I am a “life-long” Forneyite, born in 1950 in Terrell, Texas, because that is where Doctor Alexander wanted to deliver me, but I was brought back to Forney as soon as Mom and I could travel. The Paul and Marian Themer, Don and Ann Family lived in the first house built on Maple Street (605) (McKellar cotton land). The only time I have LIVED for any length of time away from Forney occurred when I lived in Commerce, Texas, during the semesters I attended college at East Texas State University between fall of 1969 and spring of 1973, coming back to Forney for three of the four college summers. I (and later my Family and I) lived in a house at the end of West Pacific Street until the very end of 1993 and then moved with Wife, Vivian, and Sons, William and Waylon, and just born in August, Weston, to our new house on Old Military Trail and have lived happily there ever since! We have missed the shaking of the old house by passing trains!
Like most children of my era, I basically knew what I learned from my Mom and Dad, Church friends, and relatives we visited until I started school. Then, I began to “pick up” extraneous information from school children close to my age and later from folks all around town as I became old enough to venture out farther and farther on my own, while still learning from visitors and relatives (mostly in Oklahoma and some in Kansas) and from reading, which I did voraciously as a child through probably my forties!
But I learned “a lot” (an unfavorite slang expression of mine) by living in Forney. I want to share with you some of these that are true, some that are just ridiculous, some that are humorous, and some that are just interesting. I mean to offend no one, and I am not trying to convince anyone of the verity of what I have learned! And, I am sure these “learnings” do/did not just pertain to Forney!
1. Especially as a child, I “loved” to fish, and folks in Forney fished in TANKS, which was strange to me, since Dad and Grandpa and my cousins and I fished in ponds in Oklahoma. There, tanks were located below windmills and held water for the livestock or to be pumped to the “yard” around the tanks. And quite a few tanks, or stock tanks as I later heard some local farmers call them, were rather small here, quite often the sizes of good-sized house lots, while those in Oklahoma most often encompassed two or more acres. The first “tank” in which Dad, Grandpa, and I fished belonged to Mr. Lonzo Yandell, father of David and Walter.
2. I grew up drinking POP out of pop bottles the “every once-in-awhile” that I was given some carbonated beverages or when I got old enough to redeem bottles for the “two cents” deposits and bought some for myself! My early friends, though, nearly always asked their parents if they could have COKES and drank them out of coke bottles, even if they were oranges or grapes or Dr. Peppers! And later, they asked if I wanted to “team up” with them to scavenge “coke bottles” to sell back to Jack Pippins or Jack Venner. (grocery stores) The first “pop” or “coke” I remember drinking in town as a very young boy was at Marvin Feagin’s Humble Station right next to a cotton gin “burning silo.” It was a “Grapette!”
3. The Themer church denominational preference was/is Lutheran, and there were no Lutheran churches in Forney, so we attended Grace Lutheran and then Hope Lutheran in Dallas and never in Forney—and our relatives in other states all were Lutherans, too! First time I went to Vacation Bible School with one of my friends in Forney, I was told that “There is ‘Brother So-and-So,’ and he is the boss of our Church.” When I got home after noon the first day, Mom asked if I had met the Pastor (which is what we Lutherans all called the Preacher), and I replied, “No, I don’t think they have one, but I did meet my friend’s really older ‘brother.’”
4. I also learned early on that if I were going to “fit in” with some of my friends and their families, I would have to learn the correct pronunciation of the bigger town to our east. My friend asked me to go home with him after school one day and told me to warn my Mom that they lived almost to TURL (Terrell). When I met his Mom and Dad, they both used the same pronunciation! Ask Mickey Rouvaldt which pronunciation is the “correct” one and which is the “preferred.”
5. Another time the older neighbor lady needed a “ride” to town and asked my Mom for help, because by the late ‘50s, we were one of several families in our area that had a second car, used as it was! After Mom brought the lady back home (My sister and I were with them.), she profusely thanked Mom for “CARRYING” her to town. Our family had never used that expression! We drove folks places or gave them rides.
6. I loved peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and they were pretty safe for school lunches regarding still being edible by lunch time. I was in 4th or 5th grade and after a hard morning’s learning and an even harder recess play time, I opened my lunch box, drank some milk from my thermos, unwrapped my peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and took a bite. “Yuck,” I said out loud. “My mom put bananas on my peanut butter sandwich, and she has never, ever fixed them that way. Nobody in our family does!” From across the room, I heard Robert Dobbs complain rather loudly that “My Mom must be slipping; she left the bananas off my peanut butter sandwich. Man, oh man!” I walked over to him, and the two of us rather sheepishly exchanged lunch boxes that looked exactly the same on the outsides but had differing contents, at least as far as sandwich constructions! I later found out that many of my friends expected bananas with their peanut butter and that I was in the minority!
7. While on the subject of food and eating, years later, I went to a gathering of Forney folks with my, by then, own family (not with Mom and Dad) and was invited to stay for lunch. After the “BLESSING,” the hostess said for all of us to “HELP OUR PLATES” and to take as much as we wanted. Of course by then, I was older and knew exactly what she meant, but the “Themers” had always said the “prayer” and to “help yourselves” to the food!
8. Back to being a boy! I was old enough to ride my bike around town, which did not have to be very old in early Forney when there was not nearly as much traffic or concerns for “abductions” as in today’s times. I was probably riding with David Costello, Rod Stark, Alan McCuistion, Charles Bratcher, or some other fairly “close living” guys, when some big high school boys drove close enough to scare us on Center Street and yelled something “not nice” at us! One of the group was “foolish” enough to yell back at the much bigger guys, who stopped and blocked our paths. The “yeller” again was foolish enough to “smart off” back at him and to say he was going to “tell his Dad.” The big boy got really close and said back to him, “Oh, yeah, well I’ll get the FUZZ to come pick all of you up, because my older brother is good friends with one of them!” To this day, I don’t know if the rest of the guys knew, but I did not. I had to go home and get up enough nerve to ask Dad who or what the “fuzz” were? When he told me that he did not want to ever hear me call them that name, but that it meant the “police officers,” I was astounded!
9. I also learned the definition of GIG, in fact two definitions at two differing times! “Big Frank” Rhea (Mr.) found out that Rod and I sometimes shot frogs with Rod’s “pump-up” pellet rifle and asked Mrs. Stark to fry the legs with the crappie at a fish fry they periodically held. Mr. Rhea soon asked me if I would like to “go with him to get some really big Bull Frogs out at a local tank.” I agreed, but when I showed up across the street at his house, he had no pellet guns or other rifles. Instead, he showed some long poles with “spring loaded catcher tongs” at the ends and explained how to use them and called them “frog giggers” or just “gigs” for short.
10. Years later, when I was probably in 8th grade and old enough to like popular music and dancing with girls, a “few years older” guy on the football team in high school told me he had a GIG at “someplace” in the area and that I should get someone with a driver’s license to bring me to hear him play. I wasn’t able to get my parents to let me go, but I did find out that a “gig” meant a “performance” or a “musical venture.”
11. I also still remember the time my Dad and I were going to a Rabbits football game with another man and boy (friends) and stopped at a “filling station” to “buy a coke” on the way. Once inside, we all found what we wanted and were about to pay when the man said, “I will pay for all the drinks. I have a jar of ‘change’ in the CUBBY HOLE. You boys go back out to the driveway and get the jar.” I went along, wondering what and where a “cubby hole” was! I was amazed to find out that we had one in our car, too, but we always called it a “Glove Compartment.”
12. One final memory for today! Coach Jimmy Johnson, while teaching at Forney Grammar School, talked about differing names of towns and counties in Texas and spoke at length about one that he pronounced as “McCloud” each time he referenced it. None of us students knew of that place which he described, and I think Warren Hatley asked him to spell it. Well, he took the chalk and printed “McLeod” on the board and said, “There it is!” We were amazed to find out that he was right when we later looked it up in one of the World Book Encyclopedias. Later in my teaching career, that became a reference point for one of my many onepoint “bonus” questions.
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