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The electric chair was invented by a dentist.
And Now You Do
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7:24, ¶Hearken unto me now therefore, O ye children, and attend to the words of my mouth.
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Tales from Elm Flat: Yell Dell !
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Column by Dr. Ivan R. Vernon
My generation, which came of age in the decade of the 1950s, had different dating options than teen-agers today. For athletics, Kerens teen-agers mostly went to football games and basketball games, and there were regular rites of passage for girls and boys in such athletic-related activities as band and drill team . . . and of course the highlight of the social season was the Football Banquet.
On a day-to-day basis, a guy might meet his girl friend down at Hilliard’s Drugstore for a fountain coke, often shared between the two because loose change was always a scarce commodity. McClung’s Drugstore was another meeting place, and the featured attractions for me at McClung’s were always the ice cream malts—whether to have chocolate, vanilla, or strawberry was the pressing question of the day!
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Posted by webmaster on Friday, September 07 @ 15:56:59 EDT (696 reads)
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Tales from Elm Flat: Terror under the Railroad Bridge
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Column by Dr. Ivan R. Vernon
The Vernon kids had to cross Indian Creek to get to school in Kerens and to return home in the afternoon. You had three routes back and forth, involving three different ways to cross the creek. From the Vernon place you could go into Kerens by taking the Old City Lake Road, a dirt road that ran in front of our house, down the hill to the creek, and then into Kerens. Obviously, you could come back home the same way. On school days when the road was not too muddy, we usually went this way.
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Posted by webmaster on Monday, August 27 @ 23:16:24 EDT (578 reads)
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Tales from Elm Flat: Growing Soybeans
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Column by Dr. Ivan R. Vernon
Around Kerens, whenever you hear someone speaking of the river, they mean the Trinity River–the geographic and legal boundary between Navarro County to the west and Henderson County to the east. Farming bottom land means trying to grow crops on the floodplain of the Trinity River.
Farming bottom land is neither an easy nor risk-free way to make a living. The land is rich because of the alluvial deposits of the river. However, sometimes after you have planted–investing time, labor, crop seed, tractor hours, and money into the effort–the river floods, laying waste to all your efforts! The land is generally weedy, and requires lots of plowing and hoeing to clean up the rows after you have planted. Instead of row crops, some river bottom owners or leasers prefer to use their fields as pasture land. There is a similar problem–after you have invested money in developing a good stand of coastal bermuda grass, the river can come along and flood the place and kill all the grass. In other words, having bottom land to contend with is sort of a mixed blessing!
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Posted by webmaster on Wednesday, August 22 @ 21:51:15 EDT (640 reads)
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Tales from Elm Flat: Too Much of a Good Thing
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Column by Dr. Ivan R. Vernon
My younger days were spent on the farm, several different farms, in fact. Our family owned the 127-acre family farm east of Kerens, in part inherited from Grandma and Grandpa Vernon, but Dad also rented several different pieces of land in every compass direction from Kerens. The most productive farm land for raising cotton was the 100-acre black land Houston place out in Elm Flat, west of Kerens and south of Hwy 31.
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Posted by webmaster on Monday, August 13 @ 13:27:18 EDT (561 reads)
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Tales from Elm Flat: Playing with Fireflies
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Column by Dr. Ivan R. Vernon
Growing up on the Vernon farm, my brothers and sisters and I had few luxuries of any kind. Most of our toys were homemade. My brothers and I made slingshots using forked tree limbs and cut-out strips of rubber from worn-out inner tubes. My sisters used their sewing skills to make clothing for their dolls, and Dad exercised his carpentry skills to create doll houses for them.
Outside play included baseball, touch football, tree climbing, and capture the flag. Fishing, playing down in the pasture, and swimming in the stock tank were other of our activities. In the summer, evening was a good time for play because the work day was over and the temperature was cooler.
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Posted by Webmaster on Thursday, August 09 @ 14:13:22 EDT (516 reads)
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Tales from Elm Flat: The Taj Mahal
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Column by Dr. Ivan R. Vernon
The Taj Mahal is deemed one of the eight wonders of the world. I had the privilege of viewing the Taj during the decade of the 1980’s while on a consulting mission to India, and this visit was memorable in many ways. This month-long consultancy was undertaken on behalf of the government of Germany, and we visited many industrial factories, sewage treatment plants, and waste disposal dumps around the nation. Our overnight stop-over to visit the Taj was quite a contrast to the other site visits!
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Posted by Webmaster on Friday, August 03 @ 12:02:35 EDT (476 reads)
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Tales from Elm Flat: Monkey Business
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Column by Dr. Ivan R. Vernon
Working and traveling in the East African nation of Tanzania took me a long way from Kerens and Elm Flat. Growing up in Elm Flat before the day of paved roads was good preparation for traveling in Tanzania, but in other ways as well a rural Texas background was pretty helpful for my African odyssey. For example, the days of no electricity or telephones in Elm Flat were also good training for living in certain parts of the country! Like Elm Flat, most of Africa, particularly Tanzania, is agricultural in nature, and corn and cotton are common crops—not to mention tea and coffee, peanuts and cashew nuts, bananas, papayas, mangos, and other tropical fruit.
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Posted by webmaster on Wednesday, July 25 @ 17:34:32 EDT (493 reads)
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Tales from Elm Flat: Pete Massey
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Column by Dr. Ivan R. Vernon
During the years when I was growing up, Kerens was filled with ordinary men who, in hindsight, do not appear so ordinary after all. These were men who earned a living, were absolutely loyal to their wives and families, cherished their children and helped teach them right from wrong, provided worthwhile life examples, and who themselves saw nothing extraordinary in what they were doing. Pete Massey was one of those men. I knew him, my father knew him, and virtually the entire Kerens community knew him. Those who knew him respected him and trusted him, and his family knew him and loved him.
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Posted by webmaster on Monday, July 23 @ 12:11:02 EDT (687 reads)
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Tales from Elm Flat: Cemetery Sam
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Column by Dr. Ivan R. Vernon
These little Tales from Elm Flat are intended to convey some of the truths about life in Elm Flat and the Kerens community in general. Writing a story about Cemetery Sam may be an exception, because a more fictional character than Cemetery Sam has hardly ever existed—although, as I shall reveal, there is some room for debate on that point. Whatever the facts, several generations of Kerens young people have claimed to have seen him, or to have known someone who did see him, or to have known someone who thought they had heard of someone who had seen him.
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Posted by webmaster on Wednesday, June 27 @ 00:34:32 EDT (718 reads)
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Tales from Elm Flat: An Old Man in His Garden
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Column by Dr. Ivan R. Vernon
My father Steve Vernon grew a garden every year of his life. They were working gardens, meant to feed a large and growing family. We ate fresh produce from the gardens during the growing season, and we always had canned, frozen, and dried garden vegetables for the rest of the year.
Cultivating to start the farm garden was an easy task. Dad began by plowing the garden spot with the tractor and farm equipment that was already installed for field work. Then he planted and transplanted, laying everything out in rows. Tending the garden after that was hand work—chopping weeds, tilthing up the soil, picking off the potato bugs and tomato worms, and harvesting the ripe vegetables.
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Posted by Webmaster on Monday, June 25 @ 18:28:07 EDT (499 reads)
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Tales from Elm Flat: Memory of Times Gone Long Away
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Column by Dr. Ivan R. Vernon
Nostalgia: A wistful desire to return in thought or in fact to a former time in one's life, to one's home or homeland, or to one's family and friends; a sentimental yearning for the happiness of a former place or time.
The past is gone, and can never return. Yet the past is still with us, and will never disappear until our capacity for memory disappears. Just when we know we should forget, nostalgic memories arise--sometimes so suddenly and unbidden that it steals our very breath and moisture surreptitiously appears in the corners of our eyes!
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Posted by webmaster on Thursday, June 21 @ 11:06:43 EDT (495 reads)
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Tales from Elm Flat: Daddy's Bull
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Column by Dr. Ivan R. Vernon
As Gentle as . . . a Bull
Think of those gaunt, wild-eyed, snorting, bucking bulls you see in the rodeos. A few seconds aboard one of these creatures will win the daring bull rider a prize!
Now imagine a bull that is the exact opposite of the rodeo bulls–well-fed, gentle as a lamb, but handsome as a Hereford gentleman could possibly be. Think of a massive bull, brown of body but with a white face–now the image of Domino Samaria III begins to come into focus. Domino Samaria III was my father’s bull–a registered Hereford bull of outstanding lineage, a bull fit to found a dynasty.
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Posted by webmaster on Thursday, June 14 @ 13:42:47 EDT (531 reads)
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Tales from Elm Flat: A Slight Case of Polio
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Column by Dr. Ivan R. Vernon
When I was ten years old, in the summer of 1950, I woke up with an aching feeling in both my legs. It felt a little like normal sore muscles, only when I stretched, I felt more pain instead of relief—and it was pain that would not go away. When I tried to stand, the pain intensified and I could not remain on my feet.
I did not have to guess. I knew immediately what the problem was. In retrospect, I cannot imagine why I remained so calm in the face of this potentially crippling disease, but that is how I recollect matters. I called my Mom and Dad, told them that I had contracted polio, and asked them to take me to see Dr. Sanders.
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Posted by webmaster on Monday, June 11 @ 17:46:34 EDT (554 reads)
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Tales from Elm Flat: Struggling Against the Odds
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Column by Dr. Ivan R. Vernon
Steve Vernon was my Dad. He farmed the Vernon place east of Kerens, the same place where he was born. He farmed elsewhere too, from time to time--four different places in Elm Flat as well as other smaller fields scattered around Kerens including a big hayfield in the Trinity River bottom way past Rosie Hammett’s place.
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Posted by webmaster on Tuesday, June 05 @ 16:53:42 EDT (569 reads)
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Tales from Elm Flat: Custom Combining
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Column by Dr. Ivan R. Vernon
Farming during the drought years that were the 1950s was tough, and revenue sources were hard to come by. Crops were poor, and Dad had to rely upon the bank for a loan every spring to finance seed, fertilizer, tractor fuel, and field labor to plant and eventually harvest the crops.
Custom combining, doing harvesting work for other people, was one way we tried to earn a few extra dollars. Dad bought a little orange colored Allis-Chalmers grain reaping machine called a combine. The one we got was not the latest model. It was powered from the tractor PTO instead of having its own separate engine.
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Posted by webmaster on Thursday, May 24 @ 23:35:09 EDT (517 reads)
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88 _STORIES (6 _PAGES, 15 _PERPAGE)
 [ 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 ] |
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 The trouble with eating Italian food is that five or six days later
you're hungry again.
-- George Miller
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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 |
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