From where I came

I was born in 1953 in the Nix Hospital, which is well known in the city for being a triangular building that from a certain vantage point looks alarmingly like a single flat plane with no other sides, and ready to come crashing down.   Childbirth in 1953 was no pleasant experience for any mother.  When a woman went into labor, the obstetrical staff clapped a gas mask over her face which made her feel like she was suffocating and they did not hear from her again until she woke up.  It made the birth process a lot easier for nurses and doctor:  no need to deal with a woman in pain.   When she swam back up to consciousness, she had her baby: clean, wrapped and diapered.  Fathers were banned from the delivery room, with no opportunity for them to get in everyone’s way with a video camera, or pass out on the floor and become an irritating distraction to the already overworked obstetrical staff.

I owe my existence to that post war economic prosperity, both military and civilian, which made San Antonio boom from 1945 on.   The city was a mecca for the active and retired military, and whoever else in need of a job.   On weekends, the streets of San Antonio teemed with eager, friendly and gawking military escapees out on weekend passes to see the city and have a little fun.  After the war when young men were released from the service, it was easy to stay there.  There were opportunities to continue working as a civilian for the military at a more competitive salary than regular jobs.  For the active military, there were the Post Exchange and base amenities such as cheap living quarters, swimming pools, libraries and low cost military medical care.  There was a comfortable infrastructure that would grow dramatically during the next decades as the city pushed out its boundaries to the North.  With a population of around 200,000, the city’s size was perfect.  Downtown San Antonio offered shopping, office buildings, and restaurants while affordable, safe and comfortable neighborhoods were stretching out in all directions.  The city was casual and a really pleasant place to live, including a temperate climate that was comfortable for most of the year except in the high summer.  Water and energy were plentiful and cheap.

This was how my father came to be in San Antonio.  Nelson J. Burleson was a rural West Texas transplant, just released through Fort Sam Houston from Patton’s third army.  A depression kid, he had grown up poor and often hungry around Uvalde, Texas, the only son in a family of girls.  His doting mother, Ella Taylor, was a rancher’s daughter whose childhood experiences included hiding from the Comanche.  Dan Taylor, her rancher father, had to ride fence or tend livestock on a daily basis and was gone from the homestead from dawn until dark.  Ella’s mother, to keep safe, led her brood to a gully wash about a mile from the house and there they spent their days hidden there with simple toys and busy work until Dan returned home late in the afternoon.  In the late 1890s when Ella was a girl, no rural Texan woman wanted to be caught indoors without her man by a troop of marauding Comanche, who were just plain vicious.  They would burn the house down with the inhabitants inside.  As long as her father was at home, the family was safe, for the Comanche feared Dan Taylor and would not come near him.  But they were not above an occasional night raid to steal his horses.  In the following days, Dan Taylor returned the favor and raided their camps, stealing his horses back.  Cat and mouse games continued for years with horse swiping, and shadowing each other during his night hunts.  Dan had to do a lot of his hunting at night.  The Comanche always joined in and shadowed him, keeping at least 100 yards back.  Dan would stop his horse and listen.  The Comanche would do the same and wait for him to continue.  This would continue throughout the night until he returned to the house, the dogs barking their welcome and his wife and family much relieved.   Gradually as the Comanche were subdued, life became a little easier for the Taylor clan.

As a young woman, Ella met James Hopson Burleson (much older than her and scandalously divorced) at a revival in Camp Wood, Texas.   Because he had already cycled through two wives, her parents were not impressed.  Hop and Ella had to elope, but theirs was a happy marriage, producing three girls and my father.  Hop was always extremely proud of his young wife and their brood of children.

 

The Burlesons are a huge and old Texas family with many distinguished individuals, including a vice-president of the Republic of Texas.  The family patriarch was Aaron Clark Burleson who migrated from England in the 1700s.  His forebears had originated in Durham, England, prime Viking raiding territory.  Indeed, some Burlesons have had their chromosomes tested and Swedish ancestry shows up.  Aaron Clark produced seven sons and six daughters whose descendants fanned out over the southeastern United States. 

Our branch of the family moved steadily westward through the Carolinas, Georgia, and finally Alabama, when Benjamin Franklin Burleson arrived in Texas.  Dad’s branch was definitely of the undistinguished side, except for one great grandfather who was the local judge.  His own father, James Hopson Burleson, was a day laborer who loved to play his fiddle at the honky tonks on weekends.  When the children were old enough, they learned to play piano, guitar and fiddle by ear.  Hop would haul them along with him from location to location on a Saturday night as a "family" band.  

When he was around 12 years old, the great depression hit and Dad quit school to help support his family.  It was not a hard decision as he detested the classroom and Ella had tired of beating him on a daily basis to force him into the schoolhouse where he would get into fights with his classmates.  She relented and allowed her son to work as a day laborer alongside his father, building fences, digging ditches, picking cotton or whatever else a rancher needed them to do.  Truant officers did not exist and most families honestly needed the earning power of a young son coming into adulthood.  It was a decision he regretted as an adult.  

The clan moved from rent house to rent house in the Uvalde and Camp Wood area, ranging as far north as Oklahoma in search of a livelihood, eventually winding up in El Paso, Texas, where Dad matured into a young man.  He was now fully supporting his mother, father and sisters.  Every Friday he would collect his pay, count out the bills his mother needed to pay the rent and buy the week’s groceries, and take the rest and make for the Juarez bars where he would drink and fight.  He was the center of his mother’s universe until the day she died, especially since he was now the sole support of his family.

His father, Hop, was now involved in staying home and taking care of his diabetes stricken brother,  Uncle Pat.  The clan now depended on Dad to bring in the wages with Ella’s help, who did practical nursing on the side, and took care of elderly patients. 

Pearl Harbor arrived and Dad’s life quickly changed when he was drafted to Fort Bliss and endured the Normandy Invasion, and the Battle of the Bulge.  While waiting for June 6, he was bivouacked with an English family who idolized the Yank.  They called him Tex and made him drink a lot of tea, which he detested.  He tried to sneak up the stairway and avoid it, but always got caught and was served up a hot cup of the English national beverage.  The family daughter had never seen or eaten an orange, so he made it a point to bring her fruit from the base after his meals there. 

Once deployed, he drove a tank in Patton’s third army across Europe to Germany.  He was completely indifferent to all the wonders and sights he saw in England, France, Germany and Belgium (that were not bombed out).  He had only two goals:  to survive, and get home to Texas.  In Ardennes, he had his doubts about survival as he huddled behind a tree to avoid German fire, and watched grown men cry behind the neighboring trees.  When VE day arrived, he rejoiced, but expected to be deployed to the Pacific Ocean to fight the Japanese.  On August 6, 1945 when a large part of Hiroshima was vaporized, those fears ended.  At the war’s end, he was discharged from Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio and decided to stay. 

As his formal education was very minimal, he enrolled in the San Antonio Barber College on the GI bill.  Hop Burleson had worked as an untrained barber for years, when he was not building fence for someone, or sawing on his fiddle on a Saturday night.   Dad located a rooming house to live in and took a room.  It was the first time he had ever been on his own.   He was also on a mission.  His mother, the center of HIS universe as well, had told him it was time he found a wife to take care of him.  He was 32 years old and never married.  He was an extraordinarily handsome man.

As a child my mother, Ruth Weston, had grown up listening to San Antonio’s powerful 40,000 watt WOAI radio station that could broadcast as far north as Chicago.  She was a country girl too, growing up in the extraordinarily beautiful Ozarks region of southwestern Missouri.  She was of French and Irish descent, with a Trail of Tears full blood Cherokee grandmother thrown into the mix.  The gentle Ozarks hills were beautiful to all the senses, but devoid of real economic opportunities.  Like my father, she grew up poor. 

Her father, Roy Weston, was one of the hardest working men she ever knew, never ceasing in his search for a way to turn a dollar, and feed his family.  Roy had run away from home at the age of twelve, shortly after his mother died and he was left in the questionable care of an alcoholic father.  Leona Scroggins, his late mother, was a half blood Cherokee, a direct descendant of the Trail of Tears Cherokee who had passed through Washburn Prairie on their way to the Oklahoma reservations.  Many of the Cherokee stayed in the southwestern Missouri area, along with their wagon masters, the Weston family.  They quickly shed their Cherokee identity, in fear of being uprooted and shipped on to the reservation. 

In Roy’s and Leona’s times, though, there were few honorable and hard working Westons.  Roy came from a family of drinkers, moonshiners  and rum runners, and his cousin owned one of the fastest cars in the county, perfect for outrunning the "revenuers" or the police.  Roy was determined to live his life differently.  At the age of 12 and after the death of his mother,  he ran away from home in Seligman to nearby Cassville, Missouri, where he was briefly homeless.  He was noticed and picked up in the town square by the local sheriff: William Holman.  Children's Protective Services were non existent, so Roy was taken into the Holman home and grew to manhood there, where he was treated no differently than the couple’s other twelve children.  It was a decent, prosperous and hard working household where he could thrive.  A blue-eyed attractive niece of the Holmans, Gertrude Chappell, visited regularly.  As my grandfather was equally attractive, a courtship soon began. They married while still in their teens.  In those times, if you had reached the age of 20 without snagging a spouse, you were hopeless.

 

Gertrude Chappell, my grandmother, was the oldest of six children, raised deep in the Ozark Hills of southwestern Missouri.  Her grandfather had been a defrocked Baptist preacher, put out of the church by his own congregation.  Gertie’s mother, Georgia McGill (known simply as Gran), was bitter to the end of her days about that incident and would not set foot in an organized church.  Gran was a good and Christian lady, but had no use for organized religion.  She was as efficient as any pioneer woman and could go into her kitchen and produce a tasty meal from anything she would scavenge out of the pantry, even if it was only flour for biscuits, some beans, some bacon grease and a few home grown tomatoes.  Her husband was Ben Chappell, from Ohio.  The Chappell family was convinced they were descended from French Canadian immigrants (remember "Evangeline"), put out of their homes by British occupation of Canada.   As a young couple, Gran and Ben had tried to make their home in Seligman, Missouri, which was notorious for Saturday night murders, moonshining, and rum running.  Their future son-in-law, Roy Weston, had already fled his hard drinking Seligman family for nearby Cassville.  After one particularly violent, murderous and gun fire ridden Saturday night, Ben had had enough.  He packed up his family and moved three miles down the road to a much tamer and quieter Washburn.  No member of the immediate Weston or Chappell family would ever again reside in Seligman.  We maintained many cousins there however, and one of them, Borky Burton, stood for years on Highway 37 waving at anyone who drove by.  He was always drunk four sheets to the wind, with a mountain of empty beer cans piled up behind him.  He was also a cross dresser, loving to appear in the local shops on the square in a dress and wig and leaving everyone speechless.  The Seligman Westons never changed.

Gran and Ben had a fruitful marriage:  three daughters and three sons, the youngest born when her oldest daughter Gertie was a mother herself.  When Gran wasn’t caring for her brood, or her farm, she had a fierce temper.  When Ben was the object of her wrath she called him limber neck or bottle ass or spewed out Ozarks expletives:  "Great gobs of hen shit!"  When something impressed her, it was "Well, don't that beat a cow pissing on a flat rock!" Frivolous people were doomed to "flit around and land in a cow pattie."  Not having access to dental services, her teeth were completely loosened in the gums by middle age.  She would amuse her grandchildren by wiggling a loose tooth for them.

Gertie was only able to finish school through the eighth grade.  High school was an impossibility for her because of her rural location.  The closest high school was in far away Cassville and there was no bus.  Her father was unable to make the commute, so she repeated 8^th grade three times out of nothing better to do.  It occupied her time until she met and married Roy Weston at the age of 18.

With two daughters born (my mother the youngest), Roy raised and milked cattle, chickens and pigs.  In the earliest days of their marriage, they were so poor that they had to rent their milk cow.  To make extra money, my grandmother worked every summer season in a local tomato canning factory where the workers would sometimes slit their hands open with their peeling knife and just keep on working, not daring to report the injury and lose time and salary.  All of the local housewives reported for about a month's work there every summer.  She used the extra money to buy winter coats for her daughters, and take them on an annual trip to the dentist to have their teeth filled.  She bought six little girls' dress patterns every summer, and the cheapest fabric she could find, and sewed a total of twelve dresses for the upcoming school year:  five for school, and one for Sunday.  These were all the clothes her daughters had, and by the summer they were almost transparent with wear.

My mother’s older sister Lois was a true cross that my mother had to bear.  She was an unmanageable child and abusive to my mother.  Mom spent much of her earliest childhood with her head in a vice grip under her older sister's arm.  Lois also pulled most of her younger sister's hair out when she was a toddler.  As both grew, there were vicious fist fights, my aunt winning most of them because of her age.  My grandmother always attempted to separate the girls when they were smaller, but Lois was a clever sneak and made it a point to abuse her younger sister out of sight.  As they grew older and stronger, it became dangerous for my grandmother to intervene, and Mom was on her own.  But nature has a way of compensating for such things.  By the age of 13, my mother had grown at least a head taller than her sister and had 20 pounds of weight on her.  By her teens, Mom had transformed into a formidable fighter and could now easily deck her tormentor.  She would have much preferred not to fight, but Aunt Lois just kept on asking for it, and my mother regularly obliged her.  It was not a happy sibling relationship. 

Lois’s other antics included borrowing her father’s truck without permission (and without a driver’s license) and roaring through town in it.  Behind my mother's back, she borrowed her never worn and cherished upcoming 8^th grade graduation dress.  She hemmed it short enough for herself, and wore it on a date.  My mother was devastated.  She had saved and ordered her dress from the Sears and Roebuck catalog and it had cost $2.98, a prodigious sum.  It was the first “ready made” dress she had ever owned.  A store bought or catalog ordered dress was a rare gem.  Lois was duly thrashed for her sin (it did no good), but the damage was done.  My grandmother let the hem back out and the used graduation dress had to make do.

At the age of 16, Lois married her high school classmate Paul Brooks, dropped out of high school and left home, leaving Mom ecstatic. But the marriage soon foundered and one afternoon, Lois was seen coming up through the gate with her suitcase.  My mother would have preferred to see the devil himself stepping towards the door rather than her older sister.  Lois was also pregnant and NOT by her recently deserted young husband.  After reconciling with Paul Brooks, the two were off on Route 66 to California to find their fortune, giving my mother another blessed reprieve.  Life in California did not go well for them.  Down to his last coins in Long Beach, Paul went out to buy milk for the infant who did not even belong to him, and slipped on the steps to their apartment, breaking the bottle into shards.  They packed it up after that and returned home, living on their own.  Lois quickly cleaned up her act, straightened out and became a normal mother.  A true child of the depression, she and her husband became experts at saving money and piling up cash and property.

These were the Roosevelt years, and Roy had secured a job with the CCC and was able to bring in a regular and decent paycheck for the first time in his life.  He attempted many times to purchase his own farm, but always had to let it go back to the bank.  In 1941, the year my mother graduated high school, he had managed to buy a new truck with his CCC wages.  An opportunity arose to trade that truck for a 40-acre place with a house and barn.  He traded, and his family had a paid up home at last. His family also got to enjoy a radio (operated by a car battery) and an ice box.  He earned the princely sum of $100 a month, more than most of the CCC "boys."  He was classed as an "experienced local man."

My mother at least graduated high school, unlike my father who only made it through the 5^th grade.  She had started out at the OK School, a simple, one room country school with an impressive  six-seater outhouse.   The playground offered a wooden slide which left many a student with splinters in their backside.  She and Lois were soon moved on to the Washburn public school system after she had trouble with her OK School teacher, who simply did not care for her.  It certainly did not help matters that she could belch on cue, which she did most of the day just to irritate her teacher.  Lois was not the only sibling who knew how to rattle people's cages.  Mom continued on in the town school system until graduating high school.  She was a model student, as were most of her classmates.  Curiously, Lois was fiercely protective of her kid sister at school and when they were away from home.  No one was going to beat up my mother except her.

The depression high schoolers did act out a bit, but it was rare.  One young man had managed to borrow his father’s truck and was taking everyone joy riding.  With ten young people standing up in the back of the truck, he careened up and down a dirt road.  One unfortunate young lady almost went flying out of the bed of the truck, but was grabbed just in time by a classmate.  Then they got married.  

The senior class also got to enjoy an overnight field trip to the state capital, Jefferson City, where they were all checked into a hotel under the chaperone of their teachers of course.  Each room had a phone, which was quite a marvel to these kids from the hills.  They spent the rest of the afternoon calling from room to room, probably driving the hotel operator to the brink of madness.   In that era any form of entertainment was game. 

At the end of her high school career, my mother had achieved the distinction of salutatorian (there were 24 students in her graduating class) and won a fifteen-month business skills course in Springfield, Missouri, where she trained to be a clerk typist, a stenographer and learned some basic accounting skills.   How she would have loved to attend college, but it was a dream she could not even consider.  Most of her classmates had paired up with a local and gotten married and settled down in Washburn to become replicas of their parents, raising cattle and eking out a living from the land.  There was no one suitable for Mom, so after finishing business school, she had to set out around the country in search of a job. She was one of very few who actually left home to seek her fortune.  Pickings were slim in the tiny town where she had spent her girlhood.  She was taller than all of the boys in her class except for one, and he was already taken.  In those days, young women boarded Greyhound buses and set out to places where they heard there might be a job.  Usually a friend was already there and had written them about the opportunities they would have if they would only head West  to California, or South to Texas.  The new arrivals found a clean and decent boarding house and usually had secured themselves employment within a couple of days.  They lived a good life as single gals, working and making friends, enjoying their salaries and independence together on evenings and weekends.

 

Mom traveled first to Tulsa, Oklahoma, and found a job working at Douglas Aircraft while living with her youngest aunt, who was only six years older and far more dear to her than her own sister.  She later traveled to Leadville, Colorado and worked at Camp Hale where army troops were taught mountain climbing skills, Nordic skiing, and cold weather survival skills.  Troops were being deployed to snowy Germany and skiing would be a good skill for them to acquire.  Like many flatlanders, the altitude produced too many nosebleeds for her so she was soon on the hunt for another job.  Her next stop was Long Beach, California, where she worked payroll for Douglas Aircraft.  Jobs were plentiful in aircraft and munitions factories as they churned out supplies and equipment for the raging war. She soon heard of San Antonio and the job rich military bases, and she soon rolled in on a train.  Roy had to wave the train down near the Washburn depot.  Standing in the middle of the tracks, he swung a train lantern wide when he saw the engine coming.  The engineer gave three blasts of his whistle to let Roy know he had seen him.  The train stopped, Mom boarded and was on her way.  To ice the cake, she already had friends in San Antonio for early networking.

Just north of San Antonio College the Tobin Hill streets were lined with rambling older homes which had been converted into boarding houses to serve young working people arriving in the city.  It was on West Craig where my parents met.  My father was already established in the West Craig Boarding House, and had enrolled in San Antonio Barber College.  She was the new girl who had just arrived the night before.  All the young men, most of who were on the hunt for a good clean wife, were interested in getting a look at her, which they did at breakfast the next morning.  My mother was an attractive woman, tall and dark haired.  She was sweet, enthusiastic, and highly intelligent.   She was always a country girl, but with a great attitude and willingness to wade in and try new things.  She stirred a lot of interest at the Boarding House Breakfast Table, and my father decided he must rescue her from all the other young men.  It was not a difficult task as some of the other young men boarders licked the communal sugar spoon clean with their tongues.  As he was undoubtedly the most handsome young man at the table (and did not lick sugar spoons), he had no trouble attracting and retaining her attention.

Their courtship was simple:  trips to the zoo and Brackenridge Park and a lot of Mexican food, a new and exotic delight for a girl from the Midwest.  On one of their first trips to a Mexican Restaurant, my mother had never seen or eaten hot salsa.  My father invited her to try a huge spoonful of it and she did.  Despite that prank, she married him anyway in December of 1947, after about four months of courtship.  Young couples did not believe in waiting.  They had their lives to get on with.   It was a court house Justice of the Peace wedding, no frills, and no family in attendance on either side.  My mother went to the downtown Frosts (later Frost Brothers), the premier San Antonio department store, and bought an expensive suit and hat with an eight inch  feather that curled rakishly over her head.  The suit and hat served for the ceremony, and their wedding picture.  They were a good looking couple in the formal portrait they had made.  Neither had even met their new in-laws.  This would come months later, and did not go particularly well for Mom.

The only way that my parents could afford a home would be on the GI Bill.  Down payments were waived but the GI bill didn’t cover the furniture needed, so they spent several years working and saving.  Leaving the boarding house behind, they moved to a small trailer home in the Top Hand Trailer Ranch on the Austin Highway in north San Antonio.  There was no bathroom in the trailer and they made do with a community bathhouse and toilet.  Every morning, residents ambled down to the bathhouse in their bathrobes to take care of business before returning to their trailers.  There was a child on the way (my brother Wes) when they managed to buy their first and only modest home in late 1950.  Dad had bewailed the fact that they would probably never be able to afford a real house, but Mom knew better.  She made it happen.

With many other young families, they had chosen to live in the Northeast Independent School District, the premier district of the city which would serve their family well for the next twenty years.  Under the leadership of Dr. Virgil T. Blossom, this extraordinary school district ground out first class high school graduates, and had a nationwide reputation for excellence.  Even into 1965, the graduating class of Douglas MacArthur High School posted some of the highest SAT scores in the nation. 

Neighborhoods and homes were sprouting like mushrooms out of the brush covered little hills all through the district boundary lines.  The Terrell family ranch had been developed into Terrell Hills.  Alamo Heights had been developing as a high end enclave since the 1920s, and Northwood was soon to come.  These more upscale neighborhoods were far out of the price range of a barber and a clerk typist, so they cast their eyes across Rittiman Road and the Sumner Development Corporation’s Wilshire Terrace.  This modest little neighborhood was being built in a pie shape, bordered by Harry Wurzbach Highway, Rittiman Road and the Austin Highway.  These were quick build tract homes, about every fifth to sixth house with the same floor plan and a slightly different exterior.  The intent was to get basic houses built and up for the growing needs of the young families flocking into the area.  Even though the houses were simple and inexpensive, there was tremendous pride of ownership.  For many young couples, it was their first home, and they were proud of them.  For the next 30 years, the neighborhood would remain simple but well kept.  Yards were maintained and houses were painted regularly.  Roofs were replaced when needed.  It was a clean little neighborhood.

With a government backed GI loan, my parents secured a tiny two bedroom, one bath non-air-conditioned house on Olney Drive.  It had less than 1100 square feet, asbestos siding, steel windows, a dirt yard and a carport with a handy storeroom to fill with family junk.  There was a HUGE attic fan in the hallway which did a respectable job of cooling the house down at night.  The attic fan was supplemented by an evaporative cooler, better known as a swamp cooler, imported from the trailer.  This monster, about the size of a washing machine, sat outside the house by a window and by means of a huge rotary fan over an evaporating pan of water, blew water cooled air into the home.  It was a Southern marvel that could quickly cool down the hottest room in the worst part of the mid-summer Texas heat.  It made you shiver at night.  And all on only pennies of energy, though in the 1950s, no one was overly concerned about energy or their electricity bills.  My mother had about eight square feet of counter space covered with lemon yellow tiles in the tiny kitchen with a huge retro stove.  A laundry room was a luxury not included, so the Kenmore washing machine, bought on time, sat in the corner of the kitchen.  There was no dryer, only a clothes line in the backyard.  For many years, it hung with freshly laundered diapers.  Nor was there central heat, and no builders insulated in those days.  There were solid oak hardwood floors, not the best choice for growing families.  Polyurethane had not arrived on the scene and those wood floors had to be waxed constantly to look good. 

The home cost $8300.  My parents had indigestion about how they would possibly make the $72 payments every month.  It also had a yard full of ticks that refused to move on for a long time.  The builders had cleared the brush but left the mesquite trees growing everywhere, dropping deadly thorns that could pierce the sturdiest of shoes and cripple the unfortunate victim for days.  There was no other vegetation.  At each corner of the house, a ligustrum was planted, and a juniper by the front door.  That juniper was destined to grow above the rooftop, and drop bag worms everywhere.  The backyard got a chinaberry tree which produced the most lovely and fragrant violet blossoms in the spring.  Unfortunately the lovely blossoms were followed by thousands of noxious yellow berries about the size of a marble that dropped throughout the fall and winter.  

It was home.