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The electric chair was invented by a dentist.
And Now You Do
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9:14, For she sitteth at the door of her house, on a seat in the high places of the city,
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Three categories of rifle qualification in the U.S. Army and Marine Corps are marksman, sharpshooter, and expert. The marksman category means you just barely passed, and the expert category is tops . . . the best. The sharpshooter category is midway between marksman and expert. While serving in the Kerens National Guard field artillery unit, I scored at the sharpshooter level, and I held this qualification throughout three years of service in the Regular Army from September 1959 to August 1962. I never reached the esteemed expert level. My cousin L. E. (Lester) Tarkington, an army career enlisted officer, however, was an expert with the badges to prove it. L.E. was career military, and had lots of other medals as well, including six Purple Hearts, a whole host of medals of Commendation, and the much coveted Silver Star. I am giving all this information about me and my cousin L.E. as essential background to understand a Bazette hunting trip that I took many years back with my cousin.
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In the decade of the 1950s and 1960s, Kerens had a really great place to get your shoes repaired--Sullivan’s Shoe Shop. Sullivan’s was a long-time institution in Kerens. It stood on the south corner of its block, across the street from the bank, on the west side of Colket—in other words, exactly where the Kerens Alumni Center now stands. I was in Sullivan’s fairly regularly because Willard Sullivan was a friend of my father’s and that is where we got our shoes repaired and bought new ones.
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When I grew up on the farm, we always had a clothesline. There was really no other choice. For part of my growing up years, electric dryers had not yet been invented, or if they had been invented, they were not stocked for sale by Bain’s, Carroll’s, or Massey’s hardware stores. Even after they were invented and offered for sale, our family could not afford one–and anyway, what would be the sense of paying for an appliance and electricity to run it when sunshine was so abundantly available in our part of central Texas!
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Column by Dr. Ivan R. Vernon
My brothers and sisters and I made money for our school clothes by picking cotton in the fall. My brothers and I tried to make enough money to buy two or three pairs of blue jeans, half a dozen tee shirts, some long-sleeved shirts to wear to school, a pair of tennis shoes, and a pair of dress shoes to wear to church. We also hoped to have enough to buy some socks, a belt, and maybe even a blue jean jacket. If we had plenty of money, we would buy extras such as slacks and dress shirts for Sunday.
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Column by Dr. Ivan R. Vernon
Some people are born with a talent for music, and they can learn to play a musical instrument as
naturally as a duck takes to water. Hand them an instrument, give them a few lessons, and they are off and running. I am not one of those people, and therein lies the theme of this little tale.
My father loved music, and encouraged me to participate in the Kerens school music program. Actually, in my case at least, the word “encourage” is a bit weak, and the word “insist” hits a little closer to the mark!
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Column by Dr. Ivan R. Vernon
When cotton was king around Kerens, during the decade of the 1940’s and 1950’s, the crop supported just about everything. We had up to a dozen grocery stores, three cotton gins, two blacksmith shops, two car dealerships, three hardware stores, two cotton buyers, a bank, a movie theater, as many as four or five clothing and dry-goods stores, perhaps as many as eight to ten service stations, and at least two restaurants—all those and more besides. Most of the people in Kerens, Powell, Bazette, Rural Shade, Oak Grove, Goodlow Park, Elm Flat, and Samaria made their livings from cotton, either directly or indirectly.
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Column by Dr. Ivan R. Vernon
It is a testament to the peacefulness and quiet routine of life in Kerens and Elm Flat that a minor bus accident should be considered news. The accident involving the Elm Flat bus in April 1960 would never have made the front page of the Dallas Morning News even on a quiet news day. Indeed, there is doubt whether it even made an inside page of the Corsicana Daily Sun at the time it happened, although I confess that I have not checked the newspaper archives to verify this point. Undoubtedly, it would have been reported in the Kerens Tribune, and I am left wondering if the Tribune was still under the distinguished editorship of Gilbert White, or whether it had already passed on to the Kittleys. Anyway, I would just like to make the point that there are some who care what happens around Kerens, even things that happened almost 50 years ago . . . and gentle reader, I am one who is committed to recording the crucial and important facts of our home town before they are totally lost to posterity.
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Column by Dr. Ivan R. Vernon
A friend sent me one of those internet stories about barns. The writing was about beautiful, aged, and unpainted barn wood. The author analogized the aged beauty of such wood to the lives and countenances of people who likewise take on a new kind of beauty from the years of seasoning and weathering they have experienced. I enjoyed the written barn item, and it put me in mind of some of the barns of my life.
I will tell you of two of those barns. These are the two barns that have meaning in my life, one which remains standing today, the other long consigned to the dustbin of Vernon family history!
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Column by Dr. Ivan R. Vernon
The most enjoyable part about writing these little stories about life in and around Kerens is hearing from people who have read and enjoyed them. Hearing from others is interesting, partly because we often remember things from the past together, refreshing and comparing memories. Sometimes our memories are exactly the same, but in other instances I learn that things were not exactly as I may have recalled them.
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Column by Dr. Ivan R. Vernon
Texas is a big state, and if you stick around long enough you will hear lots of over-sized tales about the state. Everybody in Texas is related to Sam Houston or Stephen F. Austin. Everyone is related to someone who took a stand at the Alamo. Everybody’s grandfather or great-grandfather or great uncle was a Texas Ranger. Texas has the hottest weather in the United States. Texas has
the most beautiful women in the United States. Someone once told me that the longest drive across any state is the trip from Texarkana to El Paso. Person that told me that, I stumped them though, “Why on earth,” I asked, “would anyone want to drive from Texarkana to El Paso?” I have yet to receive a satisfactory answer to that question!
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Column by Dr. Ivan R. Vernon
Baseball may be America’s national pastime, but football is the national game of Texas! The Kerens Bobcats during the 1950s and 1960s played other games besides football–baseball and
basketball, for example–but football was number one, and baseball and basketball fell somewhere around fifth or sixth place. If you do not understand how baseball and basketball can be in fifth or sixth place out of only three sports, you obviously did not grow up in Kerens, and you equally obviously do not possess a complete understanding of Class A Texas football and the centrality of football to Texas life and culture.
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Column by Dr. Ivan R. Vernon
The two best tree climbers I ever knew were my uncle James Henry Tarkington and my dad, Steve Vernon. Children sometimes climb trees for fun, but not these two--they climbed for pecans . . . and when they climbed they made the act look as easy as child’s play.
The pecan harvest around Kerens and the surrounding countryside commences around mid- to late September, and is fully underway well before Thanksgiving. You will know when the pecan season has started when a few pecans fall from the trees and hit you on the head, or when you begin seeing a few of them lying around on the sidewalks and grass lawns around town.
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Column by Dr. Ivan R. Vernon
I got my first bicycle at the tender age of ten. The bicycle cost me my entire life savings of $5.00, and I paid it out in cold hard cash. The seller was Joe Lewis, the teenage son of a wonderful couple named Bill and Katy Mangum. Bill and Katy lived in Goodlow Park in the last house on the right as you are headed south through Goodlow Park on FM 309. It was there that I went with Dad to pick up the bike, pay for it, and load it in our car to take home.
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Column by Dr. Ivan R. Vernon
It loomed there at the dead end of Colket Street, the main street of Kerens—a big, square, red brick two-story building with the date of 1911 boldly glaring out at passers by. Surely it had many tales to tell if only it could have talked! When you reached it driving south, you had to turn left or right because its massive structure blocked your path. It was our school. It was elementary and grammar school all rolled into one for my generation of students, the KHS class of 1958. I started first grade in one of its rooms in the fall of 1946, and graduated from this building to the tan brick one-story high school just east of it in the spring of 1954.
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Column by Dr. Ivan R. Vernon
There were two kinds of boys in Kerens High School during the decades of the fifties and the sixties—those who earned football letter jackets and those who did not. I fit in the last category until my senior year, and that year our coach “Little Tommy” Phillips got me in enough games to earn the coveted letter and the jacket it was attached to.
I went out for football all four years during the period when “Little” Tommy Phillips was coach. For those who did not know him, the word “little” really meant quite the opposite, as Coach Phillips stood somewhere around six foot six—and there was little on his frame except muscle. Playing under Coach Phillips reminds one a little of the famed Aggie football seasons under Bear Bryant. Coach Phillips believed above all in conditioning, and starting in the heat of August, he put us through three drills a day—morning, noon, and night. Wind sprints, dummy tackling, calisthenics, scrimmage with pads on—we really did it all.
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88 _STORIES (6 _PAGES, 15 _PERPAGE)
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 The trouble with superheros is what to do between phone booths.
-- Ken Kesey
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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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