FOREWORD
Some people live life in the fast lane. I haven’t.
I prefer the lesser roads, both literally and figuratively, where,
because of slower traffic, I can more fully enjoy my journey; furthermore, life
in the slower lanes is more in keeping with my heritage.
◊◊◊
My parents were the children of neighboring farmers in the
Acton community, five or six miles east of Granbury, the seat of Hood County, Texas. The railroad and major highways missed
Acton, so its lanes and roadways were unpaved until well into the twentieth
century.
◊◊◊
My maternal grandfather (Oscar R. Grammer) grew up
on a farm near Woodville, Alabama; at seventeen, he came to Texas with an older
brother (Walter). He was lean and wiry,
about five feet, eight inches tall, and had lost little of his dark hair when
he died in 1942 at the age of sixty-six.
He was a Methodist.
My paternal grandfather (Louis Marion Miller) was
born in Lynnville, Indiana during the Civil War, and as a teenager came to
Texas with his parents. He was of
medium height and build, wore a full mustache, had graying hair (with a bald
spot at the crown of his head), and died in 1953 at the age of
eighty-nine. He was a member of the
Church of Christ.
Ë
Both of my grandmothers grew up in Texas. My maternal grandmother (Bess Stribling
Grammer) lived all her life in
Hood County; her dad, James Hodges
Stribling, served as Hood County sheriff for a time. She was a lifelong Baptist; her paternal grandparents (David
Sloan and Joanne Hodges Stribling) were charter members of Acton Baptist Church. She was short and round, with dark
hair. She died in 1945, at age 66.
My paternal grandmother (Julia Goodwin Miller) was
born in Reagan (Falls County), Texas, but lived most of her life in Hood County. She grew up in the Baptist church, but
attended the Church of Christ after she married my granddad; as a child she was
in “Grandma” (Joanne Hodges) Stribling’s Sunday School class at Acton Baptist
Church. She was tall, with very dark
red hair that had begun to turn gray by the time I came along. She died in 1949, two weeks before she would
have turned 83.
Ë
My maternal grandparents met when my granddad was working
the Acton community as a door-to-door “drummer,” or traveling salesman; they
lived at Acton for all but brief periods of their married life. My paternal grandparents met while living in
the Waples community, north of Acton, where each lived on his/her parents’
farm; they lived in Putnam (Callahan County) for a time early in their married
life, but lived the rest of their lives in the Acton community. Both sets of grandparents are buried in the
Acton cemetery.
◊◊◊
My dad,
Louis Vernon Miller, the son of Louis Marion and Julia (Goodwin)
Miller, was born May 19, 1904; my mother, Zena Maurine (Grammer) Miller, the daughter of Oscar and Bess (Stribling)
Grammer, was born eight months later, on January 17, 1905.
Ë
My dad
was called “Brother” by his immediate family (except for my aunt Sue, who
called him “Bud”) and several relatives.
Everyone else called him by his middle name, Vernon, to distinguish him
from my granddad, who was called by their common first name, Louis. He was six feet tall, of medium build, and
weighed about 175 pounds through most of his adult life, although my mother
said he weighed as little as 155 during my early school years. He died January 16, 1985, and is buried in
the Acton cemetery.
Ë
My mother was named after her maternal grandmother, Zena
(Taylor) Stribling. She was called “Sis” by her immediate
family; everyone else called her by her middle name, Maurine, until late in her
life when she entered the Baptist Home in Ozark, Missouri, where she went by “Zena,”
in part because her first name was the one appearing on all official documents,
in part because she liked the name.
Mother was
the eldest of three “Zena” cousins, all named for their mutual grandmother, Zena
Taylor Stribling; the last of the three, Zena Stribling McAdams, was nearly
forty years younger, is still alive at this writing, and is an ordained
minister in the Disciples of Christ (Christian) Church.
Stribling
family records show Mother’s Grandmother Zena (Taylor) Stribling to have been a
great-niece of General (later President) Zachary Taylor. Her ancestry is explored later in these
writings.
Mother
was five feet four inches tall, and, except for a relatively short time in her
senior adult years, never weighed more than 110 pounds; she often weighed less
than one hundred pounds when I was a child.
She died on October 7, 2000, after I had completed the first draft of
these ramblings through life’s memories, so I’ve had to change tenses of some
verbs from present to past. Her grave
is beside my dad’s, in the Acton cemetery.
A
sobering thought is that, with Mother’s death, I became the oldest living
member of our branch of Millers. I have
a hard time envisioning myself as patriarch of the clan.
◊◊◊
My parents started school together, in the old rock schoolhouse at Acton.
Neighbors, then schoolmates, they hardly remembered a time they didn’t
know each other.
Acton Rock School and Baptist Church (Painting by
Arlette Miller)
The rock
building where my folks started school was built as a Masonic Lodge during the
years 1866-68, on land reportedly donated by Uncle Newt Goodwin, an Acton
saloonkeeper in the days of the Old West.
The school used the lower floor; the Lodge met upstairs. The old building stood unused (by either
students or Masons) for many years after a “new” school building was built
across the road, but, as Acton’s population has mushroomed following the
forming of Lake Granbury south and west of town, it has been refurbished and placed on the
register of historic Texas sites; it is an attractive structure.
My dad left school after completing the grades offered at Acton, so
didn’t finish high school, which would have required his going to Granbury,
several miles away. His first major
venture away from Acton was to attend a Ford mechanical training school in
Kansas City; he completed the training, but chose not to pursue a career in
automotive repair. By the time he was
twenty, however, he had begun the work that became his vocation; he was
employed as an apprentice tile setter by the Good Marble & Tile Company of Fort Worth, and had
completed his apprenticeship before marrying my mother on October 11, 1925.
During the years after my
parents completed Acton school, and while my dad was establishing a vocation,
Mother attended/finished Granbury High School, where she graduated with
honors. She attended Texas Women’s College
(now Texas Wesleyan University) for one year, passed the teachers’
certification test, then taught a short while at Mambrino school
before marrying my dad. (Mambrino is
another rural community in Hood County, a few miles south of Granbury, across
the Brazos River from the Acton area.)
◊◊◊
I was born in Fort Worth on September 27, 1926, and was named Kenneth
Zane. Years later, after I learned to
read and became familiar with literary personages, I asked my mother whether
she and my dad named me for Zane Grey, a popular western
novelist of the preceding several decades; she said they hadn’t even thought
about him when naming me. (I’ve often
been asked whether or not I was named after the famous writer; my response has
been that I was named after him, but not for him.)
◊◊◊
I have a sister, Twila, born August 9, 1928. She was named both after and for someone else; Mother had a
college classmate by that name, liked it, and passed it on to Twila.
◊◊◊
Twila and I called our parents “Mother” and “Daddy.” We called one set of grandparents “Mama and
Papa Miller,” the other “Mama and Papa Grammer.”
◊◊◊
I was the only grandson on
either side of the family, so had no male cousins. Although my mother and dad each had two siblings who survived
childhood (Mother’s older sister, Loyce, died of meningitis at age ten), the
six produced only five offspring who lived to adulthood (Twila and I, plus
three female cousins); one of my dad’s sisters (Sue) never married, so she was
childless; his sister Stella had one
daughter (Dean), who was ten years older than I, the oldest of my
cousins; my mother’s brother (Walter) had one daughter (Glenda), who was born when I was nine; Mother’s sister,
Ruth, has a daughter (Sherry), born the year I was seventeen.
Ë
I’m sure the Great
Depression was a factor in the small sizes of the families my parents and their
siblings produced, but I never heard the subject discussed.