Joe's Backstory

Wichita Falls is cold in the winter, blazing hot in the summer, and situated less than twenty miles from the Red River, the Texas-Oklahoma state line. The wind blows all the time. The population has grown to nearly 105,000 in 2018, but it has grown very little since I grew up there with my older brothers, David and Don, and my older sister, Rosemary. Our father taught us the value of self-discipline and hard work. Our mother taught us love and compassion and the importance of being mindful of words and other people's feelings. As the youngest of four, my siblings taught me to be tough and to stand up for myself.

My dad knew full well how likely boys were to get into trouble in the summer if they weren't busy. Before he went to work in the morning, he gave us jobs to do. As the summer went on, the jobs became harder. He would have us do jobs like levelling the irrigation ditch from the back of the property and spreading the dirt over the entire property. We always stayed busy and mostly out of trouble.

He was a strict disciplinarian and regularly used the "board of education" when we needed it but always at home. When we were all driving in the car (four kids and my parents) and we misbehaved, he would paddle us when we returned home. Once, we had been on a trip to Fort Worth and were driving home and really got rowdy. Out of exasperation, he said, "If I hear another peep out of you, you'll all get a busting when we get home!" We were quiet for a while, and then my brother Don said softly, "Peep." When we got home, none of us ratted Don out, and we all got a busting.

My mother was a very good mother. Also, during the summer, she took us to the library several days a week, and we became voracious readers. Some of the early lessons I remember from her were when she taught us how to have empathy for others. One of her lessons was that when you say something harsh to someone, it's like shooting an arrow. You can take it out, but it will almost always do a lot of damage.

Mother never hesitated to stand up for people either. For example, my brother Don liked to play football. He tried out for the eighth grade team at Zundy Junior High while he was in the seventh grade. He made it to the team and reported for practice the next fall at Zundy.

At the time, Don was very small, maybe only 101 pounds. The new coach told him, "You can't have a uniform. You're too small." Don went home very upset. Mother marched right up to school and gave the coach a lesson in caring about kids. Don got a uniform and went on to have a great high school football career and was the starting guard on the 1961 Wichita Falls High School state championship team.

As a child, I remember playing with our family dog, Patsy, who was a half-chow and half-German shepherd. She was an outside dog, was very sweet, and was a good guard dog; and we really loved her. When she died, we all grieved. We took a wheelbarrow to a nearby road and brought back a large (for us) piece of finished concrete that had been part of a road marker. We chiseled "PATSY — 1948–1958" on it and used it as a tombstone when we buried her in the backyard.

Mother and Dad sold that home in 1980 and moved to Georgetown. Right after their move, they got a frantic call from their realtor, who asked, "Did you bury a child in the backyard?" The new owners had found the tombstone and were very upset!

Like a lot of lower-income families then, we raised chickens. We had a chicken house and a portion of the yard fenced off as a chicken coop. We butchered two chickens most Sundays and also got eggs every day. We learned how to wring a chicken's neck and butcher it, and fresh fried chicken was sooo good!

Every little bit helped. The chicken feed came in sacks made of cotton material printed with various patterns. Mother took that material and made shirts for us. Most of the kids at school never realized it. In elementary school, I worked in the cafeteria at lunch to get a reduced lunch price.

In high school, I was a football player and a good student, and I worked in construction. I started as a laborer at age fourteen for a concrete company. By the time I was a senior in high school, I had become a cement finisher. College looked really good!

As a teenager, I always saved the money I made. By the time I was seventeen or so, I had saved quite a bit (for a kid). Dad was a state employee, raising the four of us, and had no ready cash. He really wanted to buy a piece of property in Wise County, Texas, north of Fort Worth. He could borrow from the Veterans Land Board because he was a World War II veteran, but he didn't have the down payment. So I loaned him the money (about $1,000), and he bought the property.

It had many old-growth pecan trees that were good producers, and Dad hired people who harvested them for half of the crop. He also leased out the land for grazing. Then in a stroke of good luck, the property became part of George Mitchell's original gas fields in North Texas (Mitchell was a Houston oilman and developer of the Woodlands, Texas), and Dad earned mineral royalties from it. When Mother and Dad moved from Wichita Falls to Georgetown, they sold the Wise County property, and it became an important part of their retirement. So it turned out to be a great investment, and I have had a lifelong love for our state tree, the pecan.

Wichita Falls is known as a tornado alley, and while I was growing up, tornadoes came twice within a mile from our house — once to the south and again to the north. Then on April 10, 1979, Wichita Falls drew the short straw when three tornados converged and formed an F4 (devastating) tornado that was one and one-half miles wide.

It reduced all the buildings to slabs in a two-and-one-half-mile-long swath of destruction. Forty-six people were killed, many of them in their cars, and some had driven under freeway overpasses for safety.

They were killed when the tornado sucked their cars up and crushed the occupants from above. The devastation was horrific.

Probably because of this and a desire to live closer to their children and grandchildren, my parents moved to Georgetown on the July Fourth holiday of 1980. Don and I and our families rented a truck and withstood the goodbye present of 114-degree temperature and a strong south wind to move them. Wichita Falls produced tough people.

Because times were tight, as the youngest, I had to put myself through college. But in those days, a boy could earn $1,000 in construction during the summer, which was then about the cost of a year at Texas A&M University. And, of course, I went to A&M since both of my brothers went there, and my sister...