Though I was raised during the depression, with parents who farmed and probably never had more than a few dollars in their possession at one time, I never did without. My mother, Lizzie’s canned goods were stacked up high against the bedrooms walls. She sewed everything our family wore except overalls and pants. My father, Roscoe repaired shoes, cut hair, and did any odd job he could to bring in a nickel. Mama had qualified to teach and secured a teaching position long before she married and left Virginia, but her father, the head of the school board, was too proud to have people think he couldn’t support his womenfolk, so he put a stop to that. Daddy lived on a rural homestead no access to school, except a short three months and had taught himself to read as an adult. Working as a trapper in a remote area of Northeast Texas as a young man, he tried to order some traps from the Sears and Roebuck Catalog. By return mail, he received the regretful reply that the clerk couldn’t decipher his handwriting and requested that he have someone else fill out his order for him. Determined not to embarrass himself again, he laboriously taught himself to read using the catalog as a text. Within a couple of months, he was able to place his order. He was from a family that cherished the art of storytelling and thereafter was never seen without a book. They both placed a high premium on education. We were never kept out of school to work on the farm, a common practice during the depression.

I loved my parents but, like all kids, was embarrassed about them and ashamed of being ashamed. They were well past youth when I sneaked up on them. Mama was less than five feet tall, dumpy, had lost a few teeth, with her gray hair pulled back tight in a bun. Daddy was over six feet tall, but stoop shouldered. He had smoked since he was a kid and as skinny as Ichabod Crane. He was so bow-legged he couldn’t have headed off a calf in a ditch. They looked like Jack Sprat and his wife. None of this was lost on me. I wanted them at school activities but wished them invisible, envying kids with young pretty mothers and strong, handsome fathers. While other kids had baby brothers and sisters, my folks shuffled around like grandparents. From a kid’s perspective, my parents just hadn’t done that well. It didn’t matter that Mama had been a school teacher and Daddy was one of the most well-read and intelligent men around and that ours was one of the most well-respected families in the community. They were old and poor. Anne and John were much older, had joined the army, and were working their way through school on the GI Bill and were anxious to help me get through college. I yearned for a better, more cultured life and meant to have it.

An avid reader, I immersed myself in the Bronte’s, Forever Amber, Gone with the Wind, and Sinclair Lewis. Sometimes I was even able to get out of a little work by claiming I was reading for school, but I had to be careful not to pull that too often. Misbegotten and wasted on the farm, I tolerated my oafish family with grace, wise enough to keep my mouth shut about “the truth”. I’d even gotten a little firsthand exposure to town life when Mama and I boarded in town so I could finish my last two years of high school. Grandpa let Mama and me stay in Uncle Herb’s house on his place after he went in the service. It was a cute little house with indoor plumbing and electricity, a nice change from an outhouse and kerosene lamps. We went home to be with Daddy on the weekends, but before long, Daddy was likely to ride in with the mailman in the evenings and catch a ride home in the morning. Going to the movies every time the picture changed, window-shopping on the Square, and strolling to the drug store for ice cream was the way to go. Feeling especially cultured one fine day, I plunked down my baby-sitting money and bought a can of caviar at the Mercantile. Rushing home, I spread it on crackers and was devastated to find it repulsive, fishy and salty. Disappointed in it and myself, I was disgusted when my ignorant, countrified mother announced it was “pretty good on pinto beans.”

I know Mama must have loved living in town, too, but, after a few months, Anne got out of the Army and came back to her old job at the telephone company. I felt a little sorry for Mama, but I didn’t regret seeing the back of her headed back down the road to Cuthand after they’d helped Anne and me move into the hotel where we’d board in a big corner room on the second floor. Anne had left home when I was only six to join Neighborhood Youth Corps, one of Roosevelt’s New Deal Programs. We were getting reacquainted now as young women of seventeen and twenty-seven. The war had just ended. The depression was over. It was an exciting time to be starting out.

I went to school and worked Saturdays and till eight a few nights a week at one of the restaurants on the Square in Clarksville, Texas, counting on the free meal that came with my shift and the discount just as much as the pay and tips. I’d load up on the free meal, and then when Anne and I came in for breakfast, we’d order the cheapest item on the menu, two eggs and an order of fries. Eventually, we slipped a hot plate into our room and were able to cut our food budget even further.

I’d gotten hooked on murder mysteries. Probably not the best choice for a teenager alone  in the evenings till Annie got in after midnight. Just in case I’d not gotten enough fear fuel from the murder mysteries, Mama had forewarned and frequently reminded me that murderers, lechers, and perverts waited around every corner, just waiting to get at my tender flesh. Naturally, in the language of the day, the mysteries and Mama’s descriptions of exactly what murderers, lechers, and perverts did to tender flesh was heavy on blood and gore and left the sexual details to imagination and innuendo. Night after night, I’d lock myself in the room after my shift ended at eight, waiting for Anne to get in. The rooms didn’t have private bathrooms, just separate men’s and women’s toilet and shower rooms on each floor. I had no intention of journeying down that long, dark hall to fall into the clutches of a murderer, lecher, or pervert. It also concerned me that each room had a transom for ventilation over the door, but there wasn’t a lot I could do about that.

I needed to be at school at seven one morning, so really needed to get to bed early. Like careless people inevitably do, Anne and I had managed to get down to sharing one key, which of course I had. I was concerned that Anne might not be able to wake me to get in, so I reasoned I could tie a string on my toe, run it out the transom, and tie it on the door knob. She could just pull it to wake me. How could it fail? Easily! I could turn over in my sleep and break the string, which I did. Anne got in after midnight and knocked. No luck. She knocked louder. Still no luck. Even louder. A door opened down the hall. “Honey, if he won’t let you in, come on down here. We’re having a party. We’ll sure let you in.”

“No thanks. I just heard her coming to the door.” It wasn’t true. Anne took her purse and umbrella and spent the long night wrapped in her raincoat on a bench in the Women shower room. We got keys made the next morning.

Sure enough, before long we had reason to be concerned about murder. In recent weeks, several young people parked in secluded areas in and about the Texarkana area had been brutally murdered. Many young men were returning from the war and no one was above suspicion. Everyone was on edge, afraid to go out. Mama and Daddy had brought us a pistol and warned us again against going out with anyone we didn’t know. We were terrified just like everyone else. We lay talking in the dark, long after they left when I looked over and saw the head and shoulders of a man in a hat shadowed against the curtains of our second floor window. It took my breath! My bed was clearly visible in the blinking light of the neon sign Ace Drug Store next door. I couldn’t move without being seen. Anne’s bed lay in the shadows. I hissed at her “Anne, Anne, the window!” Hoping not to be heard.

Gasping when she caught sight of the threatening image, she slid from her bed in the dark, creeping along the floor in the dark toward the window. Along the way, she picked up the iron skillet off the hotplate. Rising to her feet in the dark, she backhanded the “man” with the skillet, breaking the window in the process. A crowd from the other rooms on the floor quickly came to our “rescue”, saving us from what was not the shadow of a man, just Daddy’s old hat resting atop our ironing board in front of the window. There was no one to rescue us from the pain of a two dollar charge for a broken window or a bent ironing board………..s