From the time of my earliest recollections, we did not have a radio nor even electricity. Of course television was unheard of at that time. The only entertainment available came to town about once or twice a year. A carnival or a moving picture show would arrive after being advertised for a couple of weeks. The picture shows were usually in big tents and were set up as near to down town as possible. Of course the carnivals were always in the open and you could see the Ferris wheel for miles, all lit up and going around and around.

There would usually be a man that would come to town, before the show or carnival was to come, with circulars and posters to be put up and passed out all over the area. He would hire boys in the area to do the legwork and their pay would be free passage to the show, or free rides at the carnival. Bobby Shelton, Wayne Stone, and I would be waiting when he came, and usually got the job. If it had not been for those opportunities, I most probably would never have been able to see a movie or carnival before I was about 14 years old. When I was about 13 or 14 Mother would let me go to Groesbeck on Saturday and see a movie. Movies cost a dime then, so it was a special treat to get to see a movie at a theater.

On one occasion, I rode to Groesbeck with John Pilot, a businessman from Thornton, and he promised to pick me up after the movie at the Black and White Cafe for a ride back to Thornton. I got out of the movie about 8 p.m. and went to the cafe to wait for him. I knew it would be about 10 p.m. before he would be there, so I waited patiently until then. However, the cafe closed at 10:30 p.m. and he still was not there. I waited until midnight; he still did not show up. It was dark and quite because everyone had already gone to bed. There was no traffic on the highway in front of the cafe, so I started walking toward Thornton along the shoulder of the highway. That was the longest, most frightening, 8 miles I ever walked in my life. Not a single car passed me in either direction, there was no moonlight to see by, and every house I passed along the way was dark and had a dog that would bark at me.

When I got to Thornton, about 3 a.m., the night watchman told me that my mother had been looking for me since about midnight. He said she was really worried and I was probably really going to "get it" when I got home. Sure enough, she was waiting for me at the door, and before I could explain that John Pilot had not picked me up, and I had to walk the 8 miles home, she started applying the razor strap in the proper place. I made a dive to get under the bed and hide, but my shoulders got caught against the bed rail. There I was, the seat of my breeches pulled tight, unable to move forward because of the bed rail, and unable to retreat because of the razor strap; a perfect posture for a good whipping if there ever was one. My mother and I agreed, years later, that the only whipping I ever got that I did not deserve, was that one. John had forgotten about me and gone home about 7 p.m.

After Daddy died, and before I was old enough to earn any money, the only new toys I had to play with came at Christmas or on my birthday, and they usually came from my sister Loraine. I could always expect a nice package from her in December and another in February. The packages would contain clothes for both Mother and I, as well as some kind of toy for me. I guarded those toys with my life and I think that was the beginning of my respect for my possessions. I never destroyed a toy or left it out of its place even for an hour.

Leland Stutz, Keely Black, J.C. McClelland, and I were about the same age and lived within a city block of each other. They would invite me over to their houses to play with them and their nice toys. We usually played with our cars and trucks in the dirt, and I always had a toy airplane and had a runway to land on. Keely's father owned a drug store and he always had lots of nice toys. He gave me several of his toy cars, airplanes, and guns.

Leland and I were playing, with our toy cars and airplanes, one day when we heard some cars coming down the road in front of his house going really fast. The dust was going as high as the telephone poles and we could hear someone shooting guns. As the cars passed his house, we saw that the sheriff's car was chasing another car and shooting at it. We learned later that he was after Blue Boy and Austin Holmes, two local moonshiners, who had a carload of whiskey and were running from the sheriff.

In the winter time, when the nights were long, we would sit in front of the fireplace and Mother would tell me stories about Grandpa Jordan, (pronounced Jurden), and the civil war. He never liked to call it "the civil war", but referred to it as "the War Between the States." He had been a Captain in the Confederacy, with Company G of the 36th Alabama Regiment, out of Mobile, and had fought at Lookout Mountain, Tennessee, and many other places against the Union Army of the northern states.

Before the war started he had been a "slave master", or foreman, over the Negro slaves on a plantation near Mobile, Alabama. His job was to oversee their work and to take care of them, much like a foreman on a ranch directs the operation of the ranch and oversees the cowboys working for him. He lived in a cabin next to the slave quarters and they prepared his meals, washed his clothes, and kept his quarters clean for him. One of the slaves was designated to wake him up every morning before daylight for breakfast and Grandpa would assign them duties for the day.

One morning, the slave woke him up and said, "Master Jordan, come outside and look up at the sky. We is all scared half to death." When Grandpa looked at his watch and saw that it was 1:30, he said, "What in the world do you mean, letting me sleep until 1:30 in the afternoon? You know we have cotton to pick." The slave's reply was, "But, Master Jordan, it ain't in the day, its night time, come on out and look at the sky." When Grandpa finally did go outside and looked up, he saw thousands of bright meteorites, or "shooting stars" as they called them, moving from the northern sky toward the southern sky. The slaves told him the display had begun in the north a while before midnight. It finally disappeared over the southern horizon a little while before daybreak.

Many people, all over the United States had seen the display of meteorites, and many took it as an omen of a war to come between the northern states and the southern states. Rumors of war had been around for some time. President Abraham Lincoln declared slavery to be under the jurisdiction of the federal government, and the people of the northern states supported him, but the people of the southern states felt that the decision to own slaves, or not to own slaves, was the right of each state, and not the right of the federal government.

War between the northern states, The Union, and the southern states, The Confederacy, began in 1861, then President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in September of 1862, and effective January 1, 1863, the slaves in all territory still at war with the Union, were freed. Grandpa Jordan no longer had a job as a slave master and set about to form a company of men to go to the war against the Union. When he had his group of men all together, they marched to Mobile and became Company G, of the 36th Alabama Regiment, Confederate Army.

Mother told me how he marched northward with his men to near the town of Chattanooga, Tennessee, where they met the Union forces at Lookout Mountain and fought there. He lost several of his men there because they were fighting on the side of the mountain and when they were wounded, they fell to their death. It was a very fierce battle and lasted for several days, and both sides took very heavy losses.

From Lookout Mountain, he marched northward to Virginia, through farmland that had been overrun by the Union Army and plundered. The farmers had very little to eat because of the destruction of the battles waged on their farms, and the farms were tended by mostly women and children along with slaves that had refused to leave the farms. The men had gone to war, leaving their farms behind. Grandpa and his men had very little to eat, and were constantly on the move, to keep from being detected by the Union forces in the area. The farmers helped when they could.

Grandpa found some of his men roasting a pig over a bed of coals and, thinking they might have been given the pig by a grateful farmer, he was sitting eating with the men when one of them said "Boy, I hope we can find a pig like this again in a day or two, even if we have to steal it like we did this one." Grandpa was quite upset because the pig had been stolen, and ordered the soldier to grub up a tree stump that was near by where they had roasted the pig. When Grandpa had finished his inspection rounds of the other platoons, he came back to where the men had roasted the pig and found the soldier digging up another stump; having finished with the one Grandpa had ordered him to dig up. When Grandpa asked him why he was digging up another stump, he said, "Captain, if I see another pig like that one, I'm gonna steal it, and I just want to be one stump ahead."

Mother said Grandpa told her of being captured by the Yankees, (Union Soldiers), and being held in a prison in New York State. He managed to escape and board a train to Canada. When the train crossed over the national boundary into Canada, there went up a shout of, "Hurrah for Jeff Davis". It seems there were other escaped Rebel prisoners and Confederate sympathizers aboard the train. Jefferson Davis was the President of the Confederacy. The Canadians helped Grandpa to return to Mobile aboard a ship, which sailed around the tip of Florida and he joined back up with his outfit just before the war was over.

After the war was over, he rode a horse from Alabama to Texas in search of a place to settle and start a new life. There were no jobs in the south and it was popular for men to go westward in search of independence and riches. He camped out for several days near Fort Parker, in Limestone County, Texas and rode out each day looking for land to settle on. The Indians were still roaming the area, but as long as they were left alone, they left the white man alone also.

He rode his horse across a prairie southwest of Fort Parker and his boots, in the stirrups of his saddle, dragged in the grass. This was the land he was looking for; it was rich sandy loam on the edge of black land. It would be good cotton country. He sent for his family in Alabama, and they came in a covered wagon to join him.

He built a big two-story house in the middle of 320 acres that he had staked out as a homestead and laid claim to. His sister, Matt Owens, and her five sons came with his wife and two small children. Aunt Matt's husband had been killed in the war. The boys helped Grandpa build the house and till the soil. Life was good again until his wife took sick and died. Aunt Matt took over as lady of the house until he met and married my grandma, Mary Whatley, a young half Indian maiden, who bore him four daughters and a son.

Mother told me many stories about her childhood and many more stories about Grandpa and the civil war, but I cannot remember them all. The stories served their purpose; they gave Mother and me something to do on those long cold winter evenings. They also let me get a glimpse of some grandparents I never knew.

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