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The pin that holds a hinge together is called a pintle.
And Now You Do
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14:27, The fear of the LORD is a fountain of life, to depart from the snares of death.
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Tales from Elm Flat: Birthdays in the Country
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You know, growing up in the country, with eight brothers and sisters--nine of us in all plus Mom and Dad--birthdays were not really a big thing. With eleven of us, having a birthday party for every one would have cut seriously into work time and chore time. Even so, our parents, Mom particularly, always found some way to recognize each child’s birthday, generally not a party, but maybe a cake, maybe a Happy Birthday song, maybe a birthday card. There was really no set pattern, and I do not recollect that any single child got all three things—cake, song, and card.
Favorite foods were one way to recognize birthdays, with Mom taking the time and care to prepare your favorite dish for dinner or supper on your birthday. With me there was really no question. I always asked for Mom’s homemade angel food cake with cherry-flavored butter icing! Mom’s angel food cake was, to me, delicious beyond description, and if you have only had angel food cake from the grocery store or a bakery, you still have not the slightest conception of how delicious this desert can be! Dad would sometimes prepare his specialty, bread pudding with a marvelous orange-flavored sauce to pour over it, and I know there must have been requests for peach cobbler pie, which we ate with cream British style, not sweetened or whipped up into a froth.
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Posted by Webmaster on Monday, June 28 @ 17:40:24 EDT (1841 reads)
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Tales from Elm Flat: Halloween in the Old Days
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Halloween in Kerens back in the old days was a time when children had great fun, and sometimes a little mischief got thrown in to boot. Nowadays when I treat little spooks at my front door, some of my own haunting memories come rushing back. There are recollections of Halloween costumes, of Halloween parties and hay rides, of trick-or-treat forays, and even of high jinx that went a little beyond usual expectations.
The weather usually seemed to cooperate with this nocturnal occasion. October weather in Kerens is always quite a welcome relief from the 100-degree days from back in August and the still-warm days of September, and at the time of Halloween temperatures might even fall into the 50s or 60s, with the possibility of a refreshing or even chilling breeze. I cannot remember a single occasion when rain intruded upon the festivities—not during the 1950s when it seldom seemed to rain at all!
The Halloween ambience included some characteristic sights and smells. As for the visual environment, can you recall that we always seemed to have a full moon—sometimes called the harvest moon, with its pagan connotations, or Comanche moon, with its images of Indian raiding parties? Do you recall, as you made your spooky trick-or-treat visits, the crackling of fallen leaves and the crunching sound of pecans as they cracked under foot? Finally, Halloween season in Kerens, to me, will always be associated with the acrid smell of burning cotton burrs as this smell (dare I say aroma?) drifted into town from the surrounding fields where farmers added valuable nutrients to their soil by burning cotton burrs picked up as a by-product from local gins.
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Posted by Webmaster on Thursday, January 28 @ 11:32:36 EST (2232 reads)
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Tales from Elm Flat: A Trip to Daniel Lake
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Just about anyone living around Kerens has heard of Daniel Lake, but a few basic facts are worth stating. As to location, the lake is on the Navarro County side of the Trinity River right across the river from the old TP & L plant in Trinidad. Coming from Kerens and heading east across the Trinity River bridge, you can sometimes spot the lake, maybe three-quarters a mile south, if you look sharply to your right. I don’t necessarily recommend doing this if you are the one driving the car!
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Posted by Webmaster on Thursday, January 21 @ 15:02:26 EST (631 reads)
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Tales from Elm Flat: When Daddy Shot the Goose
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The old Thompson place was our home when I was about four years old. It was a big wooden two-story house right in the middle of nowhere out in Elm Flat. We were almost a mile off the main road, and even that was just a graded dirt road, and in the winter it was an ungraded mud road complete with deep ruts. The house came complete with a water well and outhouse—no pump for the well, no electricity, no telephone. Our nearest neighbors, about one-half mile south of us, were the Lancasters (Denver and Marvene and their children).
The front door of the Thompson place looked east right into the back of the 100-acre Houston place, a fertile blackland place that Daddy rented several years later and farmed for Mr. Houston. The back of the Houston place was low lying, and always collected water during the winter time, looked in fact like a small lake right across the road from our house. As such, it was a perfect landing place for Canadian geese when they made their annual pilgrimage from Canada and the northern United States to enjoy their usual southern winter vacation.
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Posted by Webmaster on Monday, January 11 @ 15:31:49 EST (541 reads)
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Tales from Elm Flat: The Old Wooden Tabernacle
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Kerens old-timers, driving around town, see things in memory that others do not—the Kerens Hotel, which stood back of the Kerens Theater on the northwest corner of that block; Reese’s Lumberyard, which stood on the now-vacant block of Colket immediately south of the railroad, on the west side of the street; and of course the old grammar school that marked the south end of Colket Street--the place where a fleet of yellow school buses assembled at the end of every school day for over fifty years. There were other landmarks as well, stores in the fire-ravaged section of downtown, the school gymnasium, and the beige brick high school building--a landmark I still remember so well that I could take you on a verbal walking tour of the entire premises. In our hearts, in our minds, in our memories, we can visit there together one day, but just now I am thinking of another landmark to tell you about—the old tabernacle.
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Posted by Webmaster on Wednesday, October 07 @ 15:40:42 EDT (939 reads)
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Tales from Elm Flat: Pitching in to Help
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Thinking of the way it was in Kerens back in the 1950s, I always find it pleasant to remember how people always seemed so willing to help out their friends and neighbors. Folks just seemed to spring into action when they heard of a person who was having a hard time. As one example, people would always show up to bring food to the home of a person who had lost a relative. Few of us were very well off, but it seemed like just about everyone was more than willing to share what little they had.
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Posted by Webmaster on Thursday, May 21 @ 15:14:21 EDT (893 reads)
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Tales from Elm Flat: Daddy’s Trip to the Chicago World Fair
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First let’s talk about the Chicago world fairs. There were two of them. The first, in 1893, was the Columbian Exhibition along the shores of Lake Michigan on the eastern edge of the burgeoning city of Chicago. The Columbian Exhibition, following in the wake of the much noted and highly successful World Fair in Paris, France, was a magnificent retrospective on the origins, history, government, people, and culture of the United States. Its architecture was stately and classical, and its focus was upon the first hundred years of this nation—it sought to explain this nation’s greatness in terms of its past.
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Posted by Webmaster on Thursday, May 14 @ 11:14:29 EDT (839 reads)
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Tales from Elm Flat: How Daddy Missed Going to Jail
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We lived in three different places in Elm Flat—the Parks place, the Thompson place, and the Goforth place. (Out in the Flat, you always referred to the place you lived by giving it the name of the owner of the land. The first house was the Parks place, meaning the farm and farmhouse were owned by Mr. Parks. Ditto with the Thompson and the Goforth places, and later Dad leased the Houston place, which did not have a house on it.) None of these three houses were very fancy, but each had a sound roof overhead, which was nice and about as much as anyone expected. None of these three places are still standing, and passers by would be hard pressed to imagine that houses ever stood on any one of the three sites, although each of the three abodes linger clearly in my memory.
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Posted by Webmaster on Thursday, May 07 @ 11:13:53 EDT (1810 reads)
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Tales from Elm Flat: The Day We Didn’t Get Snakebit
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Poisonous snakes are a fact of life around Kerens. As far as I know there are copperheads, cottonmouth moccasins, rattlesnakes, and a small snake we used to call a ground rattler. If you are a herpologist (snake expert), maybe you can think of some more, but these four are plenty for me!
Probably the best thing you can do as far as snakes are concerned is to leave them alone.
If you leave them alone, you are not likely to get snake bitten. Start fooling around with them, and the opposite is likely to be true!
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Posted by Webmaster on Wednesday, May 06 @ 13:00:52 EDT (864 reads)
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Tales from Elm Flat: Old Sam the Pipeline Man
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When one of the oil companies put a pipeline through Elm Flat, it passed right in front of our house, the Thompson place, a big unpainted, two-story house just west of the Houston place that Daddy rented a few years later. (There was a low place on the Houston place, right across the road from our house, where the water pooled up into what appeared during the rainy season to be a small lake. Once Dad borrowed a shotgun and killed a big Canadian goose that came down on the water, and Mom cooked the goose for dinner . . . not very good, too greasy.) This was winter, a rainy, wet winter, so instead of driving into town, the workers on the pipeline rented rooms with various farmers out in the Flat so they would have a place to stay during the weeks it took to dig the trench and put in the pipeline.
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Posted by Webmaster on Thursday, April 30 @ 17:04:10 EDT (733 reads)
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Tales from Elm Flat: Raising Kids with Chores and Optional Jobs
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A kid growing up on the farm learned at quite an early age how to perform work and assume responsibility. A boy ten years of age was accustomed to putting hay out for the cattle, hoeing weeds from the cotton fields, and even driving a tractor, at least for light tasks such as mowing, hauling trailers, and cutting stalks. Daughters quickly learned the house routines of washing, ironing, sewing, cooking, and looking after younger brothers and sisters.
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Posted by Webmaster on Thursday, February 12 @ 15:48:40 EST (730 reads)
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Tales from Elm Flat: The Two Ugliest Men in Bazette
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These two brothers, Alton and Jack, actually lived about half way between Bazette and Kerens. I was by their place a couple of times with my dad and once by myself. I forgot the last name of the two brothers, so I am going to call them the Bradson brothers—Alton Bradson and Jack Bradson. I do not know anyone around Bazette or Kerens named Bradson, so there is nobody to get upset about it, at least I hope not. (If there is anyone by this name who has moved into the area since 1955, this story is not about you or your kinfolks!)
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Posted by Webmaster on Wednesday, November 19 @ 00:04:59 EST (944 reads)
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Tales from Elm Flat: Picking Blackberries
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In my childhood days, the April rains around Kerens always brought out the blackberries. Berries appeared in the untrodden places—in the bar ditches along the roadsides, along the pasture fence lines, at the end of the fields, near the woods and waterways, and along the railroad, most especially the south sides of the railroad embankments. The timing of the blackberry season probably varies from year to year, but I think there were usually some good pickings before the end of May. We never wrote down the season or the time, but somehow we never missed a berry crop.
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Posted by Webmaster on Thursday, November 06 @ 17:47:21 EST (968 reads)
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Tales from Elm Flat: Yes, Bwana, There Is No Lions Here
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The Serengeti Game Preserve is a long way from Elm Flat, and the last 100 miles are all dirt and washboard gravel roads. Come to think of it, the roads in east Africa are just about like those we grew up with in Elm Flat in the decade of the 1940s and 1950s, only more so. Unless you have a helicopter, however, a rough ride down these dusty roads is the price you pay for going on safari from Dar es Salaam, the capital of Tanzania, out to the Serengeti Plains.
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Posted by Webmaster on Tuesday, September 30 @ 11:37:34 EDT (1291 reads)
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Tales from Elm Flat: My Mother’s Yellow Dress
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I suppose children in every family grow up hearing stories from their parents. Perhaps this is the way people keep alive their own memories and pass them along to their offspring. My own father had a wide repertoire of stories—of how he mended fences with his dad, our grandfather, of how Grandpa Vernon preferred mules and for many years refused to buy a tractor, of the trip Dad took in the summer of 1933 with a group of classmates in an old converted schoolbus to the Chicago World Fair, of the highjinks he and his high school pals pulled in Kerens during their senior year—naughtiness that even today more than a decade after my father’s passing had best not be told in fulsome detail lest it incriminate some who are still living!
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Posted by webmaster on Monday, September 15 @ 10:11:30 EDT (846 reads)
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88 _STORIES (6 _PAGES, 15 _PERPAGE)
[ 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 ] |
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 To see you is to sympathize.
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| Tuesday, September 09 | | · | A Bazette Hunting Trip |
| Tuesday, September 02 | | · | Sullivan’s Shoe Shop |
| Monday, September 01 | | · | Clotheslines |
| Monday, July 21 | | · | Scrapping Cotton |
| Thursday, May 22 | | · | Trombone Torture |
| Wednesday, April 09 | | · | Progress in the Cotton Patch |
| Thursday, April 03 | | · | The Day the Bus Fell into the Creek |
| Friday, December 28 | | · | Reflections upon Two Barns |
| Tuesday, November 27 | | · | The Old Yellow Fire Escape |
| Tuesday, November 13 | | · | A Trip Out of State |
Older Articles
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