Those carefree early years

With their 1947 plymouth, parked in the carport, my parents  were at home just in time for the arrival of their firstborn son, my older brother.

Wes made his way into the world the month of February 1951 and there was a rare ice storm.  It was my mother’s time.  But unfortunately, the Plymouth would not move anywhere on the ice sheet once it slid down the driveway.  Dad had to deflate the tires to get off the ice before he could drive off to the hospital.  Mom was gassed under by Dr. Passmore and gave birth to my brother.  Dr. Passmore was the attendant physician at both of our births.  I arrived two and half years later with much less drama.  My brother was NOT happy to see me and spent a lot of time breaking things in my room.  My mother had her hands full taking care of a precocious toddler and a new baby.  Wes had walked at the age of ten months and could even remember it faintly as an adult.  Both of my parents had sat on the opposite end of the living room and he tottered gleefully from one to the other as they held out their arms to him.  Ominously, Lois had walked early too ...

Once the boy took to his feet, there was no rest for anyone.  Pictures of him from the era uniformly show a look of  “What can I get into next?”   I was much more low maintenance.  If  I was fed and had a dry diaper, I was happy.  I showed no need to be held or fussed over.  My mother was released to spend her days chasing Wes, and trying to keep him from doing away with me, the new interloper, and washing endless diapers.  These were birdseye soft cloth diapers, washed in the hottest water she could produce, and hung on the clothesline every day to be bleached by the sun.  She took pride in the fact that neither of her children ever suffered diaper rash.  

Mom gave up early in the game on trying to keep a house immaculate where two small and active children lived.  We had dust bunnies the size of kittens under the furniture.   She did produce a hot cooked meal every evening, usually fried meat which my father loved, accompanied by potatoes and canned vegetables.  We slathered ketchup on everything.  There was a lot of laundry and the Sears brand washing machine hummed a lot during the day.  There was no clothes dryer, or even the connections for one.  All of our backyards came equipped with clotheslines which were used heavily.  Mom prided herself on having the "whitest whites" on the block.  Everyone's laundry flapped in full view after all as she gazed through the chain link fences making her regular comparisons.  Sometimes she added "blueing" to the final rinse to make the white sheets and towels even more dazzling.  The bath towels dried stiff as surfboards, but after a couple of uses they softened down.  To avoid having to iron my father's and brother's pants, she used "pants stretchers" which were metal contraptions that could be pushed down the pants legs while wet.  As they dried, they came out smooth and even creased.   Mom detested ironing too  and only brought the machine out about once a year when she had to.  Somehow she found a jovial black lady named Jimmie, who not only did a spectacular job on the ironing, but even came to the house in the early morning to pick up and deliver.  Once a week, she would come roaring up in the predawn hours in a turquoise oldsmobile to collect and deliver.  When Jimmie came to call, I had my freshly pressed little school dresses for the week.  Jimmie was probably someone's housemaid who did her ironing on the side, for she always wore the uniform of a domestic.  She charged around a quarter per garment for her excellent work, a bargain even in those days. 

My mother made sure we got some religion.  Her parents were Assembly of God, but her eyes roved elsewhere for us.   She didn't care for her children speaking in tongues.  The first church we attended was the Eisenhower Road Baptist Church.  Mom decided on the Baptists because of their conservative outlook and remembering her hard drinking Weston cousins, their anti-alcohol beliefs.  It was a big church, full of Baptist enthusiasm.  It was difficult for me to not squirm during the service and I hated the nursery and pitched a rare fit when they tried to drop me off.  I was a good baby everywhere but church.  More than once, the good Baptist minister had to stop his sermon and wait for me to settle down.  Everyone turned around and glared balefully at us.  After a year or so of that, we stopped attending.  God would have to wait a while for us.  After church, we often escaped to the nearby El Rancho Mexican restaurant at Broadway and the Austin Highway where we indulged in our weekly fix of dinner number three:  beans, rice, tamales and enchiladas, washed down by iced tea.  Enjoying a beer was not part of the day.  We were Baptists after all.  That El Rancho had an enormous wall sized painting of the rear of a matador with full cape, and the bull gliding by him.  His suit of lights was so tight, I always thought he was naked on the back.  I gazed a lot at that picture while I spooned down my refried beans and rice, wondering why anyone would paint a picture of a matador with a naked butt.

Despite my early limited contact with an organized church, I somehow got a pretty good notion of God and Jesus.   God for us was a friendly and jovial character.  God loved us and lived in heaven, I had learned, and I spent many afternoons scanning the billowy summer cumulus clouds looking for him.  He just had to be sitting up there somewhere.  He might even wave at me!  Church going was put on the back burner until years later when we began attending Terrell Hills Baptist Church.  Brother Harvey Hoffman was a great minister and we stayed on this time.  After a particularly scary hellfire and brimstone sermon, Wes rushed to the front of the church to be saved and I rushed after him.  We were duly baptized a couple of weeks later.  Baptists know how to baptize in a full immersion tank about the size of a hot tub.  Wearing white robes, we descended the baptismal steps to Brother Hoffman who ducked us good.  At least we weren't baptized in a river or creek like a lot of Southern Baptists.

Gran made a rare visit to San Antonio and stayed with us for a week when Wes was only a toddler.  As the daughter of a Baptist minister, she quizzed him on his church attendance (though she never attended herself).

“Now Wessie, what do you do in church?” she asked him.

“We say ‘Oh God damn it’,” was his reply after a moment’s consideration.

The conversation was dropped, but never forgotten.

After being fired from his first barber job, my father decided to open his own establishment.  It was a pity that he never really learned to cut hair well while in barber college.  He had to learn on the job, which he did.  Near their new neighborhood was a handy location:  Fort Sam Houston Village Shopping Center at the corner of Rittiman Road and Harry Wurzbach Highway.  It served Fort Sam Houston, Terrell Hills, Terrell Terrace, and even Northwood.  Even then, Harry Wurzbach was a four lane thoroughfare.  Directly across from the shopping center was a huge sand lot of several acres.  Apparently when the neighborhood was being built, sand had been trucked in for leveling the lots and the excess was just left there like a giant sandbox.   The mound covered sand lot was a great play place for years until it was covered over by the Tyrolean Village apartments in the mid 60s. 

 The shopping center across the road was the perfect family oriented place.  There was our own Burleson barber shop (which reeked of cigarette smoke, Butch Wax and Wild Root Hair Oil), Slater White’s dry cleaners, a Piggly Wiggly Grocery store, Perkin’s Beauty Salon (which reeked of hairspray and permanent waving lotion), a Rexall Summer’s drugstore with a GREAT lunch counter specializing in hamburgers and cokes and where we could blow the paper covers off our straws high into the air, a Souder’s hardware store, a bakery, and Threadgills, a five and dime type store which carried everything under the sun.  

There was also a bar, Tavern on the Green, and a liquor store, Dons and Bens.  It was a well-rounded little establishment, with something for everyone.   On rare occasions, the drunks would come weaving out of the Tavern and ask to use my father’s pay phone.  One day a very drunk couple entered his shop and asked to use the phone.  The unfortunate man could not remember which number to dial, so his partner grabbed the phone out of his hand and started hitting him with it.  Now my father could not have this going on in front of his waiting customers, so he picked the woman up and hauled her to the front door.  She pounded on him the entire time.

For $150 a month, my father rented space for four barber chairs.  With a bank loan, he bought equipment and opened for business.  He stayed there until 1976, coming to work every morning before 7:00 and closing at 6:00.  My mother handled the books and did all the taxes.  She also spent quite a bit of time refinancing their business loan at the Broadway National Bank.  Dad was in competition with the Fort Sam Houston base barber shop which was cheaper, but the barbers there had a tendency to botch the haircuts.  Little by little, the scraggly haired military transferred their business to the Burleson Barber Shop, but it was slow going.  It took a while for business to pick up, and many years passed before they were able to pay off the equipment loan.

Money was always short, but my mother settled into the routine of cleaning up the worst messes in the house and raising her offspring.  Wes was beyond precocious.  Nature had seen fit to endow him with a brain that would produce an IQ score of close to 150.  These are not cooperative, easy to handle children.  He was a child who never napped, and was on the go and into things from the moment he woke up until he was forced to go to bed, most unwillingly. 

Wes was a roving handful, and one of his favorite playthings was the telephone.  At this time, the neighborhood made do with two-party lines.  Infrastructure was far from what it is today and there were not enough telephone lines strung around for everyone to have their own private line.  You had to share with an anonymous neighbor, usually several streets away.  Our other “party” quickly got tired of his antics and made formal complaint to the phone company. 

My mother received a letter from Bell Telephone outlining the problem and asking her to please do something about it.  So, she locked the telephone up in an empty suitcase and hoped she could get the key fast enough and unlock it if she heard the wretched instrument ringing.  This went on until Wes focused his roving attention elsewhere.  It probably did not take long.  She even found and tried to use a child harness on him for outings because he had a tendency to run away in stores.  The intercom would announce:  "we have a little lost boy in the front of the store ..."  She knew it was him.  She got a lot of dirty looks when she had Wes in the harness, but those people had never spent a couple of days with him ...

As we grew, our childhood offered freedoms that would be unheard of today.  Kidnappings, molestations, and murders did occur in those years, but they were still relatively rare, and not dramatized and beaten to death in the news media.  Nielson ratings had not made it onto the scene yet.

Our typical day when we were too young for school went like this (Pre-school did not exist).  Wes woke at the crack of dawn, ready for action.  Since he woke up, so did I.  We never napped.  By this time, he had given up on trying to eliminate me and I became a grudging sidekick.  I followed him blindly around and thought everything he did was wonderful.  He basked in it, sometimes, but was never above ditching me when he grew tired of my attentions.

Breakfast was simple, usually a bowl of cheerios.  When we wanted a cooked breakfast, Mom prepared biscuits (homemade) with cream gravy, also homemade.  The taste was incredible.  Biscuit and gravy mix were unheard of.  Sometimes pancakes were on the menu, also homemade, with “simple syrup” made on top of the stove.   As we had only the one Plymouth, if my mother needed the car at all during the day she had to run my father to work.  As his shop was only about five blocks from the house, this was not at all time-consuming.  We children always rode along, always.  This was often followed by a quick trip to the Piggly Wiggly to pick up something my mother needed.  We made fun happen wherever we went, using the grocery cart like the San Antonio garbage truck we admired.  We would shriek out "here comes the garbage truck!" and then hurl ourselves like garbage men back onto the side of the cart while my mother awkwardly maneuvered it down the aisles.  Fortunately it was early and few were around to witness this spectacle.  

After we got home, it was play time.  Every day was a smorgasboard of thinking of new ways to amuse ourselves, and we were good at it. 

During warm weather, we listened for the tinkling little bell of the ice cream truck which made its way through all the neighborhoods.  The truck was white, and the driver wore a white uniform and white hat.  We had an ice cream lady.  We all lined up together on the street and she would stop the truck and take our orders.  Decisions, decisions.  We could have ice cream sandwiches, cones, popsicles or orange dreamsicles.  Sometimes our mothers gave us enough money to buy a pint of vanilla ice cream.  It was a long time before I really understood what I was asking for.  I repeated the order phonetically: pintofvaniallicecream please.  Fortunately I was always fast on the uptake and got most things down easily even if I didn't totally understand.  The ice cream lady had it all.  We then stood in the Texas heat, eating our treats before it melted down our hands.  Afterwards, sticky fingers and all, we continued our jolly games.

Enterprising Mexican farmers visited our neighborhoods regularly.  They drove up in their pick-up trucks full of tomatoes and cantaloupes.  Their children would spill out of the truck and work the streets, knocking on doors and offering nice, fresh tomatoes for about fifty cents a quart in little straw and wire baskets.  They were good tasting and reasonable.  My mother almost always bought their produce.  In high season, their cantaloupes were the best to be found and we looked forward to their arrival. 

Around 1955, my father managed to acquire part ownership of a slick, stainless steel air coupe airplane.  He had also managed to get his pilot’s license, but it was a beginner’s license only and he could take on no passengers.  Flying had been a dream come true for him.  While in the army, he had toyed with the idea of applying for the newly formed army air corps, but did not have the confidence to take the test.  How he managed to come up with the money for his airplane venture is a mystery.  My mother was not happy at all with his decisions, especially when he spent most of his Sundays at Hedrick’s Airport out on Rittiman Road, east of IH35, instead of giving her some much needed relief from us.  It was a heady time for Wes and me, to occasionally go to Hedrick’s and see our family "half" airplane.  We posed for a lot of pictures and his partner, who had full pilot’s license, was able to take us up over San Antonio, which was thrilling, especially flying over the Portland Cement Factory.  Wes decided he would try to get us closer to the smokestacks and grabbed the joystick and actually turned the plane  before the pilot regained control.  We tried and tried to spot our house, or even our neighborhood, but we quickly got disoriented.  Our flights never lasted more than 15 or 20 minutes.  My father and his partner were paying for the gas.  After a couple of months, my father’s days of owning his own plane ended.  My mother, disgusted with his absenteeism and costs, gave him an ultimatum:  the airplane or your family.  He sold the airplane.

We also acquired a small weekend lot at nearby Medina Lake, where we often went on weekends.  A little two toned second hand camping trailer had been found, extremely tiny, and we all fit into it somehow for overnight stays.  We had no boat, so we made do playing in the dirt and rocks and admiring all of the signs my father had bought and nailed on the trees:  Posted No Trespassing.  Bologna sandwiches were on the menu for most of the stay.  We built camp fire sites, and ringed them with rocks we fetched.  There would be no out of control fires on our lot.

Several times a year we would make the drive to Padre Island and Corpus Christi.  It was three to four hours of pure anticipation.  Padre Island has tall dunes and we would catch quick glimpses of the rolling surf as we drove through them before emerging on the beach.  Then came hours of pure bliss splashing through the surf, playing in the sand and feeding belligerent sea gulls before it was time to make the long drive home.  There was sand everywhere:  on us, the seats, and the floor.

We rarely sat in front of the TV, though we did have a few favorite programs such as Howdy Doody, Captain Kangaroo, Mighty Mouse  and Sky King.  We always sat down at 4:00 every afternoon for Captain Gus and Popeye.  Joe Alston, aka the captain, was a San Antonio icon who made his debut on local television in 1953 and stayed on until 1979.  Wearing his captain’s hat over an outlandish Prince Valiant style red wig, he spent the whole hour making faces, greeting his “mateys”, and running violent cartoons of Popeye and Bluto pounding each other senseless over Olive Oyl.  We could never understand the attraction.   The huge fight always ensued after Popeye ripped open his famous can of spinach and allowed it to flow like lava into his gaping mouth before going on a steroid worthy binge of violence.   The best part about Captain Gus was the fact that he used a studio audience of children.  Hay bales were piled on his boat set and everyday children got to sit on them and be part of the show.  Around 4:30 he would go down the rows and get each child’s name and age on live camera.  It was their moment in the sun.  Many children froze in the bright studio lights, and many could not remember their names.  It never failed to be entertaining.  When it was my turn to be on the Captain Gus show, I froze, refusing to even step onto the set.  Brother Wes ventured right on and had his moment of immortality.  After Popeye it was time for the muscular caped rodent, Mighty Mouse.  Here I come to save the DAAAAYYYYY!!!!!

TV aside, if the weather was fair, we were outside playing Tarzan or Superman or cars and trucks in the dirt in the driveway.  On the days we played Superman, my mother obligingly pinned bath towels to our shoulders so we could run around the front yard with flapping capes, pretending to fly.  Another cheap thrill was crowns cut out of brown grocery bags.  She was good at that too.  We would decorate them before she stapled them to size and we wore them proudly the rest of the afternoon.  We rode tricycles up and down the driveway and down the street.  When Mom wasn’t looking, we would sneak the tricycles into the house and ram the walls of the living room to see how big a gouge we could produce in the sheetrock.  We had to be fast at that because we were quickly evicted.

I do not recall my mother ever having to amuse us or play with us, other than pinning our bath towels or cutting our crowns.  We were quickly away, adept at amusing ourselves. 

Soon we were ready to leave the yard and set out in the neighborhood.  It was a blessing that my mother never had to worry about us, because we would literally be gone for hours, haunting the neighborhood.  A favorite activity was walking up and down alleys and checking the water meters for wildlife.  The alleyways were a cool and safe paradise.  They were grassed over, quiet and green.  We were safe from traffic.   There was usually a squirmy toad or two to be captured, handed around and then released, or taken home and released very quickly at the order of our mothers.  By this time, our neighbor children had usually noticed and had joined us.  The entire area was full of children.  Most of the little tract homes had been snapped up by young families.  Older couples with more money had chosen elsewhere to live, except for right next door to us with grouchy old Colonel Bartlett.  We gave him a wide berth.

We stayed off the hot asphalt streets for the most part.  I was personally terrified to walk by the manholes.  My brother, who still delighted in occasional torments, had told me the manholes were direct pathways down to Hell, and the devil himself was waiting under that manhole and ready to push it up, grab me by the ankles, and drag me under, never to be seen again.   To add to my terror, he also told me that a gigantic octopus went down the streets every night, sticking its long tentacles into childrens’  bedrooms and grabbing anyone who was not covered up by blankets.  This absolutely horrified me, and of course I believed every word that he told me.  Even on the hottest summer nights, in that un air conditioned house, I heaped as many blankets on myself as possible.  I had no plans to be carried off by an octopus in the middle of the night.  My mother would discover me the next morning, sweating like a pig. 

The first stop on our neighborhood alley treks was usually the honeysuckle vines in the next block.  We pulled the stems and harvested as many little tastes of the nectar as we could before heading down to the rabbit hutches.  One older and efficient neighbor boy kept his hutches right in the alley and not in his yard.  We never tired of gazing at the rabbits and their twitchy little noses.  They usually ignored us, basking on their sides in the gathering heat of the day.  One day, a baby cottontail rabbit was added to his collection.  It was tiny as a kitten.  A couple of rare houses had swimming pools and we would spend more time than usual there, gaping through the holes in the privacy fence and sure wishing that we lived there and could swim in that pool, especially if it was a hot summer day.

Every neighborhood has its mean kid, and ours was named Tim.  Fortunately he lived a couple of streets down and we only had to deal with him when he invaded our section on his bicycle.  Tim cruised the entire neighborhood, sharing his evil ways with everyone.  He did not discriminate.  He had an older brother who was equally mean, if not more so.  They beat up Wes on more than one occasion.  When Tim got the better of Wes and had him down, I would leap on his back like an enraged leech.  He easily shrugged me off, but I just had to do something.  Usually by that time, my mother had come storming out the front door to run Tim off.  We were never allowed to fight each other or anyone else.  Our mother had determined we would not grow up fighting as she had.

No one liked those kids, and they consequently returned the wrath.  They not only picked on the kids, but mothers were fair game too.  Tim’s favorite trick was to see some hapless housewife out in her front yard, watering the grass or messing in flowerbeds.  He would bicycle by as quickly as he could, shrieking at the top of his lungs:

“HO! HO! HO!   Miz Burleson has B.O!!!”

He nailed my mother at least once.

After a quick escape down the street, chortling with laughter, he was cruising and looking for his next victim. 

Those boys were always up to something, and it was never pleasant.  It is unfortunate that Ritalin was not yet on the scene.  They would have been prime candidates.  There is no doubt that our parents did complain to the parents, but it did little good.  They kept to their rather ratty house, letting their sons run amuck in the neighborhood.  Their behavior at least to Wes and me did improve somewhat after my father threatened to cut off Tim’s ears.   Dad was joking of course, but Tim didn’t know that.  Neither did  we. 

It happened like this.  Tim had either slapped me or knocked me down (I was most likely sassing him) and I went home and complained to my father.  I am certain Tim had abused Wes on many occasions, but his complaints fell on deaf ears.  After all, he was a boy and should just take it if he couldn’t fight back.  But for me, dear old dad took out his six-inch hunting knife and headed down the street in search of Tim.  He was going to cut his ears off.  A huge group of us kids were trailing him like the Pied Piper, whooping him on.   At last, Tim was going to get his!  Dad of course was joking and only meant to teach the boy a lesson, but we didn’t know that.  We were going to see those ears come off, and we couldn’t wait.  Tim quickly assessed the situation and took off like a bat out of hell.  My father was right behind him, brandishing his knife.  After chasing him several blocks around the neighborhood and up and down several alleyways, he gave up the chase and let Tim go, which was what he intended in the first place.  The point had been made.  Tim stayed away from our street indefinitely.

I would not even want to think about what would have happened to my father if it had been a later time.  He probably would have been arrested and made the national news.  And why didn’t Tim’s parents come flying in my father’s face about what he had threatened their son with?  Either Tim didn’t even bother to tell them, or they didn’t care.  It was most likely the latter.

Two houses down were the neighborhood eccentrics.  Their entire yard was grown up like a jungle.  They had planted shrubbery along every foot of perimeter of the lot, and completely around the house itself.  Were they trying to block the world out?  We never knew.  It was the father who did all the shrub planting before the couple divorced, and he split the scene, leaving his botanical masterpiece behind to grow taller, wilder and more unkempt by the year.  Left was their mother, a well educated and spoken high school English teacher (who never spoke to her neighbors) and her three children.  All the children had normal legal names, but went by nicknames that belonged in the cast of a Star Wars movie.  The boy was called Bokey, and the two girls LaiLai and Chuffin.   We were never invited into their house and only played outside, usually in their absent father’s brush piles until they moved away a couple of years later.  Lo and behold, ten years later I walked into my sophomore English class in high school, and my former neighbor, mother of Bokey, LaiLai, and Chuffin,  was my teacher.  She had no memory of my brother or myself.  It was not surprising since she spent most of her time there totally detached from her neighbors.  She was still a dry personality, although an excellent teacher.  She referred to her students as heathens and it was her thankless task to at least bring us up to the level of barbarians.  I often find myself wondering how her own children turned out.

Up the street was Marilyn, and a lot like Lucy in the Peanuts comic strip.  She was very self-assured and held herself above us.  She was a little bit older than us and despite her bossy and controlling ways, she was fun to play with, that is when she was willing to play with us.  We went knocking on her door on a daily basis, groveling on her front porch and begging her to come out and play.  I think she enjoyed turning us down on occasion.  Sometimes she sent her mother to the door to send us packing.  We were always back that afternoon, or the next day, whining for her company.

Marilyn’s father was a bit of a mystery.  My mother opened the newspaper one day and read a story about a local man who had been put in jail for writing hot checks.  My mother loved newspapers.  It was so much more fun than picking up the house. The subject of that day's story was was Marilyn’s father!  Not really caring that much for Marilyn and her treatment of us, she made the mistake of sharing that little tale with us, and telling us to be sure not to tell Marilyn what we knew.  We did not even understand what a hot check was, but we knew it was juicy.

Did we make a straight line to Marilyn at the first opportunity and spill everything?  Of course.    She probably did not know what a hot check was either, but she made a straight line to her mother to ask her all about it.  As to be expected, the relationship after that deteriorated to the point that the next time we really talked to Marilyn or her parents was at her high school graduation, which she shared with my brother Wes.  It was a cold conversation.   In the meantime, we were still beating around the neighborhood finding new friends and new things to do.

We had our village idiot:  Joey.  The rumor was he had had a brain operation.  By all appearances, it had not gone well.  I still feel shame for how we treated him, but it was Darwinian.  When birds realize that there is a chromosomal aberration in their midst, they will peck it to death.  Children can be just as primitive, if not more so.   We pecked a lot at poor Joey.  To make things even worse, his head was too big for his body.  We didn’t even know what the work “retarded” meant, but Joey fit the bill and we sensed it.  One of the few times I saw my mother get angry with us was the day we were taunting poor Joey and he was just standing and watching us, crying.  Memories of Lois' abuse of her must have come crashing in.  My mother stormed out the front door, chewed us all up, and made us play with Joey from that day forward.  We didn’t like it, but we did it.  I am sure we found other more subtle ways to taunt him.  Joey on his part was just happy to get to play with the neighborhood kids.

 

Our little neighborhood gang was soon joined by Bruce and Brian up the street, who became some of our best playmates.  They were sweet and good natured little blonde boys from a military family.  Many military families were moving into our neighborhood and renting the homes.  Base housing was much cheaper, but it was in short supply and many families had to wait and find alternative housing off base.  Bruce and Brian were younger than us and more than willing to follow our lead and play and do anything that we wanted.  They idolized us.  After Marilyn (who now stayed in her house most of the time), that was plenty refreshing.  In exchange for us playing cars and trucks with them in the dirt, they would play most anything we wanted first. Wes and I mixed dirt with water one day in a glass and presented it to them as chocolate milk.  They almost drank it, almost, but their wariness kicked in just in time.  They didn't trust us that much.  Wes also tried to lure them onto the school bus with him in the morning.  They didn't fall for that either.   Bruce and Brian became especially important to me when Wes moved on to Kindergarten and I was on my own.  The timing of their arrival was fortunate, for Wes had started Kindergarten at Terrell Hills Baptist Chuch on Harry Wurzbach Highway and I was on my own, except for Bruce and Brian.  We enjoyed many afternoons together until Wes returned.

The Marek family were well organized and efficient Catholics who moved into the Bartlett's rent house next door to us around 1960.  The Bartletts had fled the neighborhood, probably because of us.  The Mareks were an impressive and well managed family, and there were four children which we welcomed as playmates.  One of our first views of them was lined up and on their way to Mass, marching out the door in age order and their Sunday best on their way to the nearby Saint Peter’s Cathedral.

Mr. Marek was a geologist, on the cusp of a succcesful career.  Mrs. Marek was a tall, classy looking former nurse who had given up her career to raise her growing Catholic brood.  To save money, she made her children wear hand me downs and gave them their inoculations.  We would hear them shrieking with pain through the windows.  The children were unfailingly polite, clean and well behaved.  They had a great dog, a collie mix named Sheba, who would go straight home when they told her to, no matter where we had wandered in the neighborhood. 

"Go home, Sheba!"  She would tuck her tail and run for it, waiting patiently when we finally arrived later.

The Mareks did not attend public school.  They attended parochial Catholic school.  How their father paid for that on a single income was beyond us.  They exited their home every morning in that classic 1960s Catholic wear:  saddle shoes, plaid skirt and a cardigan.  They loaded into a huge Oldsmobile station wagon, which barely held them, and roared away.  Anne, the oldest and my playmate (the only playmate I ever had who was even taller than me), confided that all of the Mareks had once driven around in a VW beetle in their less affluent days.  How could this be possible?  Anne and Julie, the oldest rode in the back seat, while the babies, Rose and John, were stuck in the tiny storage compartment by the rear window.  Seat belts were not yet in existence, or course.

When they were not on their way to church or parochial school, they willingly played with us, but always held themselves a little apart.  They were the only Catholics on the block and probably felt a bit isolated.  We were nonetheless always welcome at their house and spent a lot of time there.  One day, we dug up a sizeable flat rock in the alleyway and proudly brought it back to their backyard.  When Mrs. Marek saw it, she had to have more and sent us out with a red wagon and instructions to dig up any we could find.  We found plenty, hauling them back in the family radio flyer to Mrs. Marek who formed a nice stone walkway with them.

  

We often visited the "cliffs", an area just north of Sumner Drive and behind the Alamo Drive In's steel fence.  It was a small running creek, about three feet wide, shady, quiet and perfect for wading and messing around.  It was usually full of tadpoles and we came with our nets to capture them.  The cliffs were challenging to reach.  The creek ran at the base of a sandy hill about 20 feet high.  You had to slip and slide and climb down like a monkey.  While exploring there one day we found and collected some cattails.  Once, we even found the head of a water moccasin, which did not deter our visits at all.  On the day we returned with our cattails, Mrs. Marek’s eyes lit up.  She collected them, spray painted them gold, and stuck them into a piece of Styrofoam as a decoration on top of her TV.  I was so impressed.  Unfortunately, a couple of weeks later, the cattails exploded white fuzz all over her den.

The Marek family lasted until they had scraped up enough money to buy their own house.  Off they went in their enormous station wagon and moved away.  We missed them.

These years stretched contentedly on, preparing us for the next phase of our young lives.