Allen Thrower

Austin, Texas
Spring of 1949 (written 9-1-1998)

I was in the eighth grade at Allan Junior High School.

Allan Jr. High was a rough school. Half Latin American and half Anglos. Fifteen hundred students in grades 7-8-9. During my two years there I saw a lot of fisticuffs as well as many knife fights. In two years I saw 30 boys cut up with knives, some of them very seriously wounded, but no deaths. As I said, it was a rough school. (There was a knifing death at Austin High.) There were often rumors of “the big rumble,” which never came off. Once I stayed home from school, expecting “the big rumble” that day.

My two years there I experienced knives pulled on me three times, but it never resulted in a fight. In fact, one fellow was mouth-agape after I asked him why he wanted to cut me and he had answered (without reason?), “…to see if my knife is sharp.” I had then asked him, “Well, why don’t you whittle on a piece of wood then?” I knew he had almost killed a boy once with a knife. As result of our encounter, he became one of my best friends and protected me from bullies at lunch-time from then on.

We had 103 boys in my P.E. class. I was not a fighter. I was among the taller boys in the class. We had a surprisingly large number of boys six feet tall or better, including me. I was thirteen years old and was 6′1″ and weighed 110 pounds. (On my 12th birthday I was 5′ 11 3/4 inches tall and weighed 107 pounds, like a big stick of spaghetti!)

Well, it seems we played all sports in P.E. We played football in the fall, softball in season, soccer in season, track in the spring, and last of all–BOXING!

We were paired up by–no, not weight, but by height. That pitted me against one of the toughest boys in school: 169 pounds.

I saw him fight one night at the Austin Collesium in the Golden Gloves Tournament. He fought another boy in our class, also very tough. I told a friend who had gone with me, “I know these boys. It’s just a matter of who get the first hit in, and he’ll be the winner. That’s how it worked out. One hit in the first round: knees buckled, and a big fall. It was a knock-out!

That winner was my opponent! I was really scared. We were the last to fight. I saw fifty boxing matches in the days building up to our matchup in P.E. Actually, I was preparing myself for death. I thought to myself, “If he hits me, he’ll kill me.” So, when our time came, I went out swinging like a windmill with fifty blades. I hit him so fast and so often that he never got a lick in, and I won the fight. Afterwards, he told me, “I’ve never seen anybody fight like that in my whole life! ” Little did he know it was nothing but the abject fear of extinction that motivated me.

Andrews, Texas
Summer 1947
(Written November 7, 1998)

We went skating a lot that summer. The skating rink was designed to travel from city to city, the floor being of wooden panels and the “building” being a large tent. Skating was one of the “funnest” things for me to do in those days.

Other things we did for entertainment were: going to the carnival, (as long as it was there), going to a shooting gallery downtown, attending movies, hunting rabbits, and having old-timey family evening singing at the Craven’s Trailer Court. Mrs. Craven would play the piano, and others would play guitar, banjo, chicken leg-bones or spoons, etc. while we all sang. Some nights we would all go outside to sing, but without the piano, of course. We sang songs of the old South, Negro spirituals, hymns, patriotic songs, and Cole Porter songs, among others. Everyone enjoyed the evening singing, and it always ended up with either ice cold watermelon or homemade ice cream and cake.

I turned twelve that summer, and someone decided it was time for me to have my first date. She, too, was twelve years old. It was a blind date, and she was probably the ugliest girl in town and she had bad breath. It was a quadruple date. I think we went to a movie. Most of all I remember that she just wanted to hold hands all the time, and I wanted to be somewhere else with somebody else all the time, and after the movie and cokes we all hopped into the car and ended up out in the country at a windmill. It was very late, and I was sleepy and wanted to go home and go to bed. I think my date wanted to go to bed, too, but not at home. She wanted to smooch. I didn’t. So, we didn’t. We just held hands. At one point, I looked outside of the car and saw a pack of about thirty coyotes circling us about fifty feet away. Nobody else noticed. My date just snuggled up real close, and I kept trying to will myself into some other scenario. Next time I looked out, the coyotes were circling about twenty feet away, and I was pretty scared, but still didn’t say anything. Soon after that, I looked out the window again, and one coyote had his paws on the side of the car and was looking in the window at me. I sounded the alarm, and the party broke up and we were out of there in a pretty big hurry, seeking an improved environment, and I think it was at least two or three years before I had my next date.

Later that night, safely in my own bed (alone), from the direction of that windmill, I heard a pack of coyotes howling and yapping, probably in pursuit of a rabbit or something; and, having survived, I peacefully fell asleep.

(Written 10-2-98)

In the 7th and 8th grades I went to Allan Jr. High School in Austin. It sat atop a hill and was a big square red-brick building with a basement and three upper stories. Half of the students were Anglos and half Latin American. It was a good school, though we had some inter-racial fights once in a while, often with knives. But, I had a lot of Latin friends as well as Anglos. For the most part everyone got along pretty well.

Some important steps in my life came at Allan Jr. High. I took wood shop for six weeks, & metal shop for six weeks. In those classes I learned a lot about tools and how to use them safely. A lot of practical knowledge from that class has helped me in being my own “handy man” at home.

Another six week class was Cooking. That was really a fun class. We sometimes paired up with a girl to be a “family.” We learned table manners, how to set a proper table and learned proper respect for the girls. It was one of the most useful classes I ever had. We learned some nifty recipes that I still use. But, one time when we cooked peanut butter cookies, my partner and I decided to double the recipe. Then we decided to split up because there was an extra oven. Therefore, we had quadrupled the recipe. The teacher didn’t realize what we had done until class was almost over and she was really put out at us because she was being nice that day and let each pair of cooks double the recipe. My partner and I had each ended up with eight times the dough for one recipe and the teacher made us stay there until all our cookies were done. We missed our next class and had a lot of dishes to wash. But, she let us keep our cookies. She was really a nice lady, as well as being a good teacher.

Then we had typing for six weeks. I loved typing. Boy! We really had some good teachers in that school! I learned to type 67 words per minute in six weeks, and that’s about how fast I type to this day. I learned to read what I typed, and got through some wonderful literature in that class.

We had Spanish for six weeks. After two other six-week courses, we came back for another six weeks of Spanish. That’s all the foreign language I ever had all the way through college. Just twelve weeks. I was in love with my pretty Spanish teacher, Miss Villanueava. She was an excellent teacher, though quite young, and fresh out of college. I learned a lot of Spanish in a short time, and it has served me very well over the years.

I sang in the Boys’ Chorus for two years. That was really positive experience. We had an excellent conductor and we sang only very good music, including Ten Thousand Men, Battle Hymn of the Republic, and The Holy City. That teacher stuck to music that we would know and appreciate for the rest of our lives. Good music! One might be surprised at how seriously that whole class took to our music. There were about 85 of us. Some had soprano voices, some voices were changing, and we had some fully developed basses. I sang alto. We made some beautiful sounds that I can still hear in my mind fifty years later.

Though I had Beginning Band in the sixth grade at West Columbia for half a year (starting two days before the Christmas break), I caught up with the other clarinet players who started at the beginning of the year. Then, I had to be in the Beginning Band again in the 7th grade at Allan Jr. High, because the Beginning Band there consisted of only 7th graders. I had already gone through all the books we used that year. One of the best things that ever happened to me was to go through Beginning Band twice! By the time that was behind me, I was really solid in the basics of playing the clarinet and in reading music, and I was a leader in Band that year and from then on. Band was my favorite class from the 6th grade all the way through Graduate School.

At Allan Jr. High I was put into a special class for advanced math students. There were 32 of us. Half a dozen of us in that class were way ahead of the others. After doing our daily work, the teacher had special problems for us to work. To us it was a game. I was in the top three math students in the entire 7th and 8th grades,–about 550-600 in each grade. Both years our little class stuck together, and we had the same teacher both years. She was a real genius of a teacher, not only in math, but in handling her students.

My English teacher was a real “Dud.” She was the only under-achieving teacher I had during my two years there, and I had her in both the seventh and eighth grades. I learned a lot about how not to teach while in her classes, and I don’t think my knowledge of our language was enhanced much in either grammar nor in literature. I think that my age was just right to learn to read better about that time, but saw little lasting improvement. I’m not making the excuses of a poor student; she was really not a good teacher, and should not have been there.

In PE because we learned the rules and went through the motions of playing all the major sports and some minor ones, competing with other teams in the class. That was another of my favorite classes. I didn’t like boxing, though. Whatever sport we were playing I was almost always one of the worst on our team. I was terribly awkward, both then and now. Years later, the game I played best was basketball. I couldn’t run then, and I can’t run now. I never could run well.

We had 48 Home Rooms in that school. During election year, each Home Room took the identity of one of the 48 states. We learned a lot about how the American political system works.

That year our family stood in line for hours to get on The Freedom Train, which carried some of our country’s most sacred documents. That’s one of the highlights of my life. Also, Harry Truman came through town on a campaign whistle stop, and that’s about what it was. He came out on the back porch of the caboose, waved his hat and the train moved on. I was a bit disappointed, because he looked just like his pictures.

A third highlight of that political year was attending the Democratic Caucus with Dad, Grandad Durden, and step-uncle Albert Durden. I think Jim was with us, too. Albert had run for the Democratic nomination for governor “way back when” against Coke Stevenson, and got splattered with political mud. Well, anyhow, at this convention were people that I recognized from pictures in the papers: Mayon Tom Miller, John Ben Shepherd, Sam Rayburn, Lyndon Johnson, and others. The platform was loaded with big-name Democrats. I recall as the evening drew to a close that I turned to Dad and said, “See that tall man up there next to Sam Rayburn? Some day he’s going to be our President.” That man was Lyndon Johnson. He wasn’t even a senator yet! That came with that year’s election.

Some of the friends I gained in Jr. High remain friends now, fifty years later. Jeannie knows some of them, too. Especially Burt Schulle. He and I were born on the same day in 1935. Also, Burt and I went to Austin High together in the 12th grade, and worked together at H.E.B. Sometimes we would spend the night at each other’s homes. His parents were some of my favorite people.

In 1968 Jeannie and I took a 29-day vacation. She was pregnant with Kelly Jo, and we spent most nights camping in a tent. We had a Volkswagon bug. I took the back seat out so we would have more room for camping gear, clothes, and for our food boxes, etc. I had a piece of plywood where the back seat should have been. It was longer than the car was wide, so I put hinges on it. I could take the passenger’s side front seat out and put it in the back, swapping the hinged boards for the front seat. It made a bed 7′2″ long so sometimes Jeannie could rest while I drove. We went to Palo Duro Canyon, Carlsbad, The Painted Desert, the Petrified Forest, Flagstaff, Las Vegas, Morro Beach, Sequoia Park, San Francisco, Stockton, Salt Lake City, and back home to Austin.

In Flagstaff we called Burt Schulle and his family, hoping to visit with them. But he was a forest ranger up on the mountain. We chatted by phone, but he said for us not to try to come up the mountain to visit, because the snow was still ten feet deep, though it was August. Another year we visited him and his family at Clovis, New Mexico. He was still a forest ranger, but was then in charge of the prairie around Clovis. I can’t recall his wife’s name, but I knew her family when I was still in high school and while I was at Southwestern, especially her sister Mary Beth!

I have a lot of good memories of Allan Junior High School, the students and teachers and the many extra-ordinary experiences I had there.

Years later the building succumbed to arson. But, for me, many good memories remain.

(Written 8-31-98)

Austin, Texas: Spring 1949

Our family in Austin all attended the First Baptist Church. My Sunday School Teacher was Mr. Nollner. He’s one of the mildest, kindest, nicest men I have ever known. He was also an excellent Sunday School teacher, and was respected by all in his classes. Mr. Nollner also coached our softball team for the junior high school age group.

I was one of the pitchers on the team,–but not the best. I did get to play some, even though I couldn’t run well if and when I got a hit. I think I didn’t get to base very often. However, I did get to pitch regularly, a few innings at a time. (Everybody got to play.) Few people got to base off of my fast pitch with the spin on it. It was my one good skill in playing the game. In those days I was very bashful and soft spoken, and I spoke with a very slow drawl.

At the end of the season we scheduled a team picnic which included our siblings and our parents. Then, for some reason or another they changed the date of the picnic, moving it up a few days. The next Sunday Mr. Nollner asked me if I had a ride to the picnic and I told him I didn’t and probably wouldn’t get to go. He seemed upset and said that I really should go if I could, for the date had been moved up because I had told him I was moving from Austin to Andrews the next week. He said that at the picnic I was to be honored for my pitching for the team. I was terribly embarrassed, but certainly went to the picnic. It was one of the greatest honors I have ever received, to be recognized for my athletic prowess. They gave me a trophy. Me! The guy who couldn’t run like the rest of the guys!

(Written 11-8-98)

Andrews, Texas, 1947, age 11, almost 12.

I needed a job. I was eleven years old, about six feet tall, and I weighed around 107 pounds.

I applied for a job as a Roustabout in the oil field, and got hired. They thought I was eighteen years old, and the pay was $3.00 an hour.

I was assigned to work with a man fixing rods on the horses that pump the oil out of the wells. He drove us to our first site about twenty miles out of town. We walked about 1/8th of a mile to the first horse. He appraised the situation and told me to go the truck and get him a crescent wrench of a certain size. I asked, “What’s a crescent wrench.” His reply was short and relatively polite, and it was to the effect that I was to just observe all day. He went for the wrench himself. He didn’t talk much, and I didn’t learn much, but I got one of the worst sunburns of my whole life. I didn’t report to work the next day. Instead I went to town and got a job washing dishes in a cafe at 35 cents an hour, having retired permanently from the oil business.

I spent part of the summer of 1947 in Andrews. It was desert country. The air was hot & dry there. When one sweated, the moisture dried instead of making soggy clothing. I loved that dry climate! I loved to hear the wind sing in the eves of the houses or in the wires between the telephone poles. It was a spooky sound, but somehow it just sounded like home to me. I loved it!

I hadn’t been in Andrews long when a carnival came to town. David Brown and Bobby and I went to it. They had all kinds of fun things to do. We were there a long time and were having a really good time. One thing I liked was shooting the moving ducks with a rifle. (The bullets were .22 shorts.) We were all good at that. Suddenly the mood all around us changed. It seemed as though panic had seized the entire carnival all at once. People were yelling and running every which way. Many people were running away from the carnival, toward their cars. Everyone was running. Everyone! All the games and rides stopped, and the carnival people were closing up their tents as fast as they could. But, it was too early in the evening for closing time. What was wrong? Bobby looked up and pointed at the sky. A hundred feet above us the town lights and the carnival lights lit up huge fast-moving boiling clouds of red, and sounds I had never heard before roared out at us. It was really scary! I had no idea what was going on. Bobby yelled out, “It’s a sandstorm!” Half a minute later it hit with all its fury. Vision was down to just a few feet. I was scared, but Bobby and David took us all to a safe place. I don’t remember anything else about that night except having learned that everyone there had proper respect for those sandstorms. This was only my first one, with many more to come.

Not long after that I was walking west from downtown on the highway toward home. One of those sandstorms hit suddenly, and I was surprised at how strong the wind was and how thick the sand was in the air. A car pulled off the road just ahead of me and the driver motioned frantically for me to get in, so I ran and got in. It was a very hot day. Inside the car the temperature was almost unbearable; but outside, the storm was even more unbearable. There were times we couldn’t even see the hood ornament on the front of the car. The sand blew for a long, long time that afternoon.

Another time I was walking somewhere when a sandstorm hit. After a few minutes it began to rain. The rain, wind and sand stopped almost as soon as it started. It was a very brief storm. But the white shirt I was wearing was now sand-red, and the red color really never did wash completely out of that shirt.

Sandstorms were an oddity, but I can’t say I ever got to where I enjoyed them. I recall one storm that lasted for three days and nights. Daytime temperatures in the house were 105 degrees, and the dust was so thick in the house we wore wet handkerchiefs over our mouths to breathe. Like wearing a fur coat on a hot, hot day, it really felt good when we were finally out of it.

I was in the sixth grade in the West Columbia Elementary School. I loved to play softball, but was one of the worst players in school. I could barely run because I was pigeon-toed and knock-kneed. Besides that, I was just naturally clumsy. I had never been able to run the way other kids could.

We lived on the southwest edge of town. We had a cow, three calves and a pig. The cow was usually staked out in the daytime for good grass beside the highway that ran in front of our house.

I pretended to be a pitcher on an imaginary baseball team. I chose one particular board on the cow shed and pitched to it, with a natural mark on that board being knee-high and another about neck-high. For a long time I just pitched to strike the “batter” out. I got to be pretty accurate. With time I increased the speed of the ball until I had a pretty fast and accurate pitch. I struck out a lot more “batters” than I walked, and developed an underhanded fast spin on the ball.

That year the sixth grade classes had exactly 36 boys, just enough for four softball teams. For some reason I never understood the nine best players were put on “Team A” and so on until the worst nine were on “Team D.” I was natural “Team D” material.

We had a double round robin tournament. Team A had one boy who could knock the ball completely out of the ball park when he connected. We were all awed by his long hits.

I don’t remember which team Billy Richards (Slaven) was on. Slaven’s mother was my Cub Scout den leader. In the eleventh grade, Slavin and I went to school together at Brazosport High School, and later we were roommates at the University of Texas.

Anyhow, our round robin tournament took place as planned. Team D batted poorly, but other pitchers walked a lot of our players. So, we did make some scores. Also, my pitching kept them from getting hits. Few opponents could hit my fast ball, and the spin I had developed made the ones who did hit pop the ball up into the air for pop flies. Our players scrambled enough that we got most of the hitters out.

Beating Team C was a real feather in our caps. We had not expected to win any games at all. But, their pitcher could pitch only slow balls and we got a lot of hits. Team B was our next opponent and we beat them, too, for the same reasons.

We ended up in the championship game with Team A, with all their heavy hitters. But, their pitcher also could only pitch slow balls. I was the only pitcher that could pitch a fast ball. We won the championship undefeated, much to everyone’s surprise.

(Written 2-1-2001)

From our house in Old Ocean, Texas it was maybe a bit more than a fourth to “The Thicket” which was a jungle-like swampy area infested with poisonous snakes, spiders, chameleons and other wildlife,–including an occasional bobcat or a javelina. The trees hung heavy with mistletoe and long strands of Spanish moss. We carried a machete with us to make the going easier, and often one of us carried a .22 rifle. David Brown (Pop’s younger brother) carried a bayonet most of the time, throwing the point into the ground. He was good at doing that. One day as approached the thicket he threw the knife and cut a copper head in two. I still shudder as I think about the two parts of that snake writhing separately on the ground.

Occasionally we would catch chameleons in the woods and take them home to catch flies, mosquitoes, ants and other insects. The technique was to tie a little string around them so that they couldn’t get away. The other end of the string was tied to a bed post or something. Mother never complained about the stakeouts. In fact, I think she actually got a kick out of it, though she was visibly squeamish about having them around. It was interesting to watch the chameleons change color, from their natural green to brown or black. Sometimes they would shed a part of their tail, which grew back in a few days.

For our personal entertainment, near those woods and next to the dump were two canals, compliments of the nearby oil refinery. The small canal was probably 20 or 30 feet across. The larger one was more like a hundred yards wide, or more. That was our main goal, for in it were some pretty big catfish. We strung a trotline across that canal with big hooks on individual strings tied several feet apart onto the main, larger line. I was usually not along when they ran the trotline, but with a rowboat we could check the line for the the daily catch. Usually the catch was quite meager. Running the line was done very carefully, for sometimes there was an alligator gar on a hook, or a big water moccasin with maws and fangs like the claws on a Lorain crane. In such instances, we cut that hook from the line, just letting them have their freedom. Too scary to play with!

For bait, we caught small perch from an earthen dam on the smaller canal. It was common to see the head of a turtle stick up out of the water. The shells of those turtles were usually about six or eight inches across, but we saw only the heads unless we found one crawling somewhere on the ground. Also, many water snakes swam there with only their heads showing, plus a wake of their bodies. Like a miniature Loch Ness Monster! All summer long Bobby and I fished for bait side by side, about ten feet apart in that small canal. We used the same kinds of pole, hook, line, sinker and bait. We fished at the same depth and maybe even used the same embouchure. Bobby usually caught plenty of perch for bait on the trot line. All summer long I caught only three perch. In all my life I have probably caught a total of half a dozen fish, none big enough to keep. Bobby could have skipped all his later years in college and supported his family well just by selling his surplus fish. To this day he retains a definite talent there.

There was a fairly narrow hump of land between the two canals with a sort of makeshift pathway on top. From there one could see a long way, for the terrain all around was flat, with woods on both sides of the water. Sometimes I took my BB gun and went there alone. I shot at everything imaginable: weeds, sticks, insects, leaves floating in the water, or snakes wherever they might be. There were countless mosquitoes and many colors of dragonflies all over the place. And red ants. Almost all my shooting was done from the hip. I was a dead shot from the hip. One day I shot at dragon flies and killed well over two hundred as they hovered in the air.

Another day, for no particular reason, I took the .22 rifle out there. Again, I was by myself. I shot at many things that day. Most memorable was a target floating about 200 feet away in the big canal. It was an alligator about eight feet long. Every time I hit him the bullet ricocheted off, whining into the woods across the way. Finally he tired of it and submerged. There was nothing interesting to shoot at anymore, so I headed toward home. On the way, I crossed the dump. A Negro man and his young son were scavenging there for treasures or just anything useful. The man asked me what I was shooting at. “An alligator,” I said. Without another word, and to my great surprise, the man was truly frightened! Immediately, he and his son got into their old truck and made fast tracks out of there! That was one really scared man! I thought to myself, “Well. He must think that they really are alligator bait!” I had never put any stock in the saying before. I just thought it was another derogatory phrase some people used rather than saying “nigger,” just as one of them might call a low-life white guy “po’ white trash.” Well, I wasn’t ever much into name calling. To me people, for the most part, are just people, as you can see from a lot of other stories I pass on. In those days, though, to me a nigger was just a nigger, with nothing else implied. Eventually this term elevated to Negro, and later to Blacks. In later years I was glad to know people from over a hundred countries. One of my dearest thoughts in my adult life is: “…and crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea.” To me, that’s the REAL America. As I see it, that’s the real goal in being American. I believe in that with all my heart.

Please forgive me, for I have digressed…

On the far side of the big canal was a swimming hole that the older boys used to frequent. They had a diving board that was probably a 2 x 12 secured under part of a tree or stump. One of my brothers once told me about an incident at the swimming hole. A boy walked out to the end of the board and was about to dive in when he looked below and saw an eight foot alligator resting in the shadow of the board. The boy very cautiously made his way off the board and back onto the bank. The boys then rowed back across the canal, went home, and never swam in those waters again.

Another event I was not in on, but was very impressed by was a nocturnal visit to a large slough on the far side of the big canal. The water there was surrounded by very large trees with long, hanging Spanish moss hanging down. Many trees spread out over the slough. Lots of trees on the bank lay on the ground rotting, and perhaps even some in the water. If I remember right, Bobby, Jimmy, David Brown and one other were there. I don’t remember which one told me what happened that night; but, this is as I recall it: They rowed across the canal and up stream several hundred yards to this slough. The purpose of the trip might have been to gig for frogs or to kill a little alligator, or was just another adventure. I really don’t know. The slough was perhaps a hundred feet across, with an island in the middle. The object was to land on the island to do whatever they went there to do. To enter the slough they had to go through a narrow straight. Once in, they had rough rowing. There were quite a few logs rotting in the water. When the moon came out from behind a cloud they saw that the island was covered with and the banks were lined with countless alligators. Then, realizing that the logs they had been pushing aside with their oars were actually alligators, they performed a Biblical feat, copying the example of Joseph of old; they got themselves out.

The attraction of the canals seems to have waned a bit from that time on. Soon after that we moved to West Columbia.

On a hot, sweltering day I rode my bike to the highway and then a mile north to where our road dead-ended at yet another highway. That was where our neighborhood grocery store was, where we at Old Ocean bought bread, milk, and such. This particular trip of mine was to get a cold pop and some gum or candy. On the way home, I saw a colored boy about my age walking in the same direction I was going. I offered him a lift on my bike, and he got on the cross bar. As we rode, we talked and were laughing and having a good time. We were only together for about a mile. When I got home, Mother and Pop said they passed us on the highway. I hadn’t even noticed. Pop kidded me a little about pumping the colored boy on my bike. I hadn’t thought anything about it, really. But, I do remember that it took a couple of days for his odor to leave me. He had certainly been a lot more fun to be with than the boy across the street, and I’ve never been sorry for befriending him.