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Lightning strikes men about seven times more often than it does women
And Now You Do
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2:8, He keepeth the paths of judgment, and preserveth the way of his saints.
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Column by Dr. Ivan R. Vernon
Out on the Vernon farm Saturday was chore day and allowance day. We did the chores in the morning, and when we were finished, my Dad gave us our allowance, $0.25 each to the oldest three of the Vernon kids. The cash was burning a hole in our pockets, so away we went, on our mile and a half walk west into Kerens.
Such excitement! Our plans were set and invariable–a trip to the Kerens Movie Theater, and then afterwards a few treats and a walk back home. The movie theater was on the west side of the block farthest north on the main street of Kerens, directly across the street from Newsome’s Grocery.
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Column by Dr. Ivan R. Vernon
October and November in Navarro County are the main months for the pecan harvest. As you walk down the sidewalks of Kerens during the fall season, you are sure to see pecans which have fallen, helter-skelter, from the many trees that adorn the town. Many are small hard-shelled, native pecans, but you are also likely to encounter several varieties of larger hybrid pecans, sometimes called paper shells.
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Column by Ivan R. Vernon
Have you ever had real home-made ice cream? Ice cream made in an old-fashioned, hand-turned ice cream freezer used to be one of our family’s special treats.
Town-bought ice cream that you buy at the stores today is quite different. Read the list of ingredients on the package you bring home, and you will see what I mean. There are stabilizers, preservatives, flavor enhancers (whatever that is), and much more. They even put in some type of texture enhancer to give the factory ice cream a slick, creamy feel, and to prevent ice crystals from forming. Now, I am not necessarily opposed to including all these things in ice cream–just pointing out that the stuff you buy today which passes for ice cream is not the same as what we used to make on the farm. We never really had an ingredient list, but it would have been a short one anyway–milk, cream, eggs, sugar, a pinch of salt, and natural vanilla flavoring. (Peaches or strawberries could be substituted for flavoring, but vanilla was the general rule.)
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Column by Dr. Ivan R. Vernon
On the farm, we used the expression “laid by” to describe the completion of row crop work. When you were laid by, it meant that all the necessary cotton chopping, hoeing, spraying, and plowing activities were complete. If you were laid by in mid-July, it meant that you had a period of time when you could cease your field working activities and await the fall harvest.
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Column by Dr. Ivan R. Vernon
For school kids living in the country around Kerens, school buses were a fact of life. Living out in Elm Flat, we had to take a bus to get to school. Later, living on the Vernon place east of Kerens, we often walked to and from school, but a school bus was available, and we often rode the bus on cold or rainy days.
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Column by Dr. Ivan R. Vernon
Whenever I have any contact with banks, my reference point is always the first bank I ever knew about, The First National Bank of Kerens. This venerable financial institution stood on the west side of our main downtown street, on the north end of its block.
The inside of the bank exuded, to a young boy, a sense of seriousness and solidity. The teller cages, which stood on the south side of the building, featured steel bars all the way to the ceiling. Long tables for customer use stood along the north length of the building. Ominous black and white posters on the north wall offered rewards of $10,000 for the capture of the pictured bank robbers, dead or alive! Other signs pointed out that depositors’ money was perfectly safe, up to $100,000, because of the protection of FDIC insurance.
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Column by Dr. Ivan R. Vernon
There were lots of grocery stores in Kerens during the decades of the forties and fifties. I remember some of them, but probably not all--Ingrams, Jennings, Newsomes, Spurlocks, and Tramels. Newsomes was the first store on the downtown block that was farthest north, on the east side of the street, and Ingrams was about one block farther south. Spurlocks was across the street from Newsomes. Tramels and Jennings were not on the main street, but on a side street that headed east toward the water tower. Tramels, I believe, was on the block where the library now stands, only a little farther east.
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Column by Dr. Ivan R. Vernon
As I was growing from childhood to manhood in Kerens, there was only one place to spend Friday night when the KHS football team played its home games during the fall season–at Bobcat Field. I don’t know exactly when Bobcat Field was first completed and dedicated to football, but my Dad played on the same field during the 1930s, and this same field provided the hometown football arena for Kerens until the time when the Kerens and Goodlow Park schools were combined--sometime during the sixties, I am guessing, since I did not live in Kerens at the time of this historic event.
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Column by Dr. Ivan R. Vernon
Kids who grew up on the farm started driving farm tractors at a very early age, and I was no exception. My first recollection of driving a tractor was when I was only five years old! I would sit in the tractor seat and steer the tractor while Mom and Dad pulled corn and threw it in the trailer. Driving the tractor was pretty easy because it went real slow, and it was a John Deere “Popping Johnny” with a hand clutch. The hand clutch was great because my legs were too short to reach the floor! At the end of the row, Dad would get up on the tractor and turn it around to start the next row.
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Column by Dr. Ivan R. Vernon
Indian Creek crosses Hwy 31 about one mile east of Kerens. There is no road sign identifying it, but it flows beneath the first bridge-culvert east of Kerens. This little stream actually begins its life just a few miles north of Hwy 31, then flows south through the old Norton place, along the western edge of the Vernon place, and then through the farm where our neighbor from the 1950s, Doc Fields and his family, used to live.
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Column by Dr. Ivan R. Vernon
Most people living out in the country around Kerens during the forties and fifties did not have air conditioning. We certainly did not. How could you survive the 100 degree summer temperature without air conditioning? The best answer is that you got used to it!
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Column by Dr. Ivan R. Vernon
In the Elm Flat I knew back in the 1940's this essay could not have been written—for several different reasons! First, there was no electricity, so the Microtel Xandros computer I am using could not have booted up. Second, there were no Microtel AMD desktop computers available. And finally there was no Xandros Linux-based operating system to install on this 1800 mHz AMD machine! (There were also no other desktop computers, nor had Bill Gates yet been born—but those facts belong in some other story!)
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Column by Dr. Ivan R. Vernon
Most people in Elm Flat and elsewhere in the countryside around Kerens got their water from shallow wells. Some people got their water from cisterns, either because they were unable to dig successfully for well water, or as a means of supplementing their well water. The wells out in the Flat were large hand-dug wells, I guess about 4 to 5 feet in diameter, and they were only about 15 to 30 feet deep. After digging the well, the well digger lined the walls with brick to discourage, if not always prevent, the sides from caving in.
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Column by Dr. Ivan R. Vernon
Nowadays when I visit the homes of my daughters and grandchildren, I am really amazed at both the variety, quality, and quantity of their toys. There are dolls, computerized learning games, athletic equipment, musical instruments, radio-controlled race cars, talking books, computer games, and much more. I think this is great, and I guess kids must learn a lot more at an earlier age than kids of previous generations, and yet sometimes I wonder . . .
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Column by Dr. Ivan R. Vernon
During the 1940s the roads out in Elm Flat often became impassable during the winter. Our dirt roads would disintegrate into a progression of ruts and mud holes after a few weeks of rainy weather. This was really no big problem unless you wanted to get off the farm and go somewhere. There weren’t too many places we needed to go, except maybe in to Kerens to replenish our food staples–things like flour, corn meal, sugar, salt, baking powder, and maybe vanilla flavor if the Macness man had not been around lately. One trip into Kerens every couple of weeks would about take care of the usual needs.
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88 _STORIES (6 _PAGES, 15 _PERPAGE)
 [ 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 ] |
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 To know Edina is to reject it.
-- Dudley Riggs, "The Year the Grinch Stole the Election"
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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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