My Mother and Father’s Story and my Brother’s

In one of my earliest memories my father, mother, my little brother Ron and I went to Kerrville for the weekend to celebrate my parents’ seventh anniversary. I was only six years old and Ron was only 3. I remember standing on the banks of the Guadalupe River that ran alongside our hotel on a cold crisp late-April morning. The water was warmer than the air and the differential caused steam to bellow off the surface in rolling twisting waves. This was the place that my father and mother spent their honeymoon, and I would later calculate that it is probably the place I was conceived since I was born nine months to the day afterward on March 1, 1956. In the next few years Jeff and Shawn would come into the world but for now it was just our little family of 4. I vaguely remember my mom telling me stories of everything they did on their honeymoon. Most of the details have long been erased from my memory and I’m sure Ron remembers almost nothing. I do remember that we had just moved back to Texas after living in Connecticut for four years, my father’s boyhood home. Looking back this was a trip they looked forward to making all of those years in Connecticut. We ate at the same restaurant where they ate in 1955 and I remember dad took me fishing on the Guadalupe. Of course, dad ALWAYS took me fishing if there was water anywhere near where we would be. If there wasn’t water he would drive to where there was water….or we would hunt. Looking back, I wonder if he went fishing on their honeymoon and I have decided it is likely that he did….and that my mom encouraged him as she always did.

They met at a rollerskating rink in San Antonio. Dad was stationed at Lackland Air Force Base and along with a couple of friends decided to go skating for the evening. A distinctly 1950s thing to do. My mom’s crew of fellow telephone switchboard operators, as fate would have it, decided to go to the same roller rink. During the slow music of a couples skate a young boy from Connecticut who looked just like James Dean asked Ruby Taylor from nearby Floresville, Texas to skate with him. And that was where my story begins. After a respectable courtship the two were the first to marry in a brand new chapel at Randolph Air Force Base and nine months later I was born at Brooks Army Hospital at Fort Sam Houston.

Now it is 65 years later and the most remarkable thing has happened. After my dad died almost two years ago my brother Ron was given guardianship of our youngest brother Shawn. He sold the old house in San Antonio and bought a house on a 5-acre hillside just outside Kerrville, Texas. He has completely remodeled the big house and cleared the cedar underbrush and made it a showplace. He has bought a small house shell and is in the process of finishing it out. It will be Shawn’s very own home. If you hadn’t figured it out, Shawn is mentally challenged but not disabled. He is awesome. I had always planned for Shawn to live with me when our parents were gone and was disappointed that wasn’t dad’s wish but seeing how well Ron has taken to caring for Shawn, I can’t say he made the wrong call. I have to wonder how much of an impression that trip to Kerrville made on my three-year-old little brother all of those years ago and how ironic it is that two of my brothers now live there.