’t really a big thing that she attend that particular day, I don’t suppose, to anyone else including her, but to me for some unknown reason it was. She and I were pretty close as sometimes the very old and the young are. She had plenty of time to listen to my ideas about things and sometimes I would memorize Bible verses for her. Of course, she gave me a dime when I got them down pat.

The idea suddenly occurred to me that I could take her to Church. The idea seemed so good that I didn’t stop to examine it. I could hook my steer, Buck, up to a small homemade sled I had and take her to Church on it. A splendid idea, she would appreciate it. Without me she wouldn’t get to Church that Sunday. She had done so many things for me in the past; this would be an opportunity to do something for her.

Buck had never done much work, but I had hooked him to this sled before and had him pull it on the grass and dirt lightly loaded just with me riding on it, but never before on snow. In fact, this was the first snow we had had since he was large enough to wear our smallest horse’s harness. Queen’s harness fit him pretty well considering that a horse’s neck has a different shape than a steer’s. I had made a bridle out of a horse’s bits and a rope going over his neck just behind the ears. A horse’s bridle wouldn’t work because it couldn’t go on over his horns. I ran lines up to the bit in his mouth. I hadn’t taught him to Gee and Haw so I had to use lines for turning and stopping him. Chains ran from the reins at the collar back to an evener or single tree and from the center of this back to the sled. There were had no shafts to it like a one-horse sleigh would have; in fact, there was nothing to keep the sled from sliding up against Buck’s heels. Pulling it around without the snow was no problem, but, with the snow and some fairly steep grades to go down, it could easily happen. I had so much confidence in Buck’s tractability that I just couldn’t imagine him running off or causing anyone to get hurt. He had never jumped or become agitated before no matter what the circumstances. I was so sure of him that the thought of this little trip being risky didn’t enter my mind.

I drove Buck over to my grandmother’s house and, leaving him and the sled in the driveway beside the house, went in and announced to her that I would take her to church. I know I must have had a big pleased-with-myself look on my face when I went in to tell her. Her face didn’t show her emotions as mine did; she got up rather stiffly and went over to a window to get a closer look at Buck and the sled. I’m not sure that she had ever seen Buck before then and the thoughts which must have passed through her mind that half minute or so as she stood at the window saying nothing I would very much like to know. She hated to disappoint me, of that I am sure. I don’t know how much consideration she gave to the ridiculous picture we would make: a boy, a calf and (the boy’s) grandmother, very old, very dignified looking, dressed all in black going to a church on a sled. I don’t believe this