Memories of Papa - John Wesley Lane (1)

I've now completed my posts about my mother's siblings.  Beginning with this post, I'll share some memories of my maternal grandparents.

Saturday Afternoons in Hico

It’s a funny thing.  I don’t remember exactly how tall John Wesley Lane was.   He had tall sons and I want to say that he was tall.   He was a thin man, who was bald headed by the time I knew him.   Of the hair that he had left, there was not a strand of gray anywhere in his hair that I can remember.

My earliest memories of him involve Saturday afternoons in Hico.  In the late thirties, people gathered in town at Hico on Saturday afternoon.   I suppose they came in to pick up supplies and do their trading.   We usually sold cream and eggs, which was about the only cash we had until the crops were sold.  If you managed to get $3 or $4 for the butter and eggs, then you would be able to buy flour, coffee, pinto beans, potatoes, corn meal and maybe a few extras.  That would get you by for several days.   There wasn’t a great deal of variety in the diet, but you didn’t starve either.  When I started to school, the teachers taught us about the basic food groups and the need for a balanced diet.   It was kind of ridiculous.   Most of us couldn’t afford a balanced diet, and we probably wouldn’t have thought healthy foods tasted well.   Nobody ever heard of cholesterol, and most foods were fried in hog lard. At various times of the year, meat from the smokehouse and vegetables from the garden supplemented those staples.  We also raised frying size chickens.   My mother was adept with an axe, but I remember others who simply twisted the bird’s head off.   I would forget about the bird’s pain, when I saw the fried chicken on the plate.  I loved the pulley bone.   We ate better in the summers than we did in the winters

We also went to town to visit with friends, family and neighbors.  The sidewalks were so thick with people that you could barely walk down the street, but I always knew where to find Papa, my grandfather.  He would be sitting next to the big picture window at the dry goods store (Hoffman’s, I think).    He was always anxious to see me.  He would always give me a penny, which I usually exchanged for a large stick of peppermint candy.

Sometime in late 1940 or  early 1941, we moved to Clyde and I was never quite as close to Papa again, although I still looked forward to each an every visit.   After we moved to Clyde I remember him sending me a dollar in the mail every year on my birthday.  That was a pretty big birthday present for a six-year-old boy.  The dollar continued to come in the mailbox until I reached adulthood.