My grandfather, Harris E. Lancaster, my mother's foster father, was born 129 years ago, Dec. 13, 1882, in Mississippi, and moved to Texas with his family as a boy. His parents, Alex and Cynthia Lancaster, had an average-sized family for the time: sons Harris, Clint, Norman, and Aubrey, and daughters Annie, Hattie, and Minnie. There may have been others, too, but those are the ones I remember. They settled on farm land in the northern part of Lampasas County, about five miles south of Adamsville along School Creek. There they grew, married, and most raised their own families in the area or not far away.
In 1925 Grandman and Granny, who had been married for about 15 years but had no children, took in a little boy and his little sister from the West Texas Children's Home in Abilene. My Uncle Billy and my mother were from a family of five children in Brownwood that through some family intrigue somehow had the three youngest children removed from the family and sent to the children's home in Abilene. Our best guess today, after piecing together little clues for many years, is that my mother's aunt, who had two children, was upset at her sister's five children receiving more attention from their grandparents and arranged for the three younger ones to be sent to the children's home while my grandmother was ill. When Granny and Grandman went to Abilene to pick up my mother and uncle, the youngest of the three, who was not quite two at the time, had already been taken by a family from Snyder. The five siblings were not reunited until more than 10 years later, although the youngest, my aunt, did come for summer visits to the farm.
Grandman farmed, hunted, and fished to provide for his family. When the highway expansion projects across the country in the 1930s brought the construction of U.S. Highway 281 right along the westward boundary of the Lancaster property, Grandman took a job of helping to build that road, or at least the section closest to his farm. He was paid $1 a day for 12 hours of work, and he received another 50 cents a day for the use of his team of horses.
In 1936 when the Texas Centennial opened at Fair Park in Dallas, he determined that his family should go to see the exhibits, but the family car was not up to the trip. He drove into Lampasas and bought a new car so that they could attend, and the trip was something my mother often talked about when I was growing up.
When World War II began, Grandman was too old to serve. I remember hearing how the family had gathered around the radio the night of Dec. 7, 1941, to hear President Franklin Roosevelt talk about “the day that would live in infamy.” My mother later enlisted in the Women's Army Air Corps, and his nephew Thomas became a bomber pilot in the Army Air Corps. Thomas' plane was later shot down over Eastern Europe, and for a while the family grieved because he was listed as “missing, presumed dead.” Then he made his way back to Allied territory, with the aid of resistance forces, and the word came that he was, in fact, alive and well. Mom’s brother Paul, one of the two older children who stayed in Brownwood when the younger three were sent to the children’s home, also became a pilot during the war. He flew reconnaissance missions over enemy territory. On one mission, his plane developed engine problems, and he had to make an emergency landing in a field. He was captured and spent time in a German prison camp. For a time, too, he was listed as “missing, presumed dead.”
By the time I arrived on the scene in 1950, Grandman was already a senior citizen. He and Granny lived in the little two-bedroom farm house down the road from the house where his parents had lived and across a field from his brother Norman's house. There were fish in School Creek, and I can remember many fishing trips down to the creek where I caught perch and sunfish on a cane pole. The land near the creek was pecan bottoms where Grandman and my dad threshed the native and budded pecan trees every fall. Whenever I stayed overnight with Granny and Grandman, the nights were frequently interrupted by barking from Grandman's dog Ruthie, who had treed a possum or a raccoon. Grandman would get up, dress quickly, get his gun, and go out to see what the problem was. I can remember waking up and hearing the sound of the shot from his .22.
Grandman loved a good story, and he had plenty of personal experiences to draw upon for material. He had gone up to Indian Territory as a young man and lived among the Indians for a time. He hunted black bear in Big Bend, killing a bear whose skin made a bearskin coat for my mother. I remember trying it on when I was a teenager. It was heavy and a little scratchy. For many years Grandman was involved in Democratic Party politics around the state, and among his personal papers were many letters from Texas politicians of the '30s, '40s, and '50s. He invented some pieces of farm equipment for which he held the patents. And he had lived most of his life in rural Texas, so he had material from those experiences, too, which he used to craft his stories.
He could tell some tall tales, too. One that I remember was about a rattlesnake that a man ran over in his car, crushing the head and leaving the fangs imbedded in the tire. Later that day the man had a flat tire. In changing the tire, the man happened to grab the tire in the exact place where the snake's fangs were. They pierced the skin of his palm, and the venom in them was enough to kill the man. It was a case of a man being killed by a dead snake. Looking back, I think the purpose of that story and some of the others he told were to keep me from straying into areas where I might encounter a snake. There were rattlers on the farm, a fact that I was very much aware of. (Granny had me almost as afraid of black widow spiders, which I was convinced were giant in size and just lurking in their basement, waiting to pounce on me if I ventured onto those concrete steps. Now, I think she was probably more worried about my falling down those steps and hurting myself.)
When I was in elementary school, my dad worked some on Grandman's farm, helping with the plowing. About that same time, Grandman let me sit in his lap and "drive" the tractor. I think he probably kept a hand on the steering wheel, but I don't remember. If not, I'm sure those were some fairly crooked rows.
In 1960 or '61, Grandman decided to sell the farm. For the first time in about 70 years, the property would be owned by someone whose last name was not Lancaster. But he and Granny were slowing down and wanted to have fewer responsibilities and be nearer our family (my sister DJ was then about one year old and the apple of Grandman's eye). So they moved into a little house on Naruna Road on the southwest edge of Lampasas, where Grandman filled his time with a garden and his beloved red roses. He always had red roses, in bushes and running roses on trellises, both at the country farm house and at the house in town. A family member had traced the family line back to the time of the Wars of the Roses in England, and like any good Lancastrian, Grandman preferred the red rose to all others.
His retirement and move to town either came too late for Grandman or his body could not adjust to the reduced activity of retirement. His decline came along suddenly. In his last days he showed signs of what we would call today Alzheimer's but then it was just the memory loss associated with old age. He died in the summer of 1964, just months before I turned 14. The night before, my parents had taken all of us to the hospital to see him. They knew that his time was short, although I don't remember that they had communicated that to my brother and sister and me. I suppose I was old enough to know, especially since he didn't react to my brother or me. But when my sister, who at that time was almost five, spoke to him, he smiled. The next morning, my mother woke me up with the news that he had died in his sleep.
Grandman was a self-educated man who had earned the respect of his friends and neighbors back the kind of life he lived. He was a man of integrity whose word was his bond, someone who could be relied on in a time of need, a man who liked a good story, who appreciated his family and friends, a simple farmer who was so admired by his nephew Thomas that when Thomas had grandchildren of his own, he asked them to call him Grandman. His character traits were perhaps more the norm in his time than they seem to be today when when hear of so many who seek only what benefits them. We’ve lost that concept of honor that Grandman’s life exemplified, and we are the poorer for it. My cousin Linda Lancaster McDonald, Uncle Billy’s daughter, who was, I think, the first to use the name Grandman, said after his death, “He truly was a grand man.”
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