My Life Story

Origins

            “Know thyself!” says Socrates, and we all nod in agreement, but I have discovered that knowing who and what I am is a complex and difficult task, perhaps never completed. The primary purpose of this little book is to help me know as clearly and honestly as possible what it means to be me. I have also  discovered that I truly understand something only if I can explain it in simple, straightforward language. I would also like to chronicle my own life’s experience in order to see if there are any broader lessons or insights to be learned about the human condition in general which might be useful to other people. Throughout my life I have been helped by a great many people in many different ways, and I hope that my life experience can perhaps be of some help to others.

            My starting point is that of a rather typical American, neither rich nor poor, neither highly intelligent nor severely limited, born in 1927 into a working class family in Palestine, a small town in East Texas. Along with millions of other average families we experienced the Great Depression of the 1930s, but I don’t recall any special hardships or feelings of poverty. I don’t remember ever being seriously hungry or being without clothes and shelter, although my parents surely went through difficult periods with dark thoughts and misgivings sometimes. Only much later did I realize that the depression years were a period of hard times for a great many people and left a decided imprint on millions.

            Probably the most important thing that happened to me was that our mother died in 1936, leaving my father with seven children, ages newborn to 17 years old. I was in the middle, aged eight. My father was about 40 years old and a roundhouse machinist repairing steam locomotives for the Missouri Pacific Railroad. Being unable to raise the baby, he had to let a family in Houston, Texas, adopt our newborn brother, and I remember being scared by talk that some others among us might be put into an orphans’ home. I recall hoping that they would at least let me and my two younger brothers, Bobbie and Willie, stay together. I don’t know if such talk was merely my childhood fear and fantasy or really a serious consideration at the time, but seeing our baby brother given away did impress me. I briefly met him again some 20 years later and once again some years after that, but then we lost contact altogether until last year.

            Right after Mother died, Bobbie and Willie and I stayed for a few months on the farm of family friends in Jacksonville, Texas, and I remember attending classes in a one-room school out in the country for a few weeks or months. Pupils from several different levels were all mixed together, but it didn’t seem to matter and we were all learning something. Dad was supposed to visit us on a regular basis and give the people some money for our expenses; sometimes he did and sometimes he didn’t, and I recall waiting--often in vain--to hear the sound of his car in the distance coming down the country road. 

            My oldest brother, Johnnie, was already a freshman at the University of Texas when our mother died. He was working his way through college and never received any help from our father who was hard pressed to support all the rest of us. Johnnie held several jobs at a time to make ends meet: delivering newspapers for cash, working in a restaurant for food, cleaning university buildings for tuition. I visited him in Austin a couple of times before he graduated in 1939, and once he talked about my coming to live with him; but I was still too young and had to wait a few more years for that to happen. He was clearly the alpha child in the family, and everyone admired him greatly. After Mother’s funeral he almost never came home any more, only once that I can remember. That left the four other brothers and a sister at home, aged 2 to 16, to grow up as best we could under somewhat unstable conditions.

            For two or three years after Mother’s death there were a couple of young women a little older than Johnnie living in our house off and on, somewhat like common-law wives. They cooked and treated us little kids all right, and we were too young to know what was going on, but Frankie and Geneva were older and resented having an unmarried woman in our house. It apparently didn’t make any difference to the next-door neighbors how we lived, and they never bothered calling the law until Frankie got in a fight with the current favorite and almost killed her. The law chased her out of town, and my father married the other one soon thereafter and eventually had two children with her, a boy and a girl, but I had already left home before they were born and didn’t get to know them until they were young adults. After a divorce from this woman many years later, Dad married the other one, and she stayed with him until his death in 1970 at age 78.

            Our home life was obviously rather unsettled after Mother’s death, to such an extent that my sister Geneva married at age 15 just to get out of the house; my older brother, Frankie, left home right after high school graduation; and I left home in 1941 at age 13 to live with Johnnie, who had finished the university and was working in Amarillo, Texas. A few months after the outbreak of World War II. Johnnie and Frankie went off to become Navy pilots in the summer of 1942, and I was left alone in Amarillo to work my way through high school by delivering newspapers twice a day and working part-time in the Coca Cola Bottling Company. In order to also get away from home my two younger brothers, Bobbie and Willie, came to Amarillo live with me, one in 1943 and the other in 1945, but we were too young for that arrangement to work out well, and each stayed only a few months before returning to Palestine. While living through all this, nothing about it struck me as being unusual or especially difficult, that was simply the way things were. I worked, went to school, paid $10 a month rent in a rooming house, ate in cafes or the drugstore, etc. Only later did I learn that my childhood was a bit strange and strained, but it did not seem that way to me at the time.