Allen Thrower

It was 1940. I was either four or five years old. The country was just coming out of the Great Depression of the late 1920′s and the 1930′s. Most American families were having tough times in those days. Ours was no exception. Dad was having a very hard time providing for himself and Mother, and for us four children. The cupboard was bare!

One evening Dad loaded Mother and all four kids into the car and drove north on Lamar Blvd, turned right, went east up the graveled 19th street hill, which was so steep that the car skidded a bit on the way up. At the top of the hill, he turned left, parked the car in the middle of the road with the motor still running. He then took his pistol with him to a house on the east side of the street where, he said, a man lived who owed him five dollars. Dad was determined to collect. How desperate he must have been! As we watched, he and the man argued on the front porch for a long time, sometimes quite loudly. It seemed much later that Dad came back to the car,–far, far from being proud, with two dollars in hand. With some of that money he bought pinto beans which Mother cooked so we would have something to eat.

To this day, when I eat pintos it is, to me, a very special meal,–a true delicacy. And, to dine on pintos with buttered cornbread is heavenly,–truly high living!

I will never forget the cost of a handful of beans.

Dad’s best friend in Austin was Dr. Vance, a dentist. My first visit to Dr. Vance’s office on Congress Avenue was a thrill. He built model airplanes and had a lot of them suspended from the ceiling in his waiting room. I was enthralled with them. Dr. Vance had one that had a propeller that wound up with a strong rubber band; and, it would really fly. Doc wanted to give that one to me, but Dad wouldn’t let him. I think Dad’s reasons were integrity-related.

Doc was also into ham radio. I can still see him and Dad in my mind’s eye as they called a ship at sea before World War II. Somehow, out of all of this, I later learned Morse Code.

Years later Doc entered my life again, when I was in junior high. He was into racing model cars, and had one that I got to see set a world record of 107 mph. It went in a circle, held by a small cable. It was probably 16″ long and was propelled by gasoline, I think.

Also, when I was in junior high school, again I got to witness Dad and Doc calling somewhere in the world on that ham radio. Jim was present. Doc was constantly chewing on a cigar. He often expectorated into a spittoon halfway across the room, and rarely if ever missed.

Jim, Dad, and Doc years later got involved in tracing radio signals moving around the city of Austin, tracking down the vehicles transmitting. It was quite a sport! I never got to see them doing that, though.

Still later Doctor Vance got into electric trains and turned his large south-facing porch into a room devoted entirely to trains. He had a city, countryside, farms, bridges and more. He had about forty trains with a console control area from which he could run many trains simultaneously. It was a fine art!

The last time I saw Dr. Vance was about 1960. It was at a bowling alley, and he was into bowling as much as he ever had been in any of his other hobbies.

He worked on my teeth only once. I think I was in high school. I remember his sticking fingers of both hands into my mouth and said, “If this hurts, just whistle.” He refused payment for the work he did. I never went back to him for dental work.

After Jeannie and I were married, we went to visit the Odem’s,–some of her kinfolk in Austin. As fate would have it, they lived right next door to Dr. Vance. When Odem, a building contractor, died his widow offered Jeannie and me the Bible of Joel Robison,–Jeannie’s great-great grandfather, who had captured Santa Anna at the Battle of San Jacinto in the spring of 1835. We had no use for it, not realizing its value. It is now in hard-to-get-to archives at the University of Texas.

My knowing Dr. Vance and Annie spanned about thirty years.

Austin is unique in that it has very tall street lights. I think they are about 296′ tall, with a cluster of lights at the top. These lights are four-sided towers with triangular reinforcement all the way to the top, beginning at the ground with a single post for about twenty feet. They are spectacular! And beautiful! Paris, France was the only other city in the world with these street lights. Sometime in my adult life, Austin bought Paris’ lights when they removed them, enhancing the number in Austin.

When we moved to Austin in 19[??] I was fascinated with these lights. From my bed I could look out the window at night and see at least one of them. One night as I looked out the window, for some reason the street light frightened me. I stared at it for a long time. I was in a strange city and was still getting used to new things, including those lights. I fell asleep and dreamed the following: Mother and I were in downtown Austin where there were some of those tall lights. It was dusk. Some men drove up in a black car, got out and tried to force Mother into it. It was a kidnapping, though they ignored the kid. I woke up yelling loudly, “Mother! Mother!” Dad came into the bedroom (he was never quite with it when awakened from a deep sleep) and asked, “What do you need?” Ashamed at waking him, and realizing I had just had a bad dream, I asked meekly, “Can I have a drink of water?” He mumbled something unintelligible and brought me some water, saying that I could have gotten it for myself. What he never knew was the comfort I had in knowing that in that time of great crisis, MY DADDY came to our rescue, and had there been a real kidnapping, Dad would have saved us.

One day in Austin I was with Mother and Dad who were shopping at some outdoor market place on a sidewalk where there were stalls covered with awnings. They sold fruits and vegetables and other things there. There were also regular small stores involved. Suddenly I broke out with a big smile and shouted, “There’s Mrs. McGregor!” And, it really was. Mother recognized her, and we got together for a brief, but very meaningful visit with her.

Mrs. McGregor had been my kindergarten teacher when we lived in Waco on McFerrin. I think my kindergarten was at the Baptist church near our home. I loved Mrs. McGregor dearly. She was good to everone in my class. She taught us to cut and paste paper, making picutes. She taught us to play a game about finding a thimble or an empty spool or some other object by playing “I spy” or “hot or cold”. Somehow she made whatever we did to be very exciting, teaching us a principle of some kind with everything we did. Whenever someone spotted the item in question, everyone shouted with glee rather than being envious. That was how she taught us to be. She really had a lot of common sense in teaching, and I remember her as a teacher who really cared for each child in the class. We also learned some numbers, colors, and what some letters said. We sang a lot of songs and played musical chairs. She didn’t try to quell our being noisy when we were having so much fun. We played games so fast that winning and losing were not a big factor. The main thing was to just start a new game with new winners and losers, and losing was just not a factor, because eventually everyone won. I think that some of what I learned in kindergarten carried over to when I was a teacher a quarter of a century later. Mainly, that there’s no substitute for fairness in whatever you do.

My Sunday School teacher was a nice lady, but I don’t remember her name. One day we had a lesson about Easter. She gave each of us some poppy seeds and told us how to plant them. I took my seeds home and planted them just to the north of the front step to our house. They grew and bloomed, and I was thrilled that I had planted my first garden and that it did so well. I still feel good about those red poppies.

One thing we boys loved to do was to play-wrestle. The bed was the softest thing to fall upon, so that’s where we did a lot of our wrestling, especially Bobby and me. One night Mother and Dad went out, leaving us kids to fend for ourselves, with the admonission for us not to fight on the bed. Well, Bobby and I knew better. We could wrestle and then make the bed back up, and they’d never know. It was a pretty good plan; but, like Mr. Robert Burns has so aptly stated, “The best laid plans of mice and men often go astray.” (My own wording.) Either Bobby or I made a running dive for the other, who dodged, allowing the flying one to exit through the window. We were in trouble. There was no need to explain to our parents how the window got broken. And, we knew that Dad was having a hard time making money in those days. Bobby and I felt really bad about what we did, but I don’t remember if it was just for what we did, or for what Dad did for what we did.

We liked to play “house.” That is, with neighbor kids, we would choose our mates and play like we were families. A man and his wife could have as many imaginary kids as they wanted, always within reason, like real families. We would have imaginary rooms, the walls usually drawn in the dirt with a stick. We had imaginary furniture, eating utensils and foods. Sometimes we had mud pies for “food.” Peggy Campbell lived on the west side of the street, directly across from us. Theirs was a very nice house. She sometimes played house with us. One day I was playing house with my wife, who lived next door to the south of us. She was only two years old. While we were “eating dinner” on the border of our properties, Mother called for me to come home to my real house. I got up from our “table,” told my wife, “I have to go to work now,” kissed her on the lips and left. That was what I remember as the first time I ever kissed a girl other than my own sister. I think I loved that girl as much at that time as a real man loved his real wife, and that kiss was a real kiss. And, then I went off “to work.” Really! It was no accident she was my wife. I think her name was Judy.

There were vacant fields near our home in Austin. One field in particular was a solid field of broomweeds that were probably about a foot and a half to two feet tall. We could crawl through a field of broomweeds without being detected by others if we first pulled up the weeds to make a path. We even cleared areas large enough to call them “rooms.” Then we could play house there.

Behind our house the yard sloped down to Bouldin Creek. We would go down to the creek to wade and play. Jimmy and Bobby sometimes would fish and catch perch in a pool below the ten-foot waterfall. I recall that the steep slope down to the creek was almost impossible for me to climb up without help. But, one day some big old 7-year-olds (12-year-olds?) across the creek threw rocks at us and called us names. Terrified, I cried. We ran away, and had to climb that impossible slope up the creek bank; but, by grabbing a small root that should have broken and maybe did, I made it to the top as though in a dead run. Fear motivates!

Schools in those days had “low” and “high” grades, ie., the low first grade, and the high first grade. If one failed the low first, he/she was not promoted to the high first, etc. Both, the highs and lows were taught each semester. Completing the high first, one was promoted to the low second. Students who excelled were “double promoted.” It seems that I remember that Bobby was double promoted, or triple promoted; I think he skipped the entire second grade. I was never double promoted, but I was never held back, either. I don’t know when they stopped having the low and high grades.

The second semester that year Jim started to Fullmore Jr. High in the “low seventh.” He has reminded me that he was a street crossing guard at school. It was during that year that the state of Texas added the twelfth grade to the public schools, and I recall that Jim was just not real happy about that.

Mad Dog!
We loved to play. Usually we made up our own rules to the games we played, often making them up as they went along. “Play like…” was a good way to make an addition to what we were doing. Play like Jim’s the daddy and Peggy is the mommy (or the little girl) and Bobby and I are the little kids (or uncles, or strangers, etc.)

One of our favorite games was “mad dog.” In this game we’d lay all the kitchen chairs on their sides, along with any other boxes or little furniture available, including a black box with a lid on it that Dad used to develop pictures. These were walls, doorways, etc. Someone would be “IT.” The object of the game was for the rest of us to get across the room without the mad dog touching us. If we were touched, we became “it” and the former mad dog was just another player. We played this game by the hour,–screaming from “fear”, laughing a lot and we were very loud. Somehow Mother tolerated this game for long periods of time. It was one of the best games we could play when the weather was cold and rainy outside.

Pirates!
A game we played was to be pirates. We fought with stick “swords”, swinging and clacking away. Sometimes we would pretend to stab another, who then fell down and died. As soon as he was down, he “came back” as “another man” and began to fight again. A cat may have nine lives, but our lives were without number, but always as another person. The same rule applied when we played cops and robbers or cowboys and Indians .

As pirates, we had lots of jewels and money. The money was almost real. Bobby and Jim made it from rolls of receipt tape. They made hundreds of dollar bills of various denominations.

During the summer Jim and Bobby both caught the chicken pox and mumps (or measles and mumps) at the same time. They were very sick, and had to stay in bed. They were miserable. I did not get sick. Somehow, I was required by my sick brothers to go out one rainy day and dig up a lot of the dollar bills we pirates had buried in a “treasure chest” the back yard. I guess my retrieving that treasure was some comfort to my brothers-in-need.