Today is the 132nd anniversary of my grandfather's birth. My father's father, Joseph Thomas Hail, was one of 14 children in his family. His father, Robert Thomas Hale, had come to Texas by way of Arkansas with his extended family shortly before the Civil War. They first settled in the Leander community north of Austin. Gradually, the parts of the family split up and looked for other homes. One went to the Brady area as a miner, and another group moved north to the Texas Panhandle to Hale Center, then crossed into Oklahoma and settled in the central part of the state. My great-grandfather and great-grandfather were living in Mason when my grandfather was born, but they eventually moved to Lampasas County and settled down in the Kempner area.
By 1900, Joseph was 18 and on his own. As there were a total of 14 children and Joe was one of the oldest, his father sent him off into the world early to take care of himself as there were still younger children to care for at home. Despite being a slender man of short stature, he worked as a blacksmith, moving to Fort Worth for a while to practice his trade in the Stockyards area. Eventually he moved back to the Kempner area, where he met and married Beulah Moore, whose family had moved from East Texas to the farmland outside the nearby town of Copperas Cove. Joe and Beulah had three children, a daughter, Saba Irene, the oldest, a son, Vernon Ray, and the baby, my father, Truman Preston. Two other children died at birth. By this time, the family was spelling their surname as Hail, in spite of the fact that Joe's parents had used the Hale spelling. However, sometime before the birth of Saba, Ray, and Truman, a clerical error changed the spelling to Hail. Another clerical error when my father enlisted in the Army in 1942 changed my father's name back to Hale.
Joe continued to do some blacksmith work, but the family also farmed a little and picked cotton. They also moved around a lot, to Quitman in East Texas where my dad was born, down to the Gulf Coast to the area around Beaumont, where other family members lived, back to Lampasas and Kempner, and even to San Saba for a time when the children were young. None of the children finished school because all of them were put to work to contribute to the well-being of the family. My father only went through the second grade.
When my father was very young, the family decided to go out to Scurry County to visit some relatives. They packed their clothes, food, and other supplies in a covered wagon and set out, pausing each night to make camp. One night there was a terrible thunderstorm, but a church building was nearby and not locked, so they slept on the floor in that church that night.
The Depression was a hard time for everyone, but Joe took a job with a farmer whose farm was about ten miles away from where the family was living at that time. Joe would leave home before sunrise, walk the ten miles to the farm, work all day, and then walk home after dark. Later he was able to get an old car, and he drove it when necessary.
Truman found a job with the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and was able to send money home to Joe and Beulah. Saba and Ray were already married at this time. When the country declared war on Germany, Italy, and Japan, both Ray and Truman enlisted, Ray first and Truman shortly thereafter. By then Joe and Beulah were living in a little rock house on a hill along the road that ran from Lampasas to Austin. Truman sent money home and Beulah sent him cookies and candy she had made and packed carefully for shipment to him in England, North Africa, Italy, or France, wherever he was at the time.
When the war ended, Truman came home and found a job working with the Lampasas street department with Saba's husband George Hughes. They patched potholes in the heat of summer. When that job became too much, they found a job working on the railroad. In the late 1940s, Truman began driving a bus. In the meantime, my mother, Dorothy Lancaster, had finished college and returned to Lampasas to teach. One of the students in her class was Ray's son, Ray Jr. At one point that year, Junior, as he was called, told her that he wanted to introduce his favorite teacher to his favorite uncle. They were married Nov. 22, 1949. Truman continued to drive a bus for the school district, and Dorothy taught through the end of the 1949-50 school year. They had bought a tiny one-bedroom house on Howe Street in the western part of the city where they lived when I was born in October, 1950.
My earliest memory is of the entire family near the Lampasas River at Kempner, at night with a fire sending sparks into the night sky. My grandmother Beulah was there and walking around. And I could remember being passed from one person to another. That was late spring or early summer of 1952. I carried the memory for years as a sequence of images, until when I was in my twenties and described what I remembered to my parents. After some consideration, they realized I was describing a family fish fry, and I was passed from one person to another because they were afraid if I walked around on my own I might fall in the river. I remembered only images because I was still not talking much.
We made frequent trips in those years to the little rock house to see Joe and Beulah. At some point between my memory of the fish fry and the birth of my brother, Truman Wayne, in 1953, Beulah had a stroke that left her paralyzed. The little two-room house had a kitchen and a combination living room-bedroom. The bathroom was an outhouse behind the little house. Water came from a well. An electric light bulb dangled from the ceiling in each room. They also had a primitive electric refrigerator that replaced the old ice box that kept food cool thanks to a block of ice purchased from the ice house in Lampasas.
I remember some family gatherings in that little house. On one occasion, my aunt decided to make fried chicken, so she caught a chicken from the yard, wrung its neck, and chopped its head off. I know the rest of the transition from live bird to crunchy fried lunch involved putting the carcass in boiling water and then plucking the feathers out. I remember this because they decided I should have the experience of plucking a chicken. I remember taking only one handful of those wet, soggy feathers and deciding that I didn't like that at all. Another time we were there, and for some reason, probably because of the colors, I got into a bunch of hot peppers growing just outside the kitchen door. The juice from the peppers burned my hands and face, and my mother and aunt had to washed me off and smeared butter on my face and hands.
Truman and Ray decided to enlarge the little house in the mid-1950s, to add two bedrooms, some closet space, and a bathroom, but before they were very far along, Beulah had another stroke and had to be moved to a nursing home. She was put in the nursing home in Gatesville, about forty miles from Lampasas, because Lampasas didn't have a nursing home at that time. She was there until she died when I was in the second grade.
After that, Joe lived on his own for a while or stayed with Ray and his wife Pauline. It was about then that Joe took his only trip out of Texas. He went to Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico.
After we moved to a large old house in 1960, he lived with us for a while. He also lived in the little one bedroom house on Howe Street for a while and in an apartment by the public library. Truman Wayne spent the n the next morning, but after they put the cereal in their bowls, they discovered that the only milk in the refrigerator was buttermilk, so they ate cornflakes with buttermilk.
Joe's health diminished while I was in college, and he moved in again with Ray and Pauline for a time before going to a nursing home. By then Lampasas had two, and he wound up living for a time in both. I was working at the newspaper in Copperas Cove in early 1975 when my mother came into the office. Joe had been sitting in a chair in the nursing home, when he suddenly straightened and leaned forward as if to stand, then toppled over. By the time the staff reached him, he was gone. He was 92.
Joe was a soft-spoken man who enjoyed playing a fiddle and reading his Bible. He spent hours playing checkers with me and my brother. By 1960 when I was 10, he was approaching 78, but he still was able to walk around the town even though his years of hard work had left him a little stooped over. On hot summer days he could often be found sitting under a shade tree. He was never convinced that the Apollo 11 moon landing happened, even though he watched Neil Armstrong take that "giant leap for mankind" along with the rest of us in July 1969. He was known around the community as a nice old man, a man of his word, who had lived in the county most of his life. His three children had a total of nine children of their own, as well 16 great-grandchildren and one great-grandchild by the time of his death.
When I think of Joe, I remember him as an old man, a pioneer of sorts, who had farmed and chopped cotton and shoed horses, pounding out the red-hot iron on an anvil. He's my connection to the past, to relatives I never met, to a simpler time. His values made my father the man he was, just as my mother's parents' values formed her character. And those same values are being taught today to my three great-nieces, an enduring legacy.
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