The Queen of Ballard Road
At some point, back in the early 60s, my father blew into Seagoville, TX, with his two near adult sons. Perhaps he was still married to his first wife. He isn’t around to ask, nor is she, nor is wife number two, my mother. Wife 3 died decades ago. I am not sure about wife 4 as we lost touch along the way. Lesson one, never assume the stories will last longer than the people who made them. I couldn’t have fathomed I would be sitting here in my mid-50s struggling to tell a tale with no one in my back pocket to edit what my own feeble mind recalls. I am not sure why my father did not settle in Wilmer or Palmer or Ferris, where his parents and 3 siblings lived. He chose the Ville. Soon, Daddy and Uncle Spider (aside: I also had an Uncle Goat, though from my mother’s clan) bought a building and opened a washateria. Uncle Spider did not enjoy the laundry entrepreneur life and bowed out shortly thereafter. Daddy hired my mother’s aunt to manage his business, met her very young, very tall, strawberry blonde niece, and promptly set up house with her in a single wide mobile home on a 3-acre tract of land in a then unincorporated area of SE Dallas County. We were a no man’s land bereft of things like city water or trash pickup. Electricity had to be purchased from the next county over. The family who sold him the property was a big deal in those parts. I didn’t understand fully, until I needed to memorize my address for school purposes. Daddy bought the parcel from the matriarch of that family. She was Charlie Ballard’s mother, though I only knew her as Granny Ballard. Charlie was Seagoville’s towing king and one of my father’s dearest friends. We lived on Ballard Road.
