My
fifty-plus years of marriage to the same lady demonstrate more than simple
compliance with vows made in conformance with scriptural principles, for I’m a person
who, having found the best way to do something, sees no reason to do it
otherwise. Examples other than
constancy in marriage include the following:
·
I like constant clothing styles. I didn’t like “zoot suits” of World War II years, whose trousers had baggy
upper legs and ankle-tight cuffs. I’ve
never liked wide ties, which go in and out of style. Recent years have brought clothing styles I’ve liked least of all
– oversized shirts; sometimes I think boys will wear only two sizes – too large
and much too large.
·
I become “attached” to clothing, and hang on to favored
items. I have a pair of overalls I remember wearing on the HPC campus in 1944; I gave them to my
aunt Sue after my college days, but they were returned to me after her
death. I have two pairs of wingtip
dress shoes I purchased at least thirty years ago; I wore them for work and
dress for many years, and still wear them occasionally. I have almost all the neckties I’ve ever
owned (I’ve given away a few).
·
I objected, but gave in, several years ago when Arlette
decided our living room furniture arrangement should, after many years, be
changed; she didn’t succumb, in that instance, to my standard question, “When
you’ve gotten things right, why change them?”
·
I’m not crazy about most changes in men’s hairstyles since
the ‘60s. Every time I see an old movie
produced before the ‘60s I realize anew that men once looked uniformly neat, in
contrast to many today who don’t; I’m continually amazed to see men with hair
hanging over their collars. Deterioration in tonsorial care apparently began as
expressions of rebellion against adult/parental authority in the ‘60s, but what
I thought then was a fad has continued into the 21st century.
As one
concession to modern times, I like wearing my hair without added oil; I used to
leave oily spots on nearly everything my head touched. (Unfortunately, the “dry look” didn’t work well for me
when I worked in air-conditioned, low-humidity offices – static electricity
made my hair look wild if I’d washed it before going to work in the morning.)
I’m not resistant to all change, for I like
improvements – but I am resistant to change for change’s sake (i.e., change
without sufficient grounds therefor). A
related characteristic is that I’m a “string-saver;” I seldom discard anything immediately upon
discontinuing its use, always thinking I might have a need for it some
day. I try to store items saved against
future need in logical places, but often discover, when an actual need arises,
that I’ve only managed to lose the needed item systematically. (One can see the difference between
“string-savers” and their less cautious neighbors by comparing trash barrels
standing at the curb on collection days; ours is seldom full, while those of
other households of comparable size are often overflowing.)
My ranking on life’s totem
pole has rarely, if ever, concerned me.
I’ve had no desire to be included in “Who’s Who” listings; “Who’s Not” (or maybe “Who’s He?”) was good enough for me. Nevertheless, I don’t consider myself
unimportant or a nonentity, nor do I believe others think I view myself as
being without consequence; rather, I’m sure my “certainty of expression”
sometimes makes others believe I think too well of myself. I defend those “certainties” by contending
that one could hardly have lived three-quarters of a century without acquiring
strong beliefs and convictions.
I’ve been accused of being
opinionated. I
plead guilty, but no more so than most of my accusers, for the alternative is
to be wishy-washy, without opinions – which implies either ignorance or apathy,
neither of which is anything to brag about.
◊◊◊
My core principles derive from a conservative upbringing, observation of the world in
which I’ve lived, and biblical teachings.
I’ve tried to live up to the standards demanded by those core principles,
but I’ve often failed; I apologize to anyone adversely affected by those
failures.
I suspect my greatest failures
have involved interpersonal relations.
I make no excuses for those failures, but perhaps I can partially
explain them. First, I don’t really notice
people closely, yet one needs to be “tuned in” to develop people-skills;
second, I’m not a highly social person.
Both characteristics can only be acknowledged, not defended.
Arlette sometimes accuses me
of being anti-social. I counter with
the claim that I am non-social, not anti-social; I like people, but don’t
usually need them around me. That I
could like people but be non-social may seem anomalous, yet it’s true.
Lacking in social skills, I’m
not a “joiner.” I’ve never been active
in clubs or fraternal orders. I joined
professional societies in my working years only because employers expected me
to. I have joked that the biblical
admonition to “forsake not the assembling of yourselves together” is the only
reason I go to church each week (I hope no one has ever taken me seriously when
I’ve said that!).
Although non-social in the
broader senses just discussed, I’m not that way with regard to family; family has
made life and work worthwhile. In
earlier segments of this writing I’ve noted that my marriage to Arlette,
followed by the arrival of three children over the next seven years, provided
great motivation for a “pursuit of excellence.”
During my first pass through college I joked about becoming “an educated
bum,” but I found a job as quickly as possible
after graduation and performed reasonably well thereon; however, I had no
motivation then comparable to the urgency that accompanied acquisition of wife
and children.
I don’t begrudge the loss of
anything that supporting a family may have cost me (e.g., the expenses of
putting Arlette and three children through college may have prevented our doing
things we could have done had education not had the higher priority, but I’d
make the same choices if I had to make them again).
I can’t imagine fulfillment
comparable to that provided by hearth and home. Life’s events, holidays, and special occasions are memorable
because family and relatives are involved.
In spite of the importance of
family to me, I don’t need someone around at all times, for I can be
entertained by reading, radio, music, work, and television; however, that
entertainment is meaningful only in the larger context of interpersonal family
relationships. I couldn’t have enjoyed
life fully without wife, family, and relatives (I respect those who can, but I
don’t envy them).
Family and home are almost
synonymous to me. The roads I travel
these days seem always to lead home, where I can stay days without leaving; I
consider that one of the greatest blessings of retirement. Some might call such a life lonely and
boring, but I call it peaceful. I keep
up with the world through the Internet, radio, reading, and TV, and Arlette is
about the only company I need.
My non-social personality may
have limited the number of close acquaintances I’ve had, but hasn’t limited my
enjoyment therefrom. I’ve particularly
enjoyed those whom I knew and liked well enough to tease; I hope those I’ve
teased realized I wouldn’t have teased them had I not liked them.
Brian
Wilson, in a February 27, 2001 segment of Fox News Channel’s “SPECIAL REPORT
with Brit Hume” regarding President George W. Bush’s propensity for assigning nicknames,
stated that “Texans tend to pick on those they like, and ignore those they
don’t.” Brian himself is a Texan; I
don’t know whether that makes him an authority on Texans, but I’m an ex-Texan
who wouldn’t argue with him.
Twila,
twenty-two months younger than I, was a primary target of my teasing when we were kids (I noted a major example in the “ACTIVITIES
AND EVENTS AROUND ACTON” segment).
Later, college girls mentioned my teasing in
notes they wrote in my Lasso (Howard Payne’s annual). Post-college, I've been teasing Arlette for over fifty-five years; I recounted in an earlier
segment the trick Bill O’Brien and
I pulled on her when we were dating, when I had him call and tell her I’d been
transferred to Chicago. That wasn’t the
last time I did or said something in fun that might have risked trouble for me:
·
While living in Austin I took Arlette by the downtown YWCA
building, which had a giant “WOMANS
EXCHANGE” sign painted across the top of
its north wall. I told her she had
better be good, or I’d take her there and trade her for another. She didn’t act worried.
·
Arlette probably wanted to trade me for another one evening
in Fort Worth when, lying on our bed reading, I asked her to bring some item to
me. The hour was late and her day of
keeping up with two small kids had been tiring, so, impatient with my laziness,
she exclaimed, “I have to wait on you hand and foot!” I responded, “Yeah, you wait for me to get home with my pay check and hand it to you, so you can hotfoot away to spend it.” Instead of becoming angry, she got so
tickled at the play on words that she lost the impatience I had engendered by
my request for “maid service.”
Writing
about a birthday anniversary reminds me of a company financial conference I
attended years ago, at which the leader demonstrated the statistical
probability that “at least two people in any random group of twenty-five or
more will have been born on the same day of the same month” by asking each
participant to tell the month and date of his birth; sure enough, two of us
(one of my successors as accounting manager at the TIMEX plant in
Abilene and I) said we were born on September 27. Jim McColl and I, in talking later about our common
birth date and company position, also discovered we had both attended Howard
Payne College and the University of Texas, and both of our weddings took place
in Brownwood (he and Lynda at First Baptist, Arlette and I in First Methodist’s
prayer chapel).
As a non-social person who has
eschewed life’s fast lane I’ve seen few famous people in
person, and have talked with none. I
met Joe DiMaggio on
a New York sidewalk while walking with two friends near the theater district
late one evening. That’s about as close
as I’ve gotten to famous sports personalities, but he was a great one to come
close to; “Joltin’ Joe” was one of the best athletes who ever lived.
I’ve
only met one athlete of even moderate fame.
Joe Boyd, named to at
least one All-American squad while playing tackle on Texas A & M’s national
championship team of 1939, was a next-door neighbor (in La Marque) of J.E.
“Hoppy” Hopkins, one of my
1947/48 college roommates; I met Joe when he came to Brownwood to visit
Hoppy. We talked briefly about his football
days, but his real interest then was in his full-time evangelistic team – to
which he later recruited Hoppy. I
talked briefly with Joe again in the late ‘60s, when he preached for a revival
at Little Rock’s Twelfth Street Baptist Church (now Heritage Baptist Temple on
Stagecoach Road); he brought me up to date on Hoppy, who had left his team some
years earlier to become a pastor (one pastorate was in Mesquite, Texas).
I’ve never seen a president of
the United States while or after he was in office, but I’ve seen two presidents
before they attained that office.
Future President Lyndon B. Johnson, while he was still in the United States
Congress, spoke at Howard Payne during my senior year, and Arkansas Governor
(later U.S. President) Bill Clinton campaigned through our TIMEX offices during his reelection
bid one year (I managed to avoid shaking hands). That’s about as close as I wanted to come to those two; I never
voted for either for any office.
As noted in an earlier
segment, I was working in Midland, Texas in early summer 1949, about the time
two future presidents (the elder George Bush and his family, including a
two-year-old son, George W.) moved there.
However, if I saw them, it was only in passing, and unknowingly.
I knew three young men during
my high school, college, and early working years who were destined for
substantial positions in U.S. religio/political life:
·
Cecil Sherman was
a year behind me in Fort Worth’s Polytechnic High School, and was from a
comparable middle-class family. His
uncle, Mr. John Brannon, was our teacher in the Young People’s
Sunday School department at Poly Baptist Church; Mr. Brannon often asked Cecil
to substitute for him when he had to be away.
Cecil was a superb teacher as a young man, went on to successful
pastorates, then ultimately became a leader of the moderate wing among Southern
Baptists, and was the first moderator (executive officer) of the Cooperative
Baptist Fellowship. I
haven’t seen Cecil since 1950, but have corresponded with him a few times in
recent years, as will be noted in the segment on “CIVIC AND CHURCH POLITICS”).
·
Jimmy Allen, son of a Baptist pastor in Dallas, was a
student at Howard Payne College three of the four years I was there. Jimmy also went on to successful pastorates
of Southern Baptist churches (including the First Baptist Church of San
Antonio), was the last “moderate” president of the Southern Baptist Convention before the 1979 conservative resurgence, then became a leading
participant in formation of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. I
haven’t seen Jimmy since the ‘60s when (1) he preached for revival services at
Pioneer Drive Baptist Church in Abilene and (2) he and I were on the same
flight from New York to Dallas a year or two after I left Abilene.
·
James Dunn was
Associate Pastor of Weatherford’s First Baptist Church during his student days
at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (while Arlette and I were members
at FBC). He led in formation of a new
church in Weatherford, then, after some years as a pastor and in denominational
positions, joined the Baptist Joint Committee for Public Affairs in Washington,
D.C., which he served as director for many years; he left that position to
become a professor in the Wake Forest School of Divinity. I haven’t talked with James since we left
Weatherford in 1957, but we’ve corresponded about his positions regarding
various church/state relationship matters, the most recent having been taken
during his January 19, 2001 testimony before the U.S. Senate Judiciary
Committee in connection with the nomination of former Missouri Senator John
Ashcroft as U.S. Attorney General.
I have to go back several
generations, through my great-grandmother Zena (Taylor) Stribling, to claim even distant kin to famous people. Grandmother Zena was, if I understand
relationships correctly, a direct descendant of a James Taylor who immigrated
to America from England in 1635. James
Taylor was the great-great-grandfather of Richard Taylor, an officer in the
American Revolution, whose son was General (later President) Zachary Taylor.
Although I was told as I was
growing up that my great-grandmother was related to Zachary Taylor, I thought little about her relationship
to the twelfth president of the United States until I was past seventy. My interest in what that relationship might
have been was piqued when, at the request of my mother, I found Grandmother
Zena’s gravesite in the Leakey Floral Cemetery; I recounted that event in the
“SPRINGING FORTH” section of the segment entitled “MORE RETIREMENT ACTIVITIES.”
Family records purportedly
reveal (I haven’t seen them) Zachary Taylor to
have been a great-uncle of my great-grandmother. General/President Zachary Taylor had five brothers, and a sister
who married a Taylor, so one of those siblings would have to have been a
grandparent of my great-grandmother if the purported relationship was
true. I’ve been unsuccessful at pinpointing
her branch of the Taylor family tree, which grew in Tennessee and the
Carolinas; she was born in North Carolina, was married in South Carolina to my
great-granddad, James Hodges Stribling (he returned to South Carolina following
the early death of his first wife in Texas, married Zena Taylor, and brought
her with him to Hood County).
The
following excerpt from PALUXY BAPTIST ASSOCIATION, 1880-1980, in the section on
Acton Baptist Church, by C. G. Carter, indicates the relationship of Zena
Taylor Stribling to General/President Zachary Taylor:
“...in the family record of James H. Stribling, who was born in South
Carolina May 19, 1840, and came to Texas in early life and lived many years in
the Acton Community. He and his wife, Zena (Taylor)
Stribling, great-niece of President Zachary Taylor, were the parents of
five sons and five daughters who grew up in the community.”
As noted,
the Taylor family tree from which my great-grandmother reportedly grew took
root in America with the immigration of James Taylor from England in 1635 (d.
1698) and his son James, one of whose four sons was Richard Taylor (March 14,
1674-June 22, 1729). Richard had a son
named Zachary (born in 1707, died in 1768).
That first Zachary had a son named Richard (April 3, 1744- August
19,1829), an officer in the American Revolution and father of General/President
Zachary Taylor, five other sons, and
three daughters. The presidential Zachary
had a son, Richard (a confederate general who settled in Louisiana), who had no
sons – therefore, Zena Taylor Stribling could not have been a direct descendant
of General/President Zachary Taylor.
As a
great-niece of President Taylor, Zena Taylor Stribling would have been the
granddaughter of either (1) one of the president’s five brothers or (2) his
sister, Elizabeth Lee Taylor, who married a man named John Gibson Taylor (but
whose two sons died unmarried). I have
been unable to determine which of the five brothers was Great-Grandmother
Zena’s grandparent. I found her listed
in 1860 South Carolina census records when she was eight years old, shown to be
the daughter of G.A. Taylor; I found G.A. Taylor as a nineteen year old student
in the 1850 South Carolina census, but was unable to find the names of his
parents, one of whom had to have been a sibling of the General/President. Census records prior to 1850 don’t list
names of members of households, and nothing I have found on the Internet lists
the names of children of any of President Taylor’s brothers.
Based on the
above, I am ten generations away from James Taylor, the 1635 immigrant from
England; in succession thereafter were (1) his son James, (2) Richard, (3) the
first Zachary, (4) another Richard, (5) the undetermined sibling of the
presidential Zachary, (6) G.A., (7) Zena (Taylor) Stribling, (8) Bess
(Stribling) Grammer, (9) Zena Maurine (Grammer) Miller, then (10) I.
President
Zachary (Old Rough and Ready) Taylor was described by some as the ugliest U.S.
President. Dare anyone suggest I got my
looks from the Taylor branch of my ancestry?
Actually, I
don’t think President Taylor was ugly, if he truly looked like his photograph
in my World Book Encyclopedia. The
“ugliest” comment may have been made by a political opponent.