SECRETS OF SOBRIETY - from THE ROAD LESS TRAVELED

CHAPTER 8

My father’s parents lived in West Texas on a farm near Rule and were by some standards well off. They had a John Deere tractor rather than horses and mules. We called the tractor “Popping Johnnie.” It was so named as it had only one large cylinder with the resulting pop, pop, pop noise from firing on only one cylinder. To keep the engine’s momentum, there was a large, heavy external flywheel. The flywheel also served as a power transfer by applying a belt to it and onto another piece of farm equipment such as a buzz saw.

There was a windmill for water. We had cows and hogs and chickens. There was a little building called the smokehouse. Its purpose was curing meat by smoking it. Whole hogs hung upside down in the smokehouse. We milked the cows for our milk and cream. A machine called a separator brought the cream to the top with the richer milk. We churned butter from the cream. A churn was a three-foot-tall, heavy, glass-like cone with a smaller hole in the top where a pole with a plunger at the end was pushed up and down to agitate the cream and make butter. After the cream and whole milk came to the top, the milk remaining, today’s nonfat milk, was fed to the hogs with the leftovers from our meals. We called it slopping the hogs.

Later, a milkman delivered our milk in glass bottles; the top several inches would be cream, and sometimes in the winter the milk would freeze before we got it inside, and the paper cap would pop up and the cream would rise an inch or so.

Cotton was the primary money crop on both farms, although maize and corn were also grown, and probably other things I do not recall. Maize and corn were fed to the cows, horses, and mules, and maize to the chickens; we also had vegetable gardens. My grandfather Robert Edwards, known as Bob, was also the county judge, as mentioned earlier.

When I was in first grade, I rode to school in a horse-drawn wagon and carried a bag of eggs that I traded for my lunch. The farm was several miles outside of Rochelle, which was small with a population of about two hundred. The population density was and is about two people per square mile. The county seat was Brady, miles farther, where the population was perhaps five thousand.

The population in Rule, Texas, is today 636. The population of Rochelle, Texas, is today about 163. I now live in the city of San Diego, California, with a population of more than a million, and as I look out my window at the time of writing this, I can see the aircraft carriers Ronald Reagan and Carl Vinson, both with crews of more than five thousand.

My grandparents on both sides had large families, twelve children on each side. Large families were the rule as they then had to hire no help and sometimes could hire the children out to those families needing help. Help was called “hired hands.”

I had an uncle, Bailey Edwards, who could pull a bale of cotton a day, about five hundred pounds. There is a big difference between picking cotton and pulling it. To pick clean cotton, you have to pull the cotton out from the boll, whether by hand or by machine. Cotton gins were more primitive at that time and could not separate the bolls from the cotton. Gins are much more sophisticated today, and machines now pull much of the plant and clean the cotton from the plant. Picking cotton involves pulling the whole boll as more modern gins can accomplish the separation and much more. Therefore, you can pick much less cotton than you can pull. Uncle Bailey would straddle a row and “pull” the middle row and those on both sides. Modern cotton-picking machines “pull” perhaps ten rows at a time.

My father was young enough then not to be necessary around the farm as a field hand. He was a very gifted athlete and earned a full athletic scholarship to Howard Payne College. While a student he excelled in football, basketball, and track, as previously mentioned. We lived later with my father’s family until my father got a position as the principal of a three-teacher school in West Texas equidistant from Rule, Haskell, and Stamford, my father’s family home area. It was named Center Point. We lived there three years. The school employed a male and a female teacher as well as my father; my mother was not yet accredited. All three families lived in a four-room “teacherage” on the school grounds. There were four rooms and a “path.” The path led to the outhouse. There was a well for water, which was drawn up by buckets as there was no water system. They had to carry water from the well to the house. The school was also our church with student pastors from Hardin Simmons University in Abilene, the nearest large city.

School was in session except when it was necessary to chop or pick cotton. Chopping cotton involved thinning the cotton plants until they were about a foot apart. When the plants matured and the cotton was ready to pick, school would let out and all the students old enough to do so would pick cotton. I had my own small “cotton sack” at age six. During the summer break, my father worked as an undertaker’s assistant and my mother went back to college.

The teacherage stove used kerosene, and as this was the Depression, our neighbors, who were poorer than us, would often steal it. They would also siphon the gas from our car and, as there were no gas gauges in cars at that time, it was easy to run out of gas. Housekeeping was difficult, a washeteria was miles away, disposable diapers were a thing of the future. The washing machines were the wringer type and laundry was rinsed in a tub. There were no dryers, just clotheslines. My mother’s family’s farm had no facilities at all—all clothes were washed at home. Few clothes were ironed, but when there were clothes to iron, ironing was done with an iron heated on a stove.

Dad was very sports minded, so we went to many ball games. I attended my first college football game at age six weeks. This was in Brownwood, where my parents got their undergraduate degrees. My brother Jim was born there in 1937. Jim died in 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic. He would have been eighty-four in twelve days.

My mother went to school that summer, and my father worked in San Angelo and played baseball for two teams, one of which won the state championship. Dad pitched and caught; he was particularly good, a very gifted athlete.

At the end of the summer, my mom had enough credits to earn her teaching certificate, and she began teaching the primary grades. The next fall, Dad went back to school and got his degree at midsemester; teachers did not have to have a degree to teach, but they did need to be accredited according to the standards of that time.

The last part of the year, Dad taught at a little school named Indian Gap. We lived in a little rock house on a hill. His oldest brother, Robert, an accountant, was killed. He was returning from playing golf with friends. They were riding in a dump truck and wearing golf shoes with steel cleats, and he slipped in the steel bed and fell. My grandfather went into a long depression.

The next school term was my dad’s first year as a coach; the school was in Rochester, Texas.

Our next school was in Rotan, Texas. That school had a particularly good football team, and my dad’s coaching career was improving each year. He was ambitious and wanted larger and better schools. My brother Mack was born there in 1940. I was five years old. Mack died of cancer in 2018, after he had achieved thirty years of sobriety.

The entire football team was the right age for the draft when World War II broke out. One member of the team became a fighter pilot and was killed over Germany. Another was killed in Britain; another was a casualty when his carrier was sunk. Casualties were often in the thousands at each battle. The newspaper often had entire pages full of the names and hometowns of the casualties.

My mother’s brother Fred was in the army. He went missing in action and was not heard from for months until a mailbag was found floating in the ocean. He was on the Bataan Death March and was a prisoner of war for three and a half years. Her younger brother Richard had been a gunner on a ship until a shell hit the gun turret and he was killed. Another brother survived the war, but suffered severely from what we know today to be post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). He later wandered away from home and family and died alone.

My father had not been drafted as he was married with three children. However, as the war progressed, it became apparent he would be drafted. He chose instead to enlist and joined the Marine Corps. This was 1942. I was seven.

While my father was in the Marines, we moved to army base housing. The base was named Camp Swift and was between the Texas towns of Elgin and Bastrop. In the Marines, my father became a rifle instructor and was sent to the South Pacific. I do not know what his duty there was, probably in reserve for being sent to the front. The end of the war prevented that. Importantly, the Marine Corps taught him to drink, or at least was instrumental in the progress of his drinking. Prior to this time, alcohol was not a problem in our family to my knowledge, although I am certain alcoholism was in its early stages at least.

During the war, my mother got a job at Camp Swift at the base post office. Camp Swift, as mentioned, was between Elgin, population today of eighty-five hundred, and Bastrop, Texas, population seventy-five hundred today. Austin, the state capital, is about twenty-five miles from both towns with a population...