Following in parental footsteps

I grew up in a small town where the major employers were a state college and a state prison. Most female students majored in teacher education or home economics but were actually working on their MRS. hoping to marry a business  or agriculture major.

The inmates on the prison farms outside of town worked in the fields tending crops or in warehouses manufacturing the goods the state prison system needed to be self-sufficient. Oh, and the penitentiary housed "Old Sparky," the electric chair that took the lives of the most dangerous and least rehabilitative criminals until 1964 (the year I graduated from high school) when death by electrocution was struck down by the Supreme Court. Most of the convicts on death row were murderers or rapists, but none were women. Karla Faye Tucker was the first woman put to death in Texas by lethal injection in 1998. She found Jesus in prison and became born again, but then Governor George Bush chose to deny her clemancy. Texas today ranks third for giving death sentences to female offenders, and more white women are sentenced to death than women of color--which, by the way, is the opposite for male felons.

My father taught teacher education at the college. Sam Houston State Teachers College was the name of the institution when he started his career there. The name changed to Sam Houston State College in 1965 (and has since become a univesity rather than a college). If you were a teacher or principal in a Houston school or anywhere in East Texas, chances were excellent that Professor Thomas Murray taught you educational psychology or supervised your student teaching.

Education continues to be the most popular major among students today, and the university also boasts of its nationally acclaimed criminal justice program, which in 1970 became one of the first to offer a Ph.D. in criminal justice. My mother, who became the first superintendent of schools within Texas Department of Corrections in 1968, served as an interim professsor of criminal justice at Sam. For the record, my mother built a school system known for reducing recidivism through education and the Dr. Lane Murray Unit outside Gatesville, TX, is named in her honor.

Is it any wonder that my older brother and I went to college in our hometown? Stone worked as a guard at the prison while going to school and eventually became a parole officer in Dallas County. While in college, he dated home economics and elementary education majors, but found his wife in far-off Virginia. I became a teacher in Spring Branch ISD and then a college professor for several colleges in Harris County, the last being Lone Star College.

My younger brother Mark broke the pattern, went to the University of Texas and became a lawyer. Mother always said he was the smartest kid in the family. For sure he landed the most lucrative career, but I'm not convinced it is the most satisfying.


What were the main industries in your hometown? How did your parents' careers influence your choices?

Love Bug

The summer before I entered high school my parents went to New Orleans on a couple’s vacation—meaning none of us three kids accompanied them—and they returned in a matador red 1960 Volkswagen convertible with a tan rag top and tan interior. Anyone who attended Huntsville High School during the 1960s remembers that snappy little foreign car. She was the first VW to appear in my hometown, and made quite an impression on the townsfolk.

I learned to drive in that car, with its stick shift and rear engine. Like many classmates, I took driver’s education from Coach Lewis and got my license when I was fourteen years old. The Volkswagen was like riding around in a pregnant roller-skate. But my, oh my, what great mileage it got! With gas at 29.9 cents per gallon, we could drive around all night—even travel to the next town and home again—for less than a dollar.

My older brother was seventeen when my folks brought home that red bug. He was dating the newspaper editor’s daughter and the first time Stone drove the convertible over to pick her up for a date, her father wanted to know what he was doing in one of Hitler’s cars, asked him if we’d become communists.

The scariest and most exhilarating time in the car had to be the night my younger brother played car tag with his friends. Eight of us were crammed in that little bug with its top down—two in the front seats, three in the backseat and three of us sitting across the back and hanging on for dear life by grabbing the canvas convertible top. Mark easily drove 40-50 mph, careening down side streets through dark neighborhoods, twice dousing the headlights, trying to escape our pursuers. I have no idea what would have happened if we’d been caught, either by the other kids in their cars or by the local police, but I believe we are lucky to have lived to tell the tale.

My brothers taught me how to disconnect the speedometer cables so our parents wouldn’t know I drove to Trinity to buy beer, or to Conroe to see a boyfriend, or to the rock quarry to swim in the moonlight. Most of the time, though, I parked that sweet ride at the Tastee Freeze where my girlfriends and I drank Cokes and flirted with boys who cruised by real slow.

Both brothers and I drove that car throughout our high school years, and I took it to Austin for the semester my dad sent me to University of Texas to experience Southwest Conference football. By then, first gear didn’t work anymore, so uphill streets with stop signs had to be avoided. (I learned that lesson the hard way.)

When I got out of college, the first car I bought was a Volkswagen. An air-conditioned 1967 Beetle, it cost around $1,800. I was teaching at Spring Woods High School in Houston, and my students placed a TIGERPOWER bumper-sticker across the back. Following that, I owned several other Volkswagens, including two VW buses, but my favorite was that 1960 convertible. I was sad when the last Beetle rolled off the Puebla, Mexico, assembly line in the summer of 2003. The end of a groovy era.

Now, I drive a Mini Cooper.

Games children play

Sunlight, dappling through the copse of aspen, warms my skin as I lie in a nest of pungent pine needles, aspen leaves, and Douglas fir. I've dragged the 1920s Victrola record player from the three-room log cabin where we vacation every summer, wound the handle, and placed my father's favorite 78 rpm vinyl record on the turntable. Sousa's "Stars and Stripes Forever" reverberates among the mountains surrounding me, giving the chimpmonks their marching orders. I tap the cadence on my tummy, and watch, through slitted eyelids, the pillowy clouds shapeshift into ponies, bears, hoot owls, and unicorns.

The slam of a wood frame screen door and the maniacal whoops of two boys cut through the music.

"Find her!"

These two words, ordered by my older brother, bring me to my feet. I know they have their birthday BB guns and I know I'm the target. I take off, running like the summer wind through the trees and up the mountain behind our cabin. But I cannot outrun the copper-plated iron pellets. I hear the pump and pop of the guns first, and then the stinging between my shoulder blades on the tender skin covering my spine. Primal fear sticks in my throat, strangling my scream. Like the shape of the shapeshifting clouds, I become a hunted animal.

I lose myself in the trees and circle around to the cabin. Ripping open the screen door, I fly, as if on the wings of a unicorn, inside to my daddy's protectived arms.

"What's wrong, honey?" he asks, giving me a comforting hug.

I hear my brothers trying to catch their breath outside on the porch. I imagine I can smell their sweat, but it's my own stink of fear that I'm inhaling.

I know I'm not supposed to tattle on my brothers, but the words spill out: "The boys..."

Like the two words my brother Stone uttered that sent me running, I can hear Stone and Mark scamper off the porch. I'm sure they've sprinted across the meadow in front of the cabin and are headed for the river banks of the Red River.

They don't come back until late afternoon, but when they do, my daddy confiscates the rifles. "Your sister is not a target. You were supposed to shoot at the paper targets we got you, not each other."

My daddy was my protector. And even though I've learned to protect myself, I miss him so much.

Happy Father's Day, Daddy.

Porch sitting

My sweetie and I are trying to perfect the art of porch sitting. We have three porches attached to our 1875 Victorian home in Navasota, Texas: a downstairs front porch, a back porch, and an upstairs porch. It is the upstairs porch where we sit and have morning coffee that brings us the most pleasure these days.

We count the trucks, cars, SUVs, motorcycles, bicycles  and people on foot to determine which is the most popular form of transportation. Answer: pickup trucks are three times more popular than anything else on the street, and Ford 150s are the most favored although Ram and Tacoma are gaining popularity.

We also pay attention to who's going to work, taking their kids to school, making a run to the grocery store; who's out for exercise and who's out to play. In a small town everyone is supposed to know everyone else's business, so we're just trying to keep up.

But there's more to do than counting vehicles and people watching. Yesterday, for example, we noticed the wasps are coming back. Last summer we had a slew of wasps that built nests under our eaves and between the windowpanes and screens. I'm not kidding--we easily had a dozen nests connected to our 2-story house. I really didn't want to see another dozen replace the ones that winter destroyed.

My introduction to wasps occurred when I was around five years old. My two brothers and I discovered a hive of hornets under the roof of a neighbor's porch. My older brother Stone charged in and poked the nest with a stick. In those days, I'd follow my older brother anywhere, so I ran up the porch steps as he retreated. The hornets flew at me and despite my trying to bat them away, I got stung on my neck. My younger brother Mark watched and decided to stay as far away as he could. Is it any surprise he grew up to be the smartest?

My sweetie remembers being stung as well when he was climbing a tree and upset a nest of yellow jackets. He was stung on his head, his back, and his arms before he flung himself from the branches and ran like the wind to escape those flying warriors.

We talked yesterday about the returning wasps and what we could do to deter them. After much discussion, we decided it might be best that we give them a wide birth.  Wasps, you see, eat those other pesky insects, like spiders. I'd rather put up with a few wasps than face a Black Widow spider...  which wasps love to eat as much as I love Blue Bell ice cream. Just saying.

Hometown memories

I'm facilitating a workshop at Story Circle Network's national conference today. The topic is "Home is Where the Heart Is," and I've been thinking about the different places I've lived, the different homes I've had, and that thinking led to the idea that one's hometown is the larger home that we all share.

Songwriters have certainly used the hometown theme to evoke strong emotional memories. The first, "Home Sweet Home," was written over 190 years ago by John Howard Payne about his early life at his grandfather's house in East Hampton, Maine.

More recently, Eric Church's "Give Me Back My Hometown" is a bittersweet ballad of faded love and bright memories. The lyrics are emblematic of every small town across the south and southwest.

I was born on an Army-Air base in upstate New York at the end of World War II, but I grew up in Texas and call Huntsville my hometown. There is a state college and a state prison in my hometown. The college, a university now, was the first teacher-training school in the southwest United States. The state prison housed the electric chair where 361 convicts died between 1924 and 1964. Most kids' parents worked at one of these institutions.

My dad was hired to teach at the college in 1949 after receiving his graduate degree from Harvard University in teacher education. When a colleague who was showing him around found out he was Catholic, the colleague turned a stone ear to any more conversation. It was awkward, to say the least. My brothers and I were oblivious to this act of unkindness. As we each entered school through the next five years, we took our turn to pray over the loud speaker which carried the message through classroom intercoms. We were supposed to write a prayer, but sometimes I forgot and so I would say one I knew from memory. Looking back, I'm sure more than one teacher, most likely a Southern Baptist or a deacon in the Church of Christ, trembled and quaked when I began reciting "Hail Mary, full of grace...." But if anyone gave me even a disapproving look, I don't remember. God looks after the innocent children.

We lived in five houses, from 1949-1967, while I was living at home full time, or hanging out between college semesters.

Our first home was a rehabbed army barracks in a place called Country Campus, east of Huntsville on Hwy 19. It had been a prisoners of war camp during the war and turned into faculty housing for a time afterwards. Families came together for family picnics. I remember watermelon, iced down in galvanized tubs, and eating out the hearts. I remember spitting seeds or taking a few and planting them. I remember hand-churned ice cream parties and adding fresh peaches or strawberries to the mix. I remember dirt-daubers and honey bees, and I remember getting stung more than once while tagging after my brothers. Today there's an 18-hole golf course there, but nothing much else.

Our second home was in town. In 1952, we moved into a two-story brick house on 15th Street. My older brother talked my younger brother into jumping off the second story soon after we'd seen Peter Pan. Stone convinced Mark he could fly, but of course, he could not. Mark missed the concrete patio by about ten inches and because he was five and still growing his bones, he suffered only a sprained ankle. God looks after the innocent children, indeed.

Our third home was across town near the college. My dad was not ready to cash in his GI bill for a mortgage, so we stayed in what my older brother called the "slump," the combination of a dump and a slum. It was in the living room of this house where my dad offered me the humongous amount of one hundred dollars to read ten books over the summer between my third and fourth grade in school. It was in the living room of this house where my older brother gave me a black eye for turning the TV channel. It was in the living room of this house that my younger brother watched Saturday westerns while dressed in his fringed Roy Rogers cowboy outfit with his 6-shooter guns strapped on.

Our fourth home was across from Piggly Wiggly grocery store. It was my favorite. Maybe because Johnny Campbell taught me how to kiss in that backyard. Probably because several other boys kissed me in the driveway and on the front porch, but none was as loved as Jimmy Scott. Both Johnny and Jimmy were victims of Vietnam. Johnny's plane crashed in the Indian Ocean; Jimmy took his own life when he couldn't re-adjust to civilian life after his year-long tour, which consisted mostly of sending home the dead in body bags.

Our fifth home was an old Victorian house next to the Methodist Church. It had stained glass windows, mahogany sliding doors, wide wrap-around porches, 15-foot ceilings, and a staircase built by convict labor in the 1800s.  In 1971 I got married in that home. My dad was walking me down the stairs when he whispered, "We can keep walking, honey, and go right out that front door." I thought it was a bad joke, but I should have listened--the marriage lasted only 5 years.

Interstate 45 bypasses Huntsville, and the town has grown toward the freeway. The drugstore and clothiers around the courthouse have been replaced by "antique" stores, filled mostly with second hand furniture, Fiesta dishware, art decor perfume bottles, mismatched china, crocheted lace doilies, plastic dolls, wooden trains, and  Mexican pottery. My parents are dead and so are a number of my friends. Most of those who are still living have moved away, many to the suburbs of Dallas or Houston, but some live out of state, one as far away as Alaska. I'll return to Huntsville this summer for my 50th high school class reunion. I'm amazed, and heartened, by how many are coming. There is no doubt, we'll listen to the music of Eric Church, and through the fragments of our shared memories, take back our hometown.


Where is your hometown?