At some point during the
fall of 1949 I worked Roby and Rotan. Two
memorable events occurred in Rotan, one of which led to a career-changing decision:
·
A lady and her three boys, driving a Packard station wagon
with crinkled exterior surfaces, came into a service station as I interviewed
its proprietor. After they left, the
owner said, “That was Mrs. Sammy Baugh.” He said the automobile had been awarded
Sammy for being named the National Football League’s most valuable player the
previous year; he had “rolled” it in a Washington underpass almost immediately
after receiving it, giving the car its crinkled appearance, so he brought it to
his ranch near Rotan for family use. (Sammy, a
native of Sweetwater, about 25 miles to the south, used his earnings with the
Redskins and as a rodeo performer to purchase his Rotan ranchland.)
·
As I sat on the edge of my hotel bed one evening, pondering
the future and wondering what else I might do to earn a living (I didn’t enjoy
some aspects of my work and stresses therefrom caused gastronomic discomfort),
I recalled a conversation I’d had, soon after I finished college, with Mr. John
Brannon, my Sunday School teacher
at Poly Baptist Church. He had
suggested, for no apparent reason, that I should become a CPA. I didn’t seriously consider his suggestion,
for I hadn’t studied accounting at Howard Payne. However, over the months as I wrote credit reports for Dun
& Bradstreet, for which I (1) was often provided information supplied
by CPAs, (2) visited CPA’s offices to obtain information when so requested by
business owners, and (3) even extracted figures from accounting ledgers when
visiting those offices, I came to the realization that accounting work might be
interesting and within my capabilities.
Inasmuch as I still had a year of GI Bill eligibility left, I began to consider the possibility of returning
to college to study accounting, with the hope of becoming a CPA. I didn’t leave D & B immediately, but my
career objective was determined that evening; I had selected a highway I wanted
to travel.
I spent the rest of 1949 traveling West Texas, then, in early 1950, was
brought back into the Fort Worth office to do city revision, a task previously
handled by Glenn Slaydon, who took over the “country desk” from a retiring
reporter. I don’t remember, if I ever
knew, the reason I was taken off the road.
My work on the traveling staff may have been unsatisfactory, but I was
never so informed. Another possibility
was that I had already done city revision work in San Angelo and
Midland/Odessa, so had experience at that task, but I doubt that to have been
the case, for city revision required no particular expertise. I rather think that Freer Humphries, the
reporting manager, suspected I wasn’t happy in my job and thought getting me off
the road might help; if so, he was wrong, for travel wasn’t the part of the job
I disliked:
·
I was shy around people I didn’t know well, and I
constantly had to deal with people I didn’t know at all; asking for personal
histories and financial information from small entrepreneurs who didn’t
understand Dun & Bradstreet’s function in the business world wasn’t an easy
or pleasant task.
·
I didn’t like prying into people’s business when they
didn’t like it.
·
Prying was more difficult if a married woman owned, or was
a partner in ownership of, a business.
A married women, under Texas law at the time, couldn’t enter into
binding legal contracts unless she, by court action, was declared a “feme sole”
(woman alone) by having her “disabilities of coverture” (i.e., legal
disabilities of being a married woman) removed. The correct way for determining a married lady’s legal status was
to ask if she had been declared a feme sole by court action, then explain (if
necessary) the disabilities of coverture applicable to a married woman who hadn’t been declared a feme sole. Sometimes, however, I first asked if the
lady’s disabilities of coverture had been removed, and was often rewarded with
a blank stare – as if I were asking about a surgical procedure that wasn’t any
of my business. In only one or two of
my hundreds of interviews with business owners did a lady or her partner say
she was indeed a feme sole, and her disabilities of coverture had been
removed. (This is amusing to relate,
but wasn’t amusing at the times I experienced the discomfort of resolving the
issue.)
Shyness, fortunately, hadn’t prevented my making friends at the office,
one of whom was Bill English, a native of Greenville
and an Air Force veteran, who had joined Dun & Bradstreet in Dallas
after his military service, was transferred to El Paso for a time, then on to
Fort Worth. Bill preferred living in
Dallas, so commuted the thirty miles to Fort Worth each workday. I spent a night or two at his southwest
Dallas apartment while attending a D & B reporters’ conference, riding to
and from the downtown event via trolley car (the Dallas transit system operated
trolleys long after their discontinuance in Fort Worth, where they’d been
displaced by buses).
My friendship
with Bill lasted until his death in 1996, although, except for an
eighteen-month period in Waco in the mid-‘50s, we didn’t live near each other
after working together in Fort Worth.
He was made manager of D & B’s Shreveport office early in 1950, then
after a couple of years became manager at Waco. He was instrumental in effecting my move to Waco in early 1954,
because of his acquaintance with Pat Pattillo, a partner in the CPA firm that hired
me. We never lived in the same town
after October, 1955, and seldom saw each other more than two or three times per
year.
Because of our common love for music, I was the beneficiary of a portion of Bill’s estate. His bequest is discussed in the “TIME FOR FRIENDS” section of the “TIME FOR FAMILY/RELATIVES/ FRIENDS” segment of these “RAMBLINGS.”
Having workaday friends around me wasn’t the only advantage of
returning to the office from the road:
·
I could dictate credit reports on a Dictaphone (instead of
hand-writing them), from which recordings typists produced printed documents.
·
I could usually, if I so desired, eat lunch in the company
of one or more fellow employees, whereas I ate alone, three meals per day,
while on the road. I particularly liked
a small restaurant about a block and a half from D & B offices, where, for
sixty-five cents one could get an entrée, two vegetables, roll or corn bread
muffin, drink, and dessert (the egg custard was the best I’ve ever eaten). When I was really hungry, I could, for one
dollar, eat my fill at Mrs. Simpson’s Boarding House several
blocks away; food was served family-style, at tables seating eight or ten
people.
·
Had I still been traveling I would have missed interesting
events, such as the occasion when Wayne Clark, the office manager, dealt with a
problem involving a very attractive young file clerk who was given to leaving
work from time to time on modeling assignments. Her absences became so frequent that Wayne called her to his desk
to tell her she couldn’t continue to work for Dun & Bradstreet if
her attendance couldn’t be more constant.
Their conversation ran along quietly for some minutes, but Wayne’s
insistence obviously angered the young lady, for she suddenly screamed, “You
can’t fire me; I quit!” then stormed
out of the office. I had seen that line
in comic strips, but never in real life.
·
When I had to have an emergency appendectomy (March, 1950)
I was (1) near Dr. T.J Cross, our
family physician, and (2) familiar with medical facilities; the appendix burst
before surgery, but I experienced no ill effects therefrom.
Still other advantages accrued from being back in Fort Worth, including, of course, living “at home” with my parents (they may not have seen that as the advantage I did!). Also “back home” at Poly Baptist Church, I could rejoin the choir and participate in young folks’ activities:
·
We often played “42” after Sunday and Wednesday evening
activities, or enjoyed great hamburgers and iced mugs of root beer at the big A
& W restaurant on East Lancaster.
·
Hot-dog roasts were fun, even though we occasionally did
dumb things, such as building a fire on a sidewalk in a city park; it cracked
from the heat, just as my windshield had in Mineral Wells a year or so earlier
(some people never learn!).
·
I played briefly on the church softball team, in only one pre-season game (I left in early June, before
league play started, to further my education).
I’ve joked that I batted 1.000 that season; I was a pinch-hitter in the bottom of the last
inning, with two out and the bases loaded, and hit a single to knock in the
winning run. (I don’t know why Mr. Julian
Parker, our team’s manager, sent me to bat in that situation, for I’ve noted
earlier that I was never a good hitter.
I imagine he just wanted to let everyone on the squad get in the game;
I’m sure he wouldn’t have put me in had we been in league play, where the
outcome really counted.) That was my
first and only time at bat that season; I left for Austin a few days
later.
I told Freer Humphries (my boss), soon after returning to the
offices in early 1950, that I was thinking of leaving Dun & Bradstreet
to further my education and try to become a CPA. He spent much of the next several months trying to dissuade me
from resigning, even offering me a leave of absence to go back to school. He regularly used afternoon drivetimes – I
gave him rides home when his wife and two teenage daughters needed their family
car – to “work” on me, attempting to convince me I should stay with D &
B. He was unsuccessful, for I had made
up my mind back in Rotan to try something new.
I was
still, of course, going steady with Arlette, spending many weekends in
Brownwood, and remembering to take her into consideration as I made plans for
the future. She expressed no qualms
about the risk I would take by leaving my job and income, so I proceeded with
the course upon which I had decided.
I decided, sometime during the spring of
1950, that I wanted to pursue the accounting education I needed at the
University of Texas. Soon thereafter,
while in Brownwood for a weekend visit with Arlette, I ran into George MacDonald, a Galveston native who entered Howard
Payne when I did, but was then living in the Austin area, attending the
University and pastoring Bee Caves Baptist church; I told him what I wanted to do,
whereupon he asked me to come share his living quarters at Bee Caves when I
came to Austin. When I ultimately made
a firm decision to quit my job, I wrote George and asked if his invitation was
still good; his response was, “Come on!”
I left my
job at the end of May, 1950. I had
traveled many roads while working for Dun & Bradstreet, but they
were all part of one big detour in my life.
However, I met Arlette while on that detour and came to a major career decision, so my
time wasn’t wasted.
I packed my belongings in the old Chevrolet and headed south in time to
enroll for summer school at the University of Texas. I went to George’s place at Bee Caves, but we decided to seek
housing in the city, and found a garage apartment owned by a nice older couple
named Heilegenthal, at 3312 Scenic Drive, near Mount Bonnell in
the hills of northwest Austin. The
apartment was several miles from the University, but much closer than was Bee
Caves.
George and
I split the cost of rent and food; he enjoyed cooking, so I was happy to let
him have that task. We had fun during
summer school, in spite of its fast pace (particularly in my labor-intensive,
pencil-pushing accounting courses); we escaped the grind fairly regularly by
spending hot afternoons at Deep Eddy, a cold spring-fed
swimming pool in west Austin.
I was readjusted to the educational mode (I took Economics and
Elementary Accounting the first summer term) when the Korean War started June
25. I had, back in the spring, extended
my Naval Reserve enlistment for another four years, so I wondered if my second
shot at higher education might be interrupted by military service, as was my
first shot several years earlier. The
fear that I might be recalled to active duty was reinforced when, soon after
the war started, a tall, good-looking young fellow “disappeared” from Economics
class; I was told he was a Navy pilot, had been recalled to active duty, and
ordered to report immediately. My first
thought was, “If the Navy is recalling pilots, how long will it be until it
recalls electronics technicians for their aircraft?” Soon thereafter I received a letter asking if I was interested in
being a civilian instructor at the Grand Prairie Naval Air Station; I might
have been interested had I not already resumed my education, but I decided to
stick with my new plan and risk a call-back.
I heard nothing further from the Navy.
I took Business Law and the other half of Elementary Accounting the
second term of summer school (the latter course under Mr. Bill Brewer, the HPC accounting
instructor I mentioned in an earlier segment, who worked on his doctorate
during UT’s summer terms).
In addition
to Mr. Brewer, I had contacts with several other prior acquaintances that
summer. Maple Avery, an HPC friend from
Brady, spent considerable time with George and me. I saw Edwin Moore, who had been in my class at La Feria years
before, and Robert Hill, another HPC ex-student. Most surprising was an encounter with Don Nottingham while
walking across the campus. I had known
Don at Corpus Christi back in 1945-46; we had boxed, and had frequently played
basketball in the base gym. He had
joined the Air Force shortly after being discharged from the Navy, had risen to
the rank of captain, and was at UT on assignment from Wright AFB in
Dayton. [Since that chance meeting with
Captain Nottingham I have seen no one else with whom I served in the Navy – even
among the other Fort Worth boys, one of whom (James Fry) became president of a
Fort Worth bank, and another (Nelson Mitchell) assumed management of his dad’s
small chain of department stores; I suppose the roads I traveled had no access
ramps to their fast lanes.]
I went to Brownwood most weekends, to visit Arlette; one weekend she
rode a bus to Austin, then we drove to Wharton to visit with Twila and John
(Twila’s first husband, who died just over a decade later); I also gave Arlette an engagement ring that weekend.
George and I terminated our apartment-sharing arrangement late in the summer. I had to locate a separate apartment, because Arlette and I were to be married at summer’s end and would need our own facilities; the apartment I found, at 2306 Sabine, was close to the UT campus.
Arlette and I were married in the prayer chapel of Brownwood’s First
Methodist Church at 2:30 on Sunday afternoon, September 3, 1950, following
morning worship attendance and a sumptious luncheon her grandmother Gaines had
prepared for relatives and friends gathered for the wedding.
Q: Why would two Baptists be married in a Methodist
church?
A: Its prayer chapel was properly sized for our
wedding party.
Dr. Russell Dennis, pastor of Brownwood’s Melwood Baptist Church,
performed the ceremony. John Wakefield (Twila’s first husband, whom I mentioned in
the previous segment) was best man.
Leona Gill (later Sherrod), Arlette’s best friend in high school, was maid of
honor. Virginia Albertson, a YWA
friend of Arlette’s at First Baptist Church, sang “Always” and “When Day Is Done.” “When Day Is Done” isn’t a traditional
wedding song (as is “Always”), but Arlette wanted it because I had sung it for
her as we drove to Lake Brownwood on our first date.
During
the ceremony I realized I had failed to remove my college class ring from my left
ring finger, where a wedding band was to be placed, so I attempted to
surreptitiously remove it and drop it into a pocket; it landed with a distinct
“clink” when it hit keys and coins.
A Gibbons-Smith photographer took several pictures after the wedding,
then Arlette and I were taken to 200 W. Adams, where my car was already loaded
with our things, ready to travel to Austin; we quickly changed clothes, told
relatives and friends goodbye, and headed south.
◊◊◊
Twila and John planned to stay with Austin friends (the Mike Caskey family) that night, so they told us (before we left Brownwood)
they would meet us at our apartment and help unload a heavy wooden chest
(containing dishes and other wedding gifts), after which we could go eat. We assumed they were close behind us, but
had to wait a couple of hours for their arrival. John and I unloaded the chest, then the four of us went to eat at
Youngblood’s, a fried chicken emporium, where we were joined by the Caskeys (as
I started writing this, I didn’t remember seeing them at Youngblood’s, although
I know we met them at some point – Arlette says we ate together).
Colonel
Sanders hadn’t yet invented Kentucky Fried Chicken, but the fare at
Youngblood’s restaurants or Leslie’s Chicken Shacks of that era was at least as good as, if not better, than at
today’s fried chicken outlets.
Darkness fell while we ate. Twila
and John took us back to our apartment, said they would stop by on their way
out of town the next morning, and went on to rejoin the Caskeys.
John knew
the Caskeys because he and Mike both worked for Belknap Hardware of
Louisville, Kentucky; they traveled adjoining sales territories. The weekend of our wedding was the only time
I ever saw Mike, but I haven’t forgotten his description of an event a few
months earlier, when, as he traveled one of the highways in his territory, a
buzzard crashed through the windshield of his car and landed on the front seat
beside him, leaving him rather shaken.
As promised, Twila and John came by our apartment to tell us goodby as
they left for Wharton the next morning, Labor Day. We unpacked some of our things after they went on their way,
repacked for our honeymoon trip, ate lunch at a restaurant near downtown, then
drove to Bandera for a week’s stay at the Cedar Crest Dude Ranch, located
just outside town off Texas 16; its name was emblazoned on a large wooden sign
mounted across the top of rock columns at each side of the entrance to a lane
leading to ranch facilities.
◊◊◊
Horseback rides were, of course, a featured activity at the ranch. Those rides usually took us along and across
the Medina River just south of town. I
was assigned “Star,” a steed no longer young, who preferred moving no faster
than a trot – except when he knew we were headed home.
Late Friday morning, as our ride neared its end, we entered the open
pasture west of ranch headquarters and Star started galloping homeward. I was enjoying the ride until someone behind
me screamed, “Stop! Stop!” I looked
over my shoulder just in time to see a lady tumble from her horse and roll
several yards across the pasture.
I turned back to help check on the fallen rider. Only her feelings were hurt, possibly
because she was a bit chunky, built for rolling. She vigorously chastised me for having let my horse gallop,
causing her horse to follow suit. I
apologized, we all remounted, and proceeded onward – slowly.
After leaving our horses at the corral, Arlette and I went to our cabin
to wash for lunch. We broke into
laughter the second we were out of sight of anyone else, for the scene had been
hilarious – after we knew no injury had been suffered. Arlette had viewed the action from behind
the victim, so could describe the event as it had developed; I had seen only
the tumble and roll.
Our mirth subsided before we entered the dining room after the lunch
gong sounded; the air was a bit frosty during the meal and the rest of the
afternoon, but warmed up before the lady and her husband left for Houston the
next day.
Friday’s ride was our last of the week, so I had no more opportunities
to cause unhorsing. We went to a barbecue and country music
event at the courthouse square Saturday evening, then on Sunday went
sightseeing and visited Kerrville’s First Baptist Church for morning worship. We left Bandera on Monday, and didn’t return
to the area for over thirty years.
Then, when we returned thirty-two years later, we
had difficulty locating the ranch. We
had heard that the big ranchhouse had burned some years earlier and the dude
ranch operation had been terminated, but we didn’t understand why we couldn’t
find the land itself, inasmuch as Cedar Crest had been quite close to town and
had an easily recognizable stone entrance-way.
We finally found the place – by accident. We saw a sign on Highway 16, at the edge of
town, indicating that Bandera High School was to the left, up a side road, and
decided to drive by the school. We
discovered that the new Bandera High had been built on land that had been a
part of Cedar Crest, just north of the old ranch headquarters. From the rear of the school grounds, through
some live oak trees, we could see the cabin we had occupied during our
honeymoon – the only visible remains of the ranch operation; it had been
converted to a small hay barn. I climbed
over the fence and took a snapshot of the cabin/barn; the resultant color photo
is now in our family album next to a similar black-and-white photo from our
honeymoon thirty-two years earlier.
Rerouting of Highway 16 caused our difficulty in
locating the ranch. It now crosses the
pasture across which Star and I had raced many years before (creating
excitement and near disaster); the old Highway 16 is the road in front of the
new high school. The stone Cedar Crest
entrance columns still stand, without the bridging sign, about two or three hundred
yards from the school.
Arlette and I still had
free time before the start of the fall term at UT, so we went from Bandera to
McAllen, where my parents had recently moved; Arlette had never seen the lower
Rio Grande Valley, with its giant citrus orchards, vegetable farms, and large
canning/packing plants.
[My parents moved from Fort Worth to McAllen during the
summer of 1950, where my dad joined Mr. Herman Krehbiel (his former co-worker at Harlingen’s Valley Marble & Tile
Company) in a tile contracting partnership. The Krehbiels moved from McAllen to Oregon at some point during
the ‘50s, but my dad stayed in business until about 1960, when he retired and
retuned to North Texas, settling ultimately in Tolar.]
Our stay in the Valley included
a shopping trip to Reynosa, Mexico, where we purchased several items of either
decorative or utilitarian nature, some of which we still have, and sometimes
use, more than fifty years later. The
Reynosa venture was made memorable during our return through Customs, because I
thought I might have to leave my bride on the wrong side of the river when she
failed to answer an agent’s question – asked first in English, then in Spanish
– about her place of birth; he must have assumed, when (1) he noted her black
hair and brown eyes and (2) she didn’t answer the question asked in English,
that I was illegally bringing a cute Mexican chiquita home with me. Arlette finally
realized the agent was addressing her, and answered his question, so we were
allowed to return to Texas.
◊◊◊
We swung
by Corpus Christi on our trip back to Austin.
We took photos along the shoreline drive around the Bay, then drove out to
Ward Island (where I had been stationed my last year in the Navy, but which had
been returned to civilian use after WWII) and the Naval Air Station. Arlette was generally familiar with the
Corpus Christi area, for her dad had taken his family camping/fishing at
Aransas Pass some years earlier, but she had never before seen the sights on
the south side of the Bay. Our drive
home from Corpus Christi was punctuated by stops at (1) New Braunfels’ Landa
Park and (2) San Marcos. That
sightseeing was the last we did for several years.