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He did have some good times as a boy. He
had a neighbor in Loyal Valley that
lived down the stream about a half mile.
The neighbor was
Herman Lehmann. As a
child, Herman had been snatched by the
Apache. He was raised by the Apache, and
spent nine years living among the Apache
and Comanche. He even became the adopted
son of Quanah Parker, the famed Comanche
Chief. Each evening my grandfather would
walk along the stream down to Herman's
house, and Herman would stay up with him
until very late hours, telling stories of his life among the Natives. My
grandfather said that as he would walk back home alone in
the dark, he would be terrified by every sound coming from
the darkness, thinking that the Apache were coming for him.
My grandfather said that he once saw Herman ride a horse at
full speed, and shoot three arrows into a steer within about
2 seconds time. The steer dropped, and Herman jumped off his
horse, cut the steer's heart out, and ate the still beating
heart raw right in front of him. My grandfather said that
Herman never fully adjusted to living among the white
people, but that Herman was always a good friend to him, and
someone he had many fond memories about.
 At
the age of 6, Jack started first grade. He attended a
one-room school in Loyal Valley. The school taught grades 1
through 6 in a single room, with a single teacher. It was in
first grade that Jack met his childhood sweetheart, Gladys.
She became his best friend. They shared a love for fishing,
and would meet down by the creek after school, and would
fish until dark. Jack would never forget Gladys, and
treasured the memories he had of this wonderful little girl.
When I was a teenager, my grandfather took
me back to Loyal Valley, which was just about a ghost town.
He showed me the one-room school where he had met Gladys, he
showed me his old homestead, and where Herman had lived. He
showed the creek where he and Gladys had fished. As a
typical teenager, I was completely bored, and could not have
cared less. Now, I am so sad that I had not cared more, and
asked questions, and learned about this little place. I
regret that I did not see what a wonderful opportunity was
being offered to me to learn an important part of my family
history. An opportunity that I squandered. But I digress . .
.
Jack's mother, Nellie did the best she
could. Being a single mother in the 1910's was not an easy
thing. In 1921 she and Jack moved to Eldorado, Texas. She
moved because Eldorado was a slightly larger community, and
she felt that there would be greater opportunity there. The
move was a hard one for Jack. He had to leave behind the two
best friends he had ever had in his life . . . Herman
Lehmann and Gladys.
Jack lost his Father as a little boy, and
now at the age of 10, he lost his two best friends. Jack
felt like he always lost the people who were closest to him,
and it hurt.
After moving to Eldorado, Nellie met and
married the local banker, J. B. Christian. J. B. was a kind
and good man, and he was a good husband to Nellie, and a
good provider for the family.
 In
1931, Jack met and married Eula Elizabeth "Liz" Elder. Liz
was the daughter of Annie Bell and James Montgomery, and
granddaughter of
Georgia "Little Sweet" Woods. Elizabeth shared Jack's
love of fishing and hunting. She was his best friend, and
they shared many interests, and great times.
Starting a new family in 1931 in Rural
Texas at the start of the Great Depression was not an easy
thing. Jack was able to get work in a poultry processing
plant. Jack had to kill and pluck chickens. He said that it
was a terrible job. He hated it, and for the remainder of
his life, he was never able to eat chicken. There were not a
lot of good jobs, and Jack did what he could to provide for
his family. After four years, he left the poultry processing
plant, and was able to get a job for the railroads. This was
better work, but because of the Depression, he was laid off,
and it was hard to keep steady work working the rails.
He then found the job he truly loved. He
got his first job in the oil fields as a Roughneck. It was
hard work, and dangerous work, but it paid well. Jack loved
the excitement of working on the oil rigs, and loved the
friends he made. He felt like he was finally getting ahead,
for the first time in his life. While working on the rigs,
he learned lots about the oil industry. Then, in the early
1940's, he opened his own oil service station. The company
provided services to the local oil industry, and served as a
retail gasoline station.
Elder Oil Company circa 1940
 Jack
and Elizabeth both worked at the Service Station. The
picture above shows Jack, wearing his hard hat, and
servicing a customer. Jack always wore that aluminum hard
had. I think he wore it with pride, like a badge or medal. I
even have a picture of him at the beach, and yes, he wore
the hard hat to the beach. Where ever he went, he wanted
people to know that he was a Roughneck. It was a fundamental
part of his self-identity.
Elizabeth would mind the store while Jack
made diesel and gas runs to the oil rigs. The typical day at
the station was 14 hours of work. They loved the work
though, and enjoyed owning their own business.
 While
Jack worked to make his business successful, he maintained
friendships with the roughnecks on the rig floors. He and
his friends were always pulling practical jokes on each
other. Jack would usually get the best of them, and always
came up with the best pranks. Then one day his friends got
together and decided that they would fix him once and for
all. They decided that the ultimate practical joke would be
to order a monkey in Jack's name, and have it delivered to
his house. So, one day Jack goes out and finds a crate on
his front porch. Inside the crate is a baby monkey. My
grandfather realized that he had been had. He wanted to get
even, and decided the best way to get even would be to turn
the tables, and make the monkey deal a good thing. He had
Liz make a little Phillips 66 uniform for the monkey, he
named him Junior, and he put him to work in the gas station
(Click here to learn more about Junior the
Pet Monkey).
He taught the monkey to clean the customers' windshields,
and to take payment from the customer. People were amazed to
see a monkey working in a gas station, and soon Jack had a
line two blocks long of people wanting to buy gas from him.
He never let on to his friends that he knew that they had
sent the monkey. Every time he saw them though, he would
talk about how much business that monkey was bringing him,
and that the best day of his life was the day that monkey
showed up on his doorstep. Junior loved to work at the
station, and was the employee of the month on several
different occasions.
In the 1960's jack got restless, and
missed the days when he had worked on the rig floors. He
decided to sell the station, and go back to his first love
of working on the oil rigs. He got a job for Tucker
Drilling, and Elizabeth got a job at the Post Office. Jack
and Elizabeth loved to hunt and fish, and did many things
together. They shared so many common interests, and had many
wonderful times together.
In 1973 Elizabeth died from an unexpected
Heart Attack. Jack was devastated, as he once again lost
someone very dear to him. He threw himself into his work,
and pretty much kept his mind off his grief by working all
the time.
He retired from the oilfields in 1978 at
the age of 67. When he retired, he once again grew restless.
He was lonely, and missed Elizabeth. She had been such a
wonderful hunting and fishing companion. He was sad and
lonely.
 Then
one day he started thinking about the days of his youth, and
his 1st grade sweetheart, Gladys. He had not seen here since
he was 9 years old. He started doing some research, and was
able to actually learn that Gladys was still alive, and
living about 75 miles away. He started asking some
questions, and learned that her husband had died some years
ago.
Jack looked up Gladys, and started
courting her. Come to find out, she loved to hunt and fish.
After a whirlwind courtship, at the age of 70, my
grandfather eloped. He ran off with Gladys, and they were
secretly married. They did not tell their families until
they returned from the Honeymoon. At the age of 70, Jack had
a new lease on life. When people would ask him whether they
were going to live at his home in Eldorado, Texas or her
home in Mason, Texas, he would always say, "My home is only
1 block from the schoolhouse, so we will live there. That
way when we have children, they can walk to school." While
he had retired from the oilfields, he would periodically go
back and work for a week or two as a roughneck on the rig
floors. He just wanted to show that he still had what it
took. I knew someone who worked on a rig who told me that
there were men half his age that could not keep up with him,
even with him being in his mid-70's.
Jack and Gladys had wonderful times
together. They enjoyed fishing and hunting, and special
times reminiscing together about their childhood in that
little one-room school in Loyal Valley, Texas.
By the 1990's, as Jack was entering his
80's, his decades of hard living, eating high fat foods,
over salting everything he ever ate, smoking 2 packs of
cigarettes a day, and numerous injuries from the old days in
the oilfields started catching up with him. He had several
heart attacks, and was involved in (i.e. caused) a serious
car accident. It became clear to his family that he was not
going to be able to live at home any longer, and was going
to have to go to the nursing home. He was very much against
this, but there were no options. He needed more help than
what could be provided at home. He was moved to the
Schleicher County nursing home. He did not adapt well to
nursing home living, and immediately began trying to escape.
He would look for a chance when no one was watching, and he
would make a run for it. He would be found at various places
around town, looking for his friends, or even trying to find
work. The nursing home was losing patience with him. He was
requiring much too much attention, and they grew weary of
chasing him down out in the parking lot, and bringing him
back into the facility.
 The
final straw occurred one night in 1994. I guess he had heard
that there was a well being drilled about 10 miles south of
town. He decided he would make his way out there, and see if
they were short handed, and could use his help. He slipped
out after everyone was asleep. It was a very cold night,
with sleet and freezing rain. He made it to about 5 miles
south of town, and then he slipped and fell into the barrow
ditch. He was unable to get himself back up, and it was a
very remote rural road. He laid in the freezing rain until
about 3:00 in the morning when someone driving by saw him
and stopped and helped. They got him up, and into their car,
and they took him to the hospital. He was OK, just a little
disappointed that he had not made it out to the rig. For the
nursing home, though, it was the final straw. They told my
family that they were not an incarceration facility, and
they were only equipped to care for people who wanted to be
there. They told us that that we had to come and pick
Grandad up, that he was no longer welcome there. At age 82,
he was kicked out of the nursing home. My family was in a
panic, since they were unable to give him the care he
needed, and there were no other nursing facilities in the
area. Desperate, they met with the nursing home, and worked
out a compromise. The family would pay to install a security
system in the nursing home, and Jack would be fitted with an
ankle bracelet, which would set off the alarm if he tried to
leave the facility.
Despite the new system, he continued to
try and escape. The odds were tilted in the nursing home's
favor with the new ankle bracelet, and he rarely made it
past the parking lot. I think the other people in the
nursing home were really rooting for him all this time. It
was sort of a geriatric version of the movie "Cool Hand
Luke". Jack would escape, and then they would catch him, and
bring him back.
On April 3, 1995, time finally ran out for
Ol' Jack. At the age of 83, he suffered one final heart
attack; this one got him, and he got called up to that Big
Drilling Rig in the sky.
As Jack's body was being removed from the
nursing home, as they were wheeling him out the front door,
those alarms went off one last time. The ankle bracelet was
still on Jack's leg, and it set the alarm off. All his
friends in the nursing home paused for a moment, and one of
them said, "Looks like he finally made it out, and for good
this time".
Most of the people that ever knew Jack are
gone now. He came, he lived his life, he did his part, and
now he is gone. I will never forget him. He was my
grandfather. |
