Our belongings were moved from Weatherford to 1201 Ross Avenue in Abilene a couple of days before I reported for work at U.S. Time. The two-bedroom frame house we rented was
located on the south side of town, near McMurry College; it needed painting,
and wasn’t all we would have liked, but was larger than the Weatherford house,
had a big back yard surrounded by a chainlink fence (where the kids could play
safely), and was within walking distance of Alta Vista elementary school (Vicky
had started school in September, so transferred from Weatherford’s Stanley
Elementary to Abilene’s Alta Vista).
Even though its appearance was less than desirable, I liked the
southeast bedroom in our new place of residence; early morning light from south
and east windows eased workday wakeup.
We found a church home our first Sunday in Abilene, even though only
two of our family attended. Arlette
stayed home with Terry, who was ill.
Marty was less than five months old, so he stayed home with them. Six-year-old Vicky and I visited Pioneer
Drive Baptist Church; as we left morning
worship, she announced, “That’s my church!”
Although Arlette and I had planned to visit several churches before
deciding which to join, neither of us objected to Vicky’s preference, so we
joined Pioneer Drive the next Sunday, and attended there all six years we lived
in Abilene.
Brother Ed Laux was pastor when we joined Pioneer Drive, but left after two or
three years to head the Training Union department of the Baptist General
Convention of Texas. He was followed by
Brother Gene McCombs, whose daughter Paula was
about Vicky’s age; the two girls became good friends.
Floyd
Lloyd was music director for all worship activities our first several years at
Pioneer Drive, and also directed the junior choir (ages nine through twelve),
which Vicky joined as soon as she was eligible. Floyd believed kids of that age were too young to sing harmony
parts, so expected all to sing the melody; Vicky, however, had a good alto
voice, so began singing alto when she joined the choir. When reprimanded for singing alto (and told
that junior choir members shouldn’t attempt to sing harmony parts), Vicky
retorted, “I can sing tenor, my dad
taught me how!” I hadn’t taught her to
sing that part, but she picked it up while sitting beside me in church, just as
she had picked up alto sitting beside Arlette.
Floyd told Arlette and me about their dialogue, so he must not have been
offended by Vicky’s insubordination.
Vicky and Terry made public professions of faith and were baptized by
Brother Gene. Marty was a preschooler,
between four and five, when the girls joined the church. One day, in a family discussion during the
interval between their professions of faith and baptism, he asked, “Does Vicky
understand what she’s doing?” We told
him we thought she did, because she had talked with us about it. “Does Terry understand what she’s doing?”
evoked our same response. “I don’t
understand,” concluded Marty. But,
under the tutelage of Mrs. Hurst and other leaders of the Beginner and Primary
departments on Sunday mornings, Sunday evenings, and Wednesday nights, Marty
later came to understand, and followed in the footsteps of his sisters. Brother Jack Ridlehoover had come as pastor by that time, so he baptized Marty; Brother
Jack pastored Pioneer Drive church for twenty-five years.
Butch, though still young, was a
full-grown dog when we moved to Abilene, was even-tempered, a good playmate for
the kids, and protective of them. Our
large fenced back yard on Ross Avenue seemed the ideal place for him – until he
decided he didn’t want to stay inside.
He seldom obeyed our orders to return to the yard after escaping, so we
had to resort to trickery:
·
Our first method was to go out front, then get him to come
to us to be petted. He soon learned
that petting would end with his being led through the house to the back yard,
so that system didn’t work long; he refused to come near when we were out
front, knowing he would soon be back inside the fence.
·
We next tried slipping around the house and shutting the
gate behind him when he came in to eat.
That, also, didn’t work long.
·
One Sunday night we failed to close the door between garage
and back porch before we left for church, so Butch was in the garage waiting for us when we returned home; he hurtled
outside when I raised the door. After
parking the car in the garage and closing the door, we opened the back gate so
Butch could return to the yard, but he hadn’t come in when our bedtime
approached, so Arlette hid in my old work car (which was parked on the side
street, close to the back yard gate), hoping to trap him inside when he came to
eat. Butch walked up, but saw her
sitting in the car, so turned and ran off again. Arlette then crouched down, so she couldn’t be seen when he came
back. She soon heard his jingling tags
as he approached the car; the jingling ceased briefly as he stopped to see if
she was still in the car, then resumed when he went on in the yard to his
supper, obviously assuming she had given up.
She peeked out; Butch was eating away, ears upright and tail
wagging. She slipped out of the car,
then hurried to the gate and closed it.
Butch was crestfallen; his ears fell limp, his tail drooped.
One night we heard a furious racket on the side street to our
north. Butch had escaped our yard,
caught a hated cat (one of twenty-eight belonging to the neighbor living
diagonally across the intersection from us), and was mopping the street with
the furry feline. The cat was limp by the time I managed to
extricate him from Butch’s mouth.
We returned Butch to our back yard and placed the unconscious cat in the garage,
propping the door open slightly, in case he should recover and want to continue
his prowl. I expected him to die, but,
surprisingly, he was gone when I checked the garage early the next
morning. We were quite relieved,
because we had no idea how his owners might have reacted to the incident; he
could have been their favorite cat.
I hadn’t been able to see details of the fight scene the previous evening,
but in morning light I inspected the unpaved street where the action
occurred. It looked as if a giant
sidewinder rattlesnake had come along; Butch had zigzagged the full width of
the street as he mopped it with the cat, which surely must have lost eight of
his nine lives in that venture.
◊◊◊
Butch’s abilitiy to climb
fences, learned while we lived on Ross Avenue, was his undoing after we moved
to our next residence, at 2156 Glenwood Drive.
The back yard at the new house was surrounded by a redwood fence, with
the boards affixed laterally, alternating inside and outside the posts. Butch went over that fence as if it were a
ladder, escaping at will to roam the nearby open spaces.
He stayed out of trouble as long as he escaped to the back and hunted
rabbits, but he bought big trouble for himself out front when he chased another
dog through a neighbor’s flower beds; she called the pound. We went bail (at the pound) for Butch a
couple of times after he annoyed the neighbor to the point that she reported
his misdeeds, but we finally decided he was incorrigible (in addition to
flattening flowers, he chased kids on bikes).
We told the folks at the pound they would have to keep him, because we
couldn’t contain him.
During
succeeding years, before we moved from Abilene, I saw several dogs in that end
of town which looked a lot like Butch, so he must have made some
friends while on his outings.
We moved to our new house, in the Brookhollow Additon of southwest Abilene, over 1959’s Independence Day weekend. We had found the place early in the year,
but several months passed between our signing a purchase agreement and the time
a loan was approved. We couldn’t
qualify for an FHA loan, but the builder/seller found a conventional loan for
us. The house cost $14,100; our down
payment was $1,100, we signed a 20-year loan with a 5¾ percent interest rate
and monthly payments of $110.
The house
was among the last of several built speculatively by I.S. Gathright, a transplanted Arkansan. Built on a concrete slab, without a step on the place, it was the
largest, best-arranged, and most attractive house in which I’ve ever
lived. A brick veneer exterior enclosed
a combination kitchen/den, living room, foyer, hallways, three bedrooms, two
bathrooms, utility room, and two-car garage; closet space was adequate. We had slightly less than 1,500 square feet
of heated and cooled space – not large by today’s standards, but nice for that
time. It had separately ducted central
heating and evaporative cooling systems; the attic was a maze of ducting.
Much work
faced us when we moved in, for no landscaping had yet been done; sunflowers
grew everywhere, touching the eaves in several places. I chopped the sunflowers down and hired a
man to Roto-Till the soil, then we planted Bermuda grass seed and had the lawn
doing well before cold weather halted its growth. We planted shrubs all around the house, plus a peach tree in the
back yard; a couple of pecan trees were added later.
The Brookhollow neighborhood was populated by middle-class
families, mostly young; “baby boomers” abounded on our street:
·
Marty played “army” with
Mike Chatham, a little boy next door just a year or so older than he; using
only their mouths, they could sound like a major battle in progress.
·
Terry and Vicky often
played with Laura and Carla Appleton, who lived a few houses to the north. Mary Appleton, Laura’s and Carla’s mother,
called Arlette “Artlette,” so her girls did likewise; fortunately, they didn’t
say, “Artless,” a name which could have been thought to impugn her artistic
talent.
·
The Herman Brooks
family lived several doors south of us. He was a TIMEX foreman, as was Claude Dauster, who lived on
Ivanhoe.
[Herman,
Claude, and I were among thirteen TIMEX employees transferred to Little
Rock in 1964; the removal of our three families (fifteen people) put a
good-sized dent in the Brookhollow population. The transfer
also dented the pocketbooks of most of the thirteen transferees – who lost
money when selling their residences, for the real estate market had suffered
from (1) closing of Abilene’s Humble Oil and Refining (now EXXON) offices and
(2) reductions at Dyess Air Force base; newspaper ads in late 1963 offered
sellers’ equities plus $250 to buyers willing to take up payments on their
houses. Three thousand FHA
repossessions were reportedly on the Abilene market at one point. We tried to sell our house from late 1963
(after we knew we would be moving) until June, 1964, when our move was
completed, but decided to rent it rather than sell with a loss of our equity,
hoping the market would improve; unfortunately, improvement didn’t happen until
1972. Henley Real Estate managed the
rentals; we received about $20 per month less than our payments, but recovered
our losses when the place finally sold.]
H. Don Rodgers (a friend from college days, mentioned in
earlier segments) and his family lived several blocks west of us, on Brentwood
Drive. (H. Don and Lucile adopted a
son, then had three children of their own; the four were born over
approximately the same time period as our three. Their youngest child learned to read when she was three years
old; needless to say, she was bored when she started school.) Our contacts with the Rodgers family were
infrequent, so we weren’t always up-to-date with each other; we were quite
surprised, therefore, when we dropped by their house late one afternoon just to
say, “Hello!” and found Don recovering from several serious cuts caused by
walking through the glass door between their den and patio. He laughed at himself about it, but the
event could have been tragic.
H. Don
lived on Brentwood Drive until a severe stroke caused him to be confined to a
nursing home for three or four years before his October 7, 2001 death.
Our three kids changed rapidly
during the years we lived in Abilene.
Vicky moved from first grade through her first year of Junior High,
Terry from a four-year-old preschooler through fifth grade; Marty, less than
five months old when we moved to Abilene, had passed through toddlerhood, playschool,
kindergarten, and first grade by the time we left.
Vicky, after having begun first grade at Weatherford’s Stanley
Elementary School before we moved to Abilene, finished that grade, plus second
grade, at Alta Vista School. After our
move from Ross Avenue to Glenwood Drive, she attended Stephen F. Austin
Elementary for four years, then did one year at Cooper Junior High before we
moved from Abilene.
Terry, though four when we moved to Abilene,
appeared to temporarily regress one day soon after our move. She needed to use the bathroom during a
visit to Arlette’s Grandmother Downing’s home on the north side of town (at
2341 North Walnut), but said her dress would have to be removed for her to do
what she had to do. Although Arlette
told her removal of the dress was unnecessary, Terry insisted, so took it off
and used the facility. (She remembers
the event and says she finally realized she could have left her dress on.) She was still a preschooler during the
nearly two years we lived on Ross Avenue, so didn’t start school until after we
moved to Glenwood Drive – at Stephen F. Austin, a new facility within walking
distance of our house. She was
fortunate in having Mrs. Thel Giddens, a reading specialist, as her first grade
teacher, for she quickly learned to read, and would read nearly anything,
including newspaper editorial pages.
Terry
liked to read aloud – from any source – to anyone who would listen. She learned phonics well, which led to some
humorous moments (e.g., in reading Genesis 2:25 from the Bible, she pronounced
“naked” to rhyme with
“baked” or “raked;” another time, reading from the newspaper, she asked what a
“tow truck” was, pronouncing the “tow” to rhyme with “now,” rather than
“no”).
Marty’s progression from
baby-and-toddlerhood through playschool and kindergarten was marked by
interesting, sometimes amusing, events, as had been the case with the girls:
·
His baby teeth started coming in soon after we moved to Abilene, making
a normally happy little boy fussy. We
had learned (from experience with his sisters) that paregoric relieved the pain
of cutting teeth, so obtained a small supply and rubbed it on his gums when
pain struck. The ameliorant worked its
magic, as it had with the girls; also, as had the girls, Marty licked
applicating fingers clean. (Arlette and
I always laughed at the way the kids licked our fingers when we applied
paregoric to their gums. Perhaps we
made "junkies" out of them, for my dictionary says paregoric is a
camphorated tincture of opium.)
·
We didn’t
work with Marty to “bring him along” as much as we had with the girls, so his
development sometimes surprised us – beginning with Christmas evening the day
before he was six months old, when he sat up in the middle of his playpen. No one had been near him; he did it
unassisted.
·
Marty never
crawled; from the time he learned to sit up until he began walking, he simply
“scooted” on his seat to reach intended destinations.
·
We couldn’t
get him to tell his age when he was two.
When we held up two fingers to demonstrate what he should do when asked
his age, he always exclaimed, “Dat’s rabbit!”
·
He was
dependent on his “binky” at bedtime, but Arlette forgot to take it when she and
the kids rode the train to Odessa to visit her parents the year he turned
two. She worried whether he would be
able to sleep without it, but, fortunately, he adapted to life without a
security blanket. [A comedy of errors
accompanied their return home. First,
they missed the train in
Odessa, so Arlette’s mother raced it twenty miles to Midland, enabling them to
board there. Once aboard, Arlette
decided they should sit in the lounge/restroom area, because Vicky had
contracted mumps, so she took them to the rear of the car,
just as she had on the way west, not realizing the seats had been reversed for
the trip eastward; after some time a conductor told her, to her great
embarrassment, that they were in the men’s facility. She says she had wondered why she had seen odd looks on the faces
of men passing by.]
·
Marty was a
night owl by the time he was two, so didn’t go to sleep quickly, but we
insisted he go to bed at the same time the girls did when they were in school,
because they had to get up early. We
put all three to bed at the same time each evening, but Marty often stole down
the hallway to the den; we would, of course, insist that he return to bed
(mainly because the girls resented his staying up when they couldn’t). One night he came into the den and crawled
onto Arlette’s lap to watch TV with her.
Arlette said, “Marty, you’re supposed to be in bed,” to which he
replied, “Look, Mom, you have your responsibilities and
I have mine.” We, of course, had to
laugh, and he got to stay up a while, watch TV, and drink some fruit
juice. The girls believed he had
“snookered” us, and I’m sure he knew
he had. [Relating that event reminds me
of an approximately concurrent late-night occurrence featuring Vicky. Awakened
during the night by a clattering sound from the girls’ bedroom, Arlette and I
investigated and discovered Vicky was missing from her bed. More sounds disclosed her location – in
their bedroom closet, sound asleep. I
put her back in bed, and she remembered nothing of her sleepwalking when she got up the next morning.]
·
Marty’s
predilection for picking up small items then dropping them elsewhere led to
many misplacements over the years. As
an example, he wanted to play with Arlette’s ring of keys as she carried
groceries in the house following a shopping expedition, then saw a box of
cereal among the purchases and asked for a bowl thereof. Later, Arlette’s keys couldn’t be found –
and weren’t located until one of the girls poured a bowl of cereal, and keys
fell from the box into the bowl. (I
suppose the brand of cereal must have been “Keyllogs.”)
·
We enrolled
Marty in playschool the fall after he turned three in June, enabling Arlette to
resume her education that had been interrupted by our marriage ten years
earlier. He liked playschool,
particularly the midmorning “juicy ‘freshments.”
·
While getting
ready for a business trip, I knocked my tennis racket from a shelf as I removed
luggage from the entryway closet.
Marty, about three years old, exclaimed, “Your football bat fell out!”
·
”Hiyo!
Silverware!” was Marty’s version of the Lone Ranger’s
cry as he galloped away on his famous horse.
·
Marty stood
outside a closed bathroom door about bedtime one evening while visiting Tolar
relatives and called in to Sherry, his teenaged cousin, “Get your shirt on
and come out of there!” A shocked
Sherry, brushing her teeth, asked how he knew she didn’t have her pajama top
on. “I’m peeking through the keyhole,” Marty replied.
·
We took the kids to
SIX FLAGS OVER TEXAS
the summer before Marty started to school.
They had a great time, but the fun was marred at the “log ride,” with
Marty in front; when the log hit the water at the bottom of the slide, we were
all thrown forward, pushing Marty into the “dashboard,” bloodying his
nose. He took the mishap in stride and
“soldiered” on.
Several kid-invented
expressions were added to the family
vocabulary as they grew, and we “imported” some invented by cousins:
·
We didn’t understand
what Marty wanted when he asked for a “meat string,” until he said he needed to remove a particle of
meat from between two of his teeth; he had noticed our use of dental floss for
that purpose.
·
Corn on the cob was
“corn in the cups.”
·
Any item that tasted
very good was “talicious.” I think
Vicky was responsible for coining that pronunciation. If she forgot something, she said she couldn’t “bemember.” [At a much younger age, when learning to
talk, Vicky had said, “Tah chew,” for “Thank you.” I still use the term in a
shortened version, “Tach.”]
·
Twila’s two older boys
(Norm and Dara) introduced two expressions, one of which makes sense, one of
which doesn’t: (1) Norm, voluntarily
coming in from playing outside one evening, explained that the kids had to quit
playing because they “got darked on.” (2) Their
name for water storage towers was “ant plugs.” I have no
idea of the origin of that appellation; it must have come from the same place
Twila and I had gotten “gobboons” (for commodes) a generation earlier.
·
We adopted my cousin
Sherry’s “I’ve dined a’clenty” (dined a’plenty) expression. She was only seven when our kids started
coming along, so still used some of her childhood mispronunciations.
◊◊◊
The girls began piano
lessons as second
graders. Vicky’s first teacher was Miss
Mabel Burford, a blind lady who lived at 1226 Sayles Boulevard,
only a few blocks from our house on Ross Avenue, then, after moving to Glenwood
Drive, we lined her up with Les Rowland, who had played professionally with big
bands for many years, but had tired of that life and returned to Abilene to
teach music.
Terry started piano lessons with Les
Rowland. Both girls
did well under his tutelage, and continued to study under him until we left
Abilene. Arlette and I liked him for
two reasons – he was a great teacher and he came to students’ houses instead of
requiring them to come to his; the convenience was worth our enduring his
cigarette smoke
Arlette resumed her college
education at the start of the 1960 fall term (over ten years after she had done
her freshman year at Howard Payne); Marty was enrolled in playschool, thereby
freeing her for activities away from home.
She matriculated at McMurry College.
She spread three years of
coursework over a four-year period. She
scheduled her classes, insofar as possible, during morning hours, then did
housework and studied during afternoon and evening hours. She burned lots of midnight oil, but
received her degree in May, 1964, qualified to teach elementary school
students.
Her teacher’s certificate provided far
better insurance than I could have afforded, at much less cost. I borrowed funds to pay for her tuition and
books at the start of each term, but repaid each short-term note before
term’s-end, so we had no outstanding debt when she graduated.
Arlette usually shopped for
groceries at M-SYSTEM, but decided to try SUPER DUPER at its
grand opening, when free banana splits were offered to all who came. She and the kids accepted the proffered treats
as they entered, consuming them as they walked the aisles filling their cart.
Marty pushed an empty
cardboard box ahead of their grocery cart, so didn’t finish his banana split as
quickly as Arlette and the girls did; he was still eating when they disposed of
their dishes and spoons. Ultimately,
however, after Arlette noticed Marty no longer had his dish in hand, she spied
a partially consumed banana split on a nearby shelf, assumed it was Marty’s and
proceeded to finish it off, using the spoon left with it. As they turned the corner at the end of the
aisle, she saw a partially eaten banana split in the box Marty was
pushing. She said, “Oh! Marty, someone
thought that box was for trash and put his banana split in it.” Marty replied, “No, Mom, that’s mine.”
Arlette was dumfounded,
wondering whose cast aside treat she had consumed and imagining the germs she
might have ingested. Everyone in sight
looked disreputable and unhealthy. She
was seized by a powerful impulse to be to rid of the contents of her stomach,
but discovered the urge to purge isn’t always
accompanied by a return of the swallow.
Fortunately, mental
discomfort was the only ill effect she suffered. Since that occasion she has made certain of the origins of the
treats she eats.
I never took vacations during our plant’s annual two-week shutdown, because (1) most of
my department had to work during the first week of those shutdowns (preparing
and distributing paychecks for the previous workweek) and (2) someone needed to
be available in case of emergencies. I
worked during shutdown periods every year we lived in Abilene, taking my
vacations at other times (but usually during summertime, when our kids were out
of school).
I spent one vacation boxing in exposed rafters and painting the trim on
our house, but we usually left town to visit relatives in Odessa and
Tolar. We visited Twila and her family
in Dalton, Georgia in 1961 and 1962. The 1961
Georgia trip was purely vacation; the 1962 visit came as we returned homeward
from a combination business and vacation venture (we took vacation days to
drive to my Connecticut assignment, then, after completing that assignment, returned
home in a zigzag route including Niagara Falls, Washington D.C., and several
days in Dalton).
During our visits to Dalton we took the kids on side trips to Atlanta,
Fort Mountain State Park, the Civil War battlefield at Chickamauga, and Lookout
Mountain at Chattanooga. Marty, still a
pre-schooler, particularly enjoyed Chickamauga; cannons spread around the area
(each with a nearby mound of cannon balls) made him want to restart the “War
between the States.”
Twila and John took Arlette and me to Chattanooga one evening to see a
“wrap-around” wide-screen movie; Twila’s good friend, Camille Cronk – a
designer for one of Dalton’s carpet manufacturers – stayed with the kids. I don’t recall anything about the movie, but
the accompanying features were great fun – particularly those filmed with
cameras mounted on the front of a roller coaster and in the nose of an airplane
flying through the Grand Canyon; resultant “free-flying” sensations caused
Arlette and Twila to hide their faces and grasp the arms of their theater seats
to keep from falling out. John and I
nearly fell out of our seats laughing at them.
We enjoyed our two summer visits with Twila and her family, but neither
was without pain (either physical or emotional):
◊◊◊
We visited Tolar frequently
on holidays, and sometimes left the kids there for a week or more. On one such occasion, when Marty was still
young enough that he didn’t always speak plainly, the Tolarites asked (when we
picked the kids up) what he could have meant when he told them he’d “been
pankin’.” We
ultimately concluded he was trying to say he meant “been painting,” for their
visit followed a time during which I had painted our house in Abilene (and they
remembered seeing him use a small brush to “paint” their car wheels with
water).
One family visit to Tolar featured a trick on my mother by
our kids, who had purchased what appeared to be a partially melted Eskimo Pie
at a Stuckey’s store (it was actually painted plastic on a
stick). After reaching Tolar, they went
to Virgil’s store to get real Eskimo Pies, returned while still eating (making
sure their grandmother saw what they had), slipped into her bedroom and placed
the fake Eskimo Pie on the nice bedspread, then patiently waited until Mother,
a stickler for cleanliness and order, went into her bedroom, saw the besmirched
bedspread, and yelped about the “mess.”
The kids could hardly contain their mirth.
July 4 and Christmas
usually found us in Tolar. July 4
celebrations most often featured steaks from my dad’s big outdoor grill; our
family, plus Ruth, Virgil, and Sherry would gather with my parents around their
dining table, then feast on grilled steaks and accompanying delights prepared
by Mother and Ruth. [Christmas
celebrations at Ruth’s and Virgil’s larger house, where the same group
gathered, could consume hours in opening gifts (but much less time in consuming
the turkey, dressing, and other delectables at mealtime).]
[We continued visiting Tolar on most Independence Day and
Christmas holidays even after moving to Little Rock in 1964, until our elders
reached ages where hosting such events was too burdensome. The group became quite large after Sherry
married David Maddox and ultimately had four children.]
◊◊◊
We tried to keep travel
from boring the kids by playing a game I call “Highway Phonics;” it was both fun and educational. As we moved along highways and streets I
would read signs and billboards phonetically backwards, then they would try to
figure out what I read as they viewed the passing signs. The girls enjoyed the game; Marty, of
course, was too young to participate, but his interest in learning to read was
piqued by the fun he saw the rest of us having.
Some signs were easy to
pronounce and figure out, even when read phonetically backwards; others were
not so easy. Several examples follow,
ranging from very easy to more difficult:
FORWARD BACKWARD
SLOW WOLS
SPEED LIMIT 65 56
TIMIL DEEPS
STANTON NOTNATS
CONOCO GASOLINE ENILOSAG
OCONOC
TEXACO GASOLINE ENILOSAG
OCAXET
GOOD GULF GASOLINE ENILOSAG
FLUG DOOG
SWEETWATER RETAWTEEWS
DRIVE SLOWLY YLWOLS
EVIRD
BIG SPRING GNIRPS
GIB
MEN WORKING GNIKROW
NEM
Consonant blends were a
problem; Vicky remembers having trouble getting “Big Spring” out of my “nurps
gib” clue. “Nikrow nem” was probably
equally difficult, but I have no specific memory about it.
My idea for the game
originated from college days, when for a time several friends called me “Nek
Rellim,” reversing the spelling of Ken Miller.
I also reversed the word order for the “Highway Phonics” game with the
kids – seemed to make it more fun. We
spent many riding hours at the game when the kids were in elementary school.
[Years
later, when Stephen (Marty’s oldest child) was in elementary school, I
introduced “Pig Latin” to him using names and
words from business signs along the streets of San Antonio. Some signs were hilarious when spoken in my
version of Pig Latin, and, of course, were a “no pain” aid to learning our
language. I regretted, when I saw how
much Stephen enjoyed the “game,” that I hadn’t thought of it when our kids were
little, for I’m sure they would have found it equally enjoyable.]