To Old Houston, Texas
Back When When I was a kid.
The Old Houston City Hall And Market (1930's)
The Big Ones Were The Great Depression
of the 1930's and WW II of the 1940's.
"The Good Ol' Days"
" I had never seen so many bare backsides
in my whole 12 or 13 years, not to
mention seeing everything else"
("Swimming Naked")
The Houston Independent School District used to have a vocational school downtown in the 1940's where high school students could attend regular school a half day and a vocational class a half day where they were supposed to learn a trade. . The classes was taught in the old Taylor school building, fifteen blocks away from Sam Houston High School, back over behind the Allen Center area where I 45 changes directions from north and south to east and west. My buddy, Billy and I started taking a class in radio (theory and repair) in the last semester of our junior year. Radio, that's like television without the picture We went to Sam Houston the first half of the day, then walked that fifteen blocks over to Taylor School for the last half of the school day.
I know, this sounds like one of those "I walked 10 miles through the snow barefoot to go to school" stories doesn't it.
Anyway, when we were going to start the first day, of the second semester at Radio Class, it was raining in down town Houston. We had made it down 3 blocks down Capitol Street to Main Street when it started raining cats and dogs. Well, of course no one could expect us to walk another 12 blocks in a rain like that so we decided to wait out the rain in the Uptown Theater until it was time to go home. The next day it was raining pretty hard again so we killed time in the Penny Arcade until time to go home. On the third day we realized we were in trouble and were to scared to go to the radio class. After a couple of weeks we gave up and went to the school office at Sam Houston to quit school rather then be expelled.
They insisted that we had to talk to the principal. He was pretty upset that we were going to quit school after so many years and he demanded to know why we were quitting. After we broke down and explained what we had done and how we didn't want being expelled against our records he seemed relieved. Against everything we could dream up, he was understanding and counseled us, explaining an alternative plan where we didn't have to quit school. He allowed us to just switch over to the work half day program and we could continue going to school in the mornings. We discovered that symbols of authority like principals could be real people underneath their authoritarian exterior if given the chance. I also learned the valuable lesson that it is better to stand up and face your problems rather then hide and face hours and hours of apprehension and anguish knowing your indiscretion would surface eventually.
Billy and I both found part time jobs at Shudde Brothers Hat Factory and finished out that semester in school. Then when summer vacation came we started working full time at the hat shop. By the time school started in the fall, we were to used to having money in our pockets and decided to keep working full time and go back to school in the Sam Houston Adult School at night to earn our high school diplomas. Then I met Nellie that fall and we were married the next summer. At least I had enough sense to continue going to night school until I earned enough credits to graduate.
As a little side note, having a good felt hat renovated at Shudde Bros. at that time would cost about $3.50. The last time I checked, renovating the same hat now would cost about $35.00
As some of you know I write a bi-weekly 1,000 word column called "Surviving The Big Ones" (the depression and WW II) with this type of story for 3 small town weekly newspapers north of Houston, the Humble Observer, the Kingwood Observer and the East Montgomery Observer. The reason I mention it is because this story was my 100th, column of memories that I have written for these newspaper. Since the columns are close to one thousand word each, that's getting pretty close to 100,000 words and doesn't even count 34 columns I had written earlier for the "Waller County News Citizen".
What does this have to do with anything, right? Just this, my old English teacher, caught me in the hall at Sam Houston High School the last day of the semester, 55 years or so ago and said, "John, I passed you this time, but please don't ever tell anyone who your English teacher was." I realize that my grammar is a little shaky sometime and my punctuation isn't always exactly proper, but maybe the huge volume written would make up for the little faults and Mrs. Hugg wouldn't mind me using her name now.
I had never seen so many bare backsides in my whole 12 or 13 years, not to mention seeing everything else. Their were about 25 or 30 naked boys lined up along the south side of the swimming pool. Of course the pool was heated and enclosed. Actually, the swimming pool was in the basement, underneath the gymnasium at the Stonewall Jackson Junior High School on Polk Street in Houston's old east end.
That's right, naked, the boy's who took the swimming class instead of the regular physical education classes did not wear bathing suits. The boy's gym class had the use of the pool for 9 weeks each school year and then the girls gym class had the pool for the other 9 weeks. Of course the girls wore bathing suits. Somehow that should have been a great case for a sexual discrimination lawsuit. But back then, in 1940 we didn't know what sexual discrimination was. But then after thinking about nudity, why not, we showered in the nude every day after the gym class.
Anyhow, that's the way city boys learned to swim. We would get in the water and hold on to the side of the pool while we kicked our feet during the class for a couple of days. Then we practiced breath control for a couple of days. You know holding your face in the water for 20 or 30 seconds. Then turning your head to the side enough to get your mouth, gasp a fresh breath and bury your face in the water while exhaling. The next couple of days were spent with our toes hooked in the hand rail. We had to do the crawl with our arms and every time your left arm came back, you quickly turned your head and grabbed a breath of air. After that we did the whole thing at one time without touching the handrail and "Walleye"(as the French say), we were swimming.
After that, when I used to spend the biggest part of my summers in Montgomery, Texas I used my newly learned ability swimming in Town Creek. A few of us boys would walk north of town about a half mile to Berkley's pasture. There, we slip through the fence and walk a ways back through the trees to a big wide swimming hole in the creek. Swimming there was in the nude also. In fact we would start running the last block or so to see who would be the first one in the creek. That's where I learned the secrets of undressing while running.
The Town Creek swimming didn't last to long though after grandma found out about it. I was always careful to wait until my hair dried before I went back to the house. We went down one day after a big rain and the creek was running bank full. Our swimming hole was in a bend in the creek. That's why it was washed out so much bigger then the main creek. That day the water was moving pretty fast and in fact was causing a small whirlpool in the middle. Of course that didn't slow us down very much and soon we were swimming in a whirlpool bath way before they were invented. Mr. Berkley came riding his horse through the woods and told us we had to get out of the creek until after the water went down. He may have blabbed about us. Anyway after grandma found out about us swimming in the creek she said no more. It didn't take long for me to decide that since grandma lived on the southwest side of town and the creek was on the northeast side she would never know if I went with the boys another time. I didn't know that she had talked to Mrs. Berkley in the meantime and grandma had ask her to call if I went down the road in front of her house. Mrs. Berkley's house was the last one on the road to Town Creek. Then when old blabbermouth called grandma I was pretty much forbidden to go to the northwest side of town from then on.
Another fun place to swim in the summer for a couple of years was a pond way back in the woods east of Lockwood Drive a couple of blocks north of Buffalo Bayou. It must have been an acre or two in area and made a fine ol' swimming hole. It was far enough back in the woods that the naked rear ends didn't shock anyone. It only lasted a couple of years. We went out the third summer and it was level full of dirt. The bayou had been dredged out during the year and the mud was pumped into our swimming hole to let the water evaporate.
The last time I swam in a natural water hole was after I was grown and married. Nellie and I went out to Cypress Creek, just east of Aldine Westfield Road, with another married couple. That was before the Flood Control District dredged it out and created a big ditch out of a nice stream. Oh yes, we didn't have bathing suits that time either. However, we were wearing old blue jeans and shirts.
We also swam in Spring Creek at Wiley Fussel Drive. Strangely enough we wore bathing suits out there, but then it was a public area where we had to pay to swim there. Now that place is a great big ditch, courtesy of the Harris County Flood Control District again. The funny thing is that a flood in that area a couple of years ago was the worse they ever had. The Harris County Flood Control District is not their friend.
Of course I'm not sure where I got my first haircut or when. The earliest one I can remember was when uncle Buster took me over to one of my great uncle Milam's house here in Pine Island. I'm sure it wasn't my first one however, because I do remember how surprised I was at the hand operated clippers he used. I guess I was a city boy and used to the hum of electric clippers.
Growing up, I usually had my hair cut at Gilbert's barber shop on Harrisburg Boulevard. It was in the middle of the block west of Sampson Street and across the street from Lubbock Elementary School where I went to school. The main reason I went to Gilbert's shop was because Dad was a pharmacist at the Lubbock Drug Store at the corner east of Gilbert's shop and dad always got his hair cut there. They were all in the same building separated by Bickley's Radio Shop and a small Barqs Root Beer bottling plant.
I really felt big at first when Gilbert put the board across the arms of the big black leather and chrome barber chair and I sat up almost as tall as him. Probably the thing that made me feel the biggest of all was when I finally got old enough to go to the shop without my mother in tow. Of course the older I got, the more I wanted to sit in the chair without the board, like an adult.
After I was seated Gilbert would swirl out the big white cape and fasten it around my neck. Then he would snip snip snip along the skinny black comb with the long sharp pointed barber scissors. He would finish with the electric clippers, trimming here and there. I always felt cheated because he didn't lather my neck and start stropping the straight razor. Of course the neck shave came soon enough and it wasn't half as much fun as I thought.
After he finished trimming he would sprinkle hair tonic all over my hair and massage it in hard enough that I thought he was trying to rub the hair off. After a careful combing he would sprinkle talcum into the long hared brush and dust the hair off my neck. Then he would take out the safety pin and whip the cape off with a flourish. After he shook the cape and swept the hair off me with a whisk broom and tell me to get up. I would give him the coins mom gave me and Gilbert would say, "Thank you'" and give me a penny candy in return. The 5 block walk home was always accompanied by a frantic attempt to get the little tiny bits of hair out from under my collar.
I tried a lot of barber shops over the years that followed until youngest daughter, Becky, earned her cosmetology license just before she graduated from Nemitz High School. Nellie and I took her to Austin for a couple of days so she could take the exam for her state license. Nellie was there for her and served as her model during the tests. I was lucky and Valerie (Becky's sister) and I roamed the mall and did a little sight seeing while the testing was going on.
After she got her license and I gained a little confidence, my hair cuts were done in the comfort of my own home. I figured that if the high school principal and the assistant principal trusted her every couple of weeks I would too. Best of all, my hair cuts were free unless of course you figure in the thousands and thousands of dollars it takes to raise a daughter to adulthood. Oh well, I guess it was worth it, because now she cuts my hair free every 6 months or so, whether it needs it or not.
IV. The Five And Dime Stores
Mom and I always begin a shopping day by dressing up and walking over to Harrisburg Boulevard to catch the street car and ride downtown to Main Street. I was between 5 and 10 years old during those years when she took me with her. Shopping usually started in the 600 block of Main street in downtown Houston. That's where the W. T. Grant and the Woolworth stores were located. The Kress store was across Capitol street on the opposite corner in the 700 block. Between those three stores, mom and I would spend three or four hours wandering up one aisle and down another looking at the huge assortment of items for sale. We didn't have much money to spend, dad was working as a policeman for the City of Houston and cities have never been known for paying high salaries, but it was fun looking at the multitude of items for sale. Five and Dime stores didn't put every thing on shelves and hang items on racks like they do at the local Wal-Mart. Everything was put on top of the counters that were divided into bins with strips of glass. There would be cosmetics, fingernail polishes, plates, glassware. little pots of ivy and tiny rose bushes a couple of inches high, toy cars, big little books, women's hose, sewing notions and patterns and almost any other small items you might find in anyone's home.
The layout of Grant's store was very unusual as it was built in the shape of an L. The main entrance was in the middle of the block on Main street and the store went half way through the block, then made a sharp right turn and came out at the Capitol avenue entrance in the middle of the block. Actually the store surrounded the Woolworth store on two sides. Woolworth's store fronted on Main and had a side entrance on Capitol Avenue. All three of these downtown store were actually twice as big as they appeared at first glance because they had full basements with a large part of the store in the basement. My favorite place was the Kress store's basement. It was always darker and cooler, but the main reason was that the toy department and the lunch counter were located in the basement. I could almost talk mom into buying a "Big Little" book or a "Dinky Toy" toy car, but the "piece de resistance" (as we used to say in France) was the lunch counter or luncheonette as it was called back then. I would sit up on the stool you could spin around on while mom ordered 2 ham and cheese sandwiches and 2 cokes. The sandwiches were made on toast and cut into 4 little triangles and placed on a plate with a pile of potato chips in the center. The cokes were in a real glass with crushed ice and furnished with 2 straws for each one. Boy howdy, that was a major high point in a young guy's experiences of eating out.. It was right up there with eating a bar-b-que sandwich at one of the "Pig Stand" drive inns. One of the fascinations of eating in the Kress luncheonette was the fact that the basement actually extended out under the sidewalk to the curb line. In those days the sidewalk had a square section every couple of feet that was about 4 foot across and tiled with 4 inch squares of very thick glass. If you looked up while you were sitting at the counter, you see the soles of people's shoes through the glass as they walked down the sidewalk. Now before someone starts saying, "Well, I never," that was all you could see, just the outlines of the shoes.
All there of those stores were still there when Nellie and I married in 1949 and visiting them was a Saturday afternoon ritual with us. I would get off work at 1:00 PM and Nellie would ride the bus downtown to meet me. After standing in line to get my pay envelope with the cash inside that I had earned that week we would head for downtown. First we would walk up and down he aisles in the five and dime stores for a couple of hours, before walking on down Main Street to go to one of the movies. It was usually the Kirby, but sometime it was the Lowes State or Majestic or the Metropolitan. After the movie, we would walk back to Prices Caf� at Prairie and Caroline streets for a bar-b-que sandwich and an order of potato salad, then catch the bus home. Nellie enjoyed going to Prices better then anything. Particularly after she discovered a former love of my life worked there. I think she just liked to watch me squirm in the booth.
V. Old Toys Back Then
I was all rared back in my recliner the other day and happened to pick up a Yahoo magazine. As I thumbed through the magazine one particular pictures jumped out at me. It was a picture of an antique toy store owner standing behind a showcase full of antique toys. Actually it was an advertisement for E-bay, the online auction company and this dealer was saying how much better his business was since he started putting his antique toys for sale on the E-bay auction.
There it was, laying on top of the showcase, my 1930's era Buck Rodgers Ray Gun. Like people say about life passing before your eyes, the memories appeared in front of mine. It was a black stamped steel futuristic looking pistol with fins around the barrel just like the one Buck Rogers used in the Sunday funny papers to evaporate any alien that dared attack his rocket ship or the planet Earth.
But more then just a death ray gun it was also a film strip projector. The side of the pistol opened and there was a place for a flash light battery in the handle. In the upper part there was a place for an endless 8 mm film strip about 2 inches long. There was a flash light bulb behind the front of the strip and a lens in the end of the gun barrel. When you pulled the trigger, the film would advance one frame, the bulb would light up and a picture would be projected on the wall if the room was dark enough. I could get in the closet and watch a slide show of the science fiction adventures of Buck Rogers. If I remember correctly, three film strips came with the ray gun and you could buy additional film strips at stores like Grants, Woolworth's or Kress.
Another fun toy was the two pot metal die cast rocket ships about five or six inches long. They had a tiny pulley on top at each end. You would run a long string through the pulleys and tie one end to a post, tree or a door knob and the other end to a lower point. Then you could take the rocket ship up to the high end and release it. In a kid's eyes the rocket ship wads flying through space as it slid down the string. Our minds eye had to provide the exhaust trail and the death rays shooting toward the enemy rockets.
Some of my other favorites were the "Dinky Toys" They were "pot metal" cars and trucks. They were about four inches long, just the right size for a youngster to push along streets and highway made by dragging a board two or three inches wide through the dirt or crushed oyster shell driveways. Little blocks of two by four made great buildings along the dirt highways. The advantage to using blocks, was that they represented whatever kind of house or store you wanted.
Dinky Toy cars and trucks were die cast metal reproductions of trucks and automobiles that were made in England. They were the predecessors of, but they were not as detailed as the "Match Box" and "Hot Wheels" model vehicles that came out later.
Not exactly a toy, but some of my main favorites were the "Big Little Books". Now before you tell me that they were named Little Big Books, you are wrong. Yes, there were some Little Big Books, but they came out later.
The "Big Little Books" were published by the Whitman Publishing Company. In looks they were about the size of a four-inch block sawed off the end of a two-by-four. Although there were numerous variations in outside dimensions and in number of pages, most were 3 5/8" x 4 1/2" x 1 1/2" in size and 432 pages in length. One thing that made "Big Little Books" different was a captioned picture opposite each page of text. The books originally sold for a dime, but were later raised to15�.
The Adventures of Dick Tracy, was the first Big Little Book. It came out just before Christmas in 1932 and production continued for fifty years.. Big Little Books came out one year before the first true comic book and with a picture across from every page of text they actually the forerunner of comics.
Many children learned to read and have an appreciation for all books because of their experiences with Big Little Books. Most of the stories in those for the books were taken mostly from radio programs, comic strips, and motion pictures. Titles included Dick Tracy, Little Orphan Annie, Mickey Mouse, Roy Rodgers, Donald Duck and many others.
VI. Even More Toys Back Then
I begin remembering some of the more expensive, more complex toys I had while growing up. I guess the major one was my bicycle. It was about the only major present I every received that wasn't a Christmas gift. Dad and mom gave me a brand new shinny blue "Ace" brand bicycle. It was about as plain a model as you could get. You know, no lights, no horn or tank between the two top bars, no luggage rack or knee action front fork. But, it was the prettiest bicycle I ever saw when dad brought it home that summer. It was a reward for graduating from elementary school to junior high school. Besides, on top of that, I was an only child until I was almost 17 and the bicycle was all mine.
I've heard Nellie say many times that when they got their first bicycle she had to share it with two sisters. That meant that the torment of waiting while the other two had their turn almost overpowered the enjoyment of riding when her turn finally came. Of course their were times when all three girls rode it at the same time with one sitting on the seat peddling, one sitting on the back fender and one sitting on the handle bars.
Yeah I know, digressing again. I guess one of the toys I liked best was the Erector Set. It was a box full of small size metal plates, different length girders, wheels and pulleys along with screws, nuts and rods. If I remember correctly there were sets in about four different price ranges. The more expensive the set, the more parts you got and the more elaborate things you could create. A book came with the set that had pictures and directions for many things, including trucks, Ferris wheels, oil derricks that you could make with that set. The most expensive set even included an electric motor to run things like the Ferris wheel.
The Tinker Toy set was similar except that the parts were made of wood There was a whole bunch of wooden dowels of different lengths and some wooden wheels with a hole through the center and holes spaced around the rim. The wheels also had a groove cut around the rim so they could also be used as a pulley. You could tie a piece of string around a couple of wheels and use it as a belt to run your construction projects such as a windmill.
One year I got a chemistry set for Christmas. I guess it was a nice present, but it sure was boring. In fact it was one present that got me chewed out pretty bad sometime after Christmas. I had to write a three page paper with pen and ink for English and my time for writing was almost up. It was Sunday evening and the paper had to be turned in on Monday morning. I remember dad saying, "Get started now and get it done." before he left the room.
As I sat there trying to figure out how to start the dad blame thing, I got to thinking about how I was bound to mess up somehow while writing in ink. Pencil would have been all right because they had erasers to change mistakes, but I am talking about liquid ink in a little glass bottle. You wrote with a pen staff (a little pencil sized stick with a steel point you dipped into the ink to write) ball-points hadn't been invented yet.
Then an idea popped into my head. I remembered seeing a formula in the chemistry set instruction book to make an ink eradicator that would make any ink mess up disappear from the paper. That would solve my problem and save hours of time rewriting a page each time I messed up. I was just as happy as a lark, mixing the ink eradicator in a test tube, when dad came back in the room. I don't remember exactly what dad said as he stood over me, but I do remember that it was about as close as I ever came to having my backside warmed on a Sunday evening. And, although the words didn't exactly flow onto the paper that that night, I was definitely inspired to finish writing the paper without any other interruptions.
VII. Pete Was A Real Urban Cowboy
You know, the neighborhood around Settegast Park in the 1930's was very typical of a 25 or 30 year old big city neighborhood. It was populated by about one half older people who were home owners and one half younger couples who rented houses where the older owners had already moved on. I would say most of the neighborhood would have been considered middle class. The reason I am explaining this is so you can understand how bizarre it was to hear a cow mooing in our neighborhood.
Every morning before school, it was Pete's job to lead his family's cow to one of the nearby vacant lots, drive an iron stake in the ground in the center of the lot and tie the cow's rope to the stake. Then, in the evenings it was his job to bring the cow home to be milked and kept in her stall all night and gather the eggs.
I hesitate to make the comparison, but it's OK because I know Pete never reads this newspaper. Now days, Pete and his family would be considered the Jed Clampets, of Settegast Park. Not in smarts of course, but in the fact that they brought the country with them when they moved to the city. With a big garden and chickens in the backyard and the old Jersey cow staked out nearby they always had fresh milk, butter, vegetables, eggs and sometime a fried or baked chicken when food was scarce during W.W. II.
I've talked about Buck and Billy and myself from the old neighborhood, but never wrote much about Pete. We 4 boys were the 4 musketeers of Settegast Park. Of course we were buddies with a lot of other guys too, but we four were the brothers we never had. Billy was an only child, Pete had 2 sisters, Buck had a couple of brothers, but they were grown and I was an only child until I was 17. That way we got to choose our own "brothers".
The first time I ever saw Pete, we were about 11 or 12 years old. He was walking down the sidewalk leaning to one side with his little sister sitting astride his opposite hip. I hadn't every seen a boy with a little girl on his hip, so naturally I was curious and said, "Hi." It turned out that his mother and dad had just rented a room from Mrs. Wright, who had the big two story house which was the third house west of us.
Pete quickly filled me in with the information that his dad worked for the railroad in the big roundhouse about 6 blocks west of the park and just north of the old Harrisburg Blvd. Underpass at Dowling Street. They had just moved to Houston from Grapeland (up near Palestine) where his family had given up trying to scratch a living from a little East Texas red dirt farm. Since I was the sophisticated city boy, I felt that it was my duty to help the poor country boy fit in and we became lifelong friends.
When he told me they had rented a house and were moving, I was a little upset until I discovered they were only moving a block east of us and into a house that my great aunt and uncle had been rented for awhile. That was OK because I knew the house better then they did and I would feel comfortable there.
Besides, the house was next door to the house that Billy's parents rented and I could introduce Pete and Billy. Billy and I had met previously when we showed up at J.D. and Wilbert Rubenstein's house, at the same time, with both of us carrying a cardboard box of funny books to swap. Hey, I don't care if you call them comic books, but to us they were funny books.
Billy's mom and dad both worked all day, so his house made a good place for the four of us to gather to play games in the winter and plan what we were going to do in the summer. I've mentioned a while back about working at the Boulevard Food Market stocking shelves one summer to make enough money to buy a clarinet so I could be in the band at Sam Houston High School that fall. Well Pete worked there at the same time, except he worked in the vegetable department. The store was really three stores in one. The Goldbergs owned the building and the grocery section, but the meat market and the vegetable department was leased out to other people. So even though we worked close enough to say hello all day, we really didn't work for the same people and if we tried to talk a few minutes, either his boss raised cane with him or my boss raised cane with me.
Pete and I kept in touch after he moved to the wild boonies of Aldine (Near the present Aldine High School) and in the 1940's that was a long way out in the country. That was before I 45 had even been dreamed of and Airline Drive was Highway 75 to Dallas. He and Mary, his girlfriend, set me up with a blind date with Mary's friend Nellie. I guess Pete and I did pretty good. Pete and Mary were together until she died last year and Nellie and I celebrated our fifty second anniversary this July(2001).
VIII. The Fem Fatale Of Settegast Park
I picked up a book called "Nemesis" by Isaac Asimov at the library the other day. When I started to read it last night one of the first characters in the book was a 15 year old girl named Marlene.
Things like that often happen to me. Nellie was ragging on me the day before yesterday about an old Christmas card, she had found that was addressed to me, from about 1942 (59 years ago in 2001). After mama died, we found drawer after drawer after box after box of things she had been saving for about a 100 years and the card was in some of it. Yeah sure, you are thinking, this guy really stretches it. Come by the house sometime and I'll show you some of my great grandmother's phone bills and canceled checks. from 1900.
Anyhow, the Christmas card was from a girl named Marlene. While laying there in the dark last night, before I went to sleep, I tried my best to remember what Marlene looked like.
Marlene must have been around 13 years old and I was about 14 or 15 the year she sent me that Christmas card. She lived in our old Settegast Park neighborhood, on the street behind me. I can't really remember her face very well, but I guess she must have been cute, because a lot of teen age males were seen near her house for a brief period of time. The main thing I really remember about Marlene was her skinny little girl body seemed to blossom over night. Well at least some of it did. The upper parts of Marlene's body appeared to be about 5 or 6 years more mature then a 12 or 13 year old girl's body should have been.
Like most young girls in the 1940's Marlene had a passion for playing with her jump rope. Jumping rope however was Marlene's downfall as a fem fatale. After jumping rope for a while, the socks or toilet paper or whatever would be bounced down and her chest appeared somewhat lop sided. I kinda figure that was why most of the boys started going back to the park to play softball in the afternoons.
IX. Adventures In Scouting
A few of the boys living around Settegast Park about the same time got interested in the Boy Scouts of America. I was a tenderfoot the whole time. The advanced ranks didn't interest me very much. I was in it for the fun things. Studying the manual for the advanced ranks was just about as bad as studying textbooks for school.
It was the fun things like camping that I enjoyed so much. Take the time we had an overnighter on the banks of Buffalo Bayou. We had our scout meetings in an old shop type building about the size of a 4 car garage behind the National Supply Company out on Navigation Boulevard. The building was about a quarter of a mile back behind the main building near the bayou and we set up the tent near the building.
Each one of us brought his own food. I remember mama taking me to Weingartens grocery store that Saturday morning. I bought a loaf of Fair Maid bread, a bag of Dentler potato chips, some bologna and a little cardboard carton of deli potato salad. Late that evening we fixed our supper and ate. The potato salad was hot but still tasted good. It must have been about 9 PM or so when I started throwing up with some pretty violent heaves. I guess we hadn't heard of food poisoning at that age.
We finally got settled down under our blankets on our folding canvas cots about 10:00 O'clock. It was about midnight when the thunder storm hit and blew the tent down. We used the tent as a huge blanket and held it down across our cots for the rest of the night as we dozed.
Another camping trip that stands out in my memory was the 3 day camping trip at the San Jacinto Battleground on San Jacinto Day weekend. No potato salad that time, I had learned my lesson. We got together and bought things like carrots, potatoes and some stew meat, cereal and powered milk and a few canned things. Man. we had it together this time. Oh yes, I almost forgot, the scoutmaster couldn't get off work that weekend, so he took us to the battleground and helped us find our site. Then he left us there, with the promise he would be back in two days to pick us up.
That evening, we were anxious to start building a beef stew and started to lay out the ingredients. As we looked for something to cook it in, it slowly dawned that no one had brought any kind of cooking utensils. Oh well, we had a one gallon water bucket someone had brought to wash up in. The stew may have been better if Charles hadn't cut up the carrot tops and threw them in because his mama always put some kind of green things in her stew(Probably cabbage or green beans.). The next morning Charles washed the bucket out and put some clean water in it. Then he dumped the box of powered milk in the water and stuck his hand in and mixed it well. Some of us preferred plain water and sugar to soften our corn flakes that morning.
We tried crabbing in a backwater of the San Jacinto river, without success the second day. That afternoon we rode the Lynchburg Ferry across the river and walked to the little community of Four Corners, where we bought hamburgers.
Like I said above, I was in the scouts for the fun things
X. 1940's Snack Food
I was thinking the other day, how it used to cost a dime to keep up with the other boys when drinking a soda water at Craig's Filling station in Montgomery, Texas. Craig's really was just a filling station, no wash rack or grease pit, just gas oil and soda water, candy and Toms Salted Peanuts. Of course soda waters only cost a nickel, but there was a special ritual we went through back then. We would buy a big RC Cola and a nickel bag of Tom's salted peanuts. You would open both and pour the peanuts in the RC bottle. The idea was to eat some peanuts while you drank the RC Cola. Just plain drinking didn't work because the peanuts stayed at the bottom of the bottle. You had to stick your tongue in the bottle and tip the bottle way up then the peanuts would slide down and into the bottle's neck. If you worked your tongue just right, you could get a few peanuts and a big swallow of RC.
Craig's was the place to gather back then. Not only was it a small independent service station, but Mr. Craig was an interesting old fellow who had a wooden leg and enjoyed talking to teen age boys. Mrs. Craig treated us like equals also. They lived in a couple of rooms built on the back of the station.
Speaking of soda waters, sometime when no one was around, I would sneak off and buy a Grapette. I loved the taste, but usually felt cheated with the tiny 6 once bottle they came in. I guess we could have drank a Grape Nehi like Radar O'Riley always did in "MASH", but they just didn't taste the same as a Grapette. When I was at home by Settegast Park I would often drink a Barqs Root Beer. The bottling plant was on Harrisburg across from Lubbock Elementary School which made it a neighbor. Besides Hires Root Beer had a stronger taste where Barqs was mellow.
. Ice cream in Montgomery back then was a poor substitute for the Rettigs ice cream stores and Madings Drug Store's (pre-Eckards) ice cream in Houston. Some cheap off brand was trucked in from some little off brand creamery up out of Brenham, Texas, called Blue Bell. The funny thing is though, that now with a freezer and a refrigerator here in Pine island they both have some Blue Bell ice cream in them.
Montgomery didn't have a caf� back then. Well, actually they had a beer joint in the mid 1930's that sold burgers, but it didn't last but a month or so before it burned to the ground late one dark night. The owner decided he didn't want to rebuild in such a strong Baptist town.. Then there was a caf� that stayed open a couple of months about 1945. So everyone living in Montgomery had to go home to eat lunch or supper. The few that couldn't or didn't want to make it home for lunch would usually stop at Jackson's or Huff's store. You could get a nickel box of crackers (single stack pack) and a nickel's worth of summer sausage (a hunk about 2 inches long) or a can of sardines and a nickel's worth of rat trap cheese (a piece about the size of a man's hand). That, along with a country red soda water (strawberry) or a big RC Cola. Now that would make a pretty good lunch
However, I have to admit that I missed out on a lot because I wouldn't eat summer sausage. You see, the name "sausage" always got to me. Mama always cooked sausage before we ate it, and I wasn't going to eat raw meat, even if it was made in the summer.. Yeah, yeah, I know now, but I didn't then. Hey, don't say anything, I'm the same guy who wouldn't eat tomatoes for a year or two after I was about six years old because I discovered they grew up out of the dirt. Thank goodness I was much older when I discovered where eggs came from
Don't laugh, my mama was raised around chickens and cows until she got married. I never saw her eat a piece of chicken, drink milk or eat eggs. She never fried chicken, but she would scramble eggs for dad and I and of course if he ate them, I had to eat them too.
Since I am talking about food tonight, did I tell you about grandma Daut who never tasted root beer during her entire life because beer was in it's name. It was a shame that no one every told her it was just cold sassafras tea. Then there was grandma Milam who convinced us grandchildren that poking a hole in the side of a leftover breakfast biscuit and pouring syrup in the hole created an exotic treat. Actually it did make a pretty good snack.
But, you know what? I buy a hunk of summer sausage (a couple of dollars) and a hunk of cheese (another couple of dollars) every once in a while and pull a stack pack out of the big box of crackers and pig out while thinking about the times I missed in the "Good Old Days".
T h e C o n t e n t s
I. When Billy And I Quit School
II. Swimming Naked
III. Haircuts Were An Adventure
The End