Ruby Lois Lane - 1908-1980

Early Years

I've said a few things about my mother already.  I want to add a few additional comments. 

My mother was born in Clairette, Texas on April 30, 1908.  Clairette was wide place in the road a few miles west of Hico near the Bosque River.   Hico is located southwest of Fort Worth.  She was raised around the Hico area and lived there until her graduation from Hico High School in 1927. 

Daddy was a big story teller and full of anecdotes about his childhood.  Mama was a quiet person and didn’t say all that much.  Information is a good bit sketchier about Mama’s early life.

Mama was the valedictorian of her class at Hico High School.   Upon her graduation she was offered a scholarship to the University of Texas.   I’ve seen a copy of the grant, although I don’t think I still have it.   In those days I guess people didn’t think education was all that important for a girl.   I’ve been told that my grandfather wouldn’t let her go to the university.   I guess that’s just as well with me.    I probably never would have been born had she married some bright campus dude with a Model A convertible and a raccoon coat.   He might have been a boring stockbroker from Austin or somewhere.

She belonged to the flapper era, although I never heard her use expressions like “23 skidoo” and “Oh you kid.”  She ended up at Brantley-Draughon Business College in Fort Worth.   Unlike my father, she took her studies seriously, and she became an accomplished typist and stenographer.   In later life she suffered from mental illness, but she never forgot how to write in shorthand.  Upon graduation she took a job with what we today would call as savings and loan bank in Fort Worth.   Things apparently went well for a while, but the job with the savings and loan bank went away with the onset of the depression.

She found a job as a housekeeper for a wealthy Jewish family, and she used to talk about that experience.  I wish I had paid closer attention.  For some reason, I remember her telling me about taking the rugs out to the clothesline and beating the dust out of them.  Vacuum cleaners were pretty rare in those days, even in wealthy families.  Eventually, they let her go and she had to return home to Hico.

She liked to talk about Fort Worth.  When I was about ten, she took me there.  New York City couldn’t have been bigger in my eyes.  Fort Worth may have been known as Cowtown, but I never saw the stockyards until I was 60 years old.  To her the heart of Fort Worth was downtown and the nerve center of that was  Leonard’s Department store.  She took me there.  The highlight of the trip was lunch at the store’s cafeteria in the basement.  I had never seen a cafeteria before.   She showed me how to get my lunch.  I remember that it cost me 29 cents.

At some point in her early life (I think it must have been during the Fort Worth years), she and a friend took a trip to Oklahoma City.  It was the only time in her entire life she would travel outside the borders of the state of Texas.  She retained picture post cards from that trip for a long time.  I remember seeing them up into my teens.    She liked to talk about her travel to Oklahoma.  I think she would have enjoyed travel as much as I have, but she never got the opportunity.