For the first years of my life, Lohn was home. It was where I had grown up on the farm, where I had started school, where I had ridden that long school bus route, and where I had begun playing music with Finn and Mackey Watkins in The Rockin' Three. Then, in the middle of my sixth-grade year, everything changed. My mother and father divorced.
The drought and the years of struggle on the farm had taken their toll on our family. Whatever the causes that finally brought my parents' marriage to an end, I was still a boy, and I experienced it the way children usually experience such things—not by understanding everything that had happened between their parents, but by seeing their familiar world suddenly change. Mother took us and left the farm.
Back to the Latimers
For a short time, we moved in with Mother's parents, Charlie and Tishie Latimer, at their ranch a few miles outside Brady. I already knew the ranch well. It was a place associated with family gatherings, live oak trees, relatives, cousins, food, and weekends together. Now it became something different. It became home. Mother had returned to her parents, and we had come with her. Although Granddad and Grandmother Latimer lived only a few miles outside Brady, their ranch was located in the Rochelle school district.
So, I left Lohn School and enrolled at Rochelle. My sister Ann was attending school there with me. I believe we were at Rochelle for only about six weeks. It was a short period of time, but it was an important bridge between the two parts of my childhood. I had left the farm and the little school at Lohn, but I had not yet arrived at the life I would know in Brady. Then Mother moved us again.
Brady
This time we moved into Brady. I transferred schools for the second time that year and finished the sixth grade in Brady. That meant that during one school year I attended three different schools: Lohn. Rochelle. Brady. Each one represented a different part of the change taking place in my life. Lohn was the world I had known. Rochelle was the temporary stopping place at my grandparents' ranch. Brady was where the next part of my life began. After finishing sixth grade, I attended Brady Junior High through the eighth grade.
During junior high, I got to know my Marshall cousin Ted. We camped at Richards Park and sometimes rode horses kept in a pasture near our house in Brady. We made halters from cotton cord and could usually catch two horses.
One day we caught only one and decided to ride double, with Ted in front and me behind. We had caught the horse on a rocky hill and were trying to cross a dry creek bed to the plowed field where we usually rode. The horse began bucking. I reached around Ted, grabbed the halter, and pulled back, but the cord broke. I went off the back and landed in a huge prickly pear. I picked stickers out for weeks. My backside was not happy.
Another experience I had with a horse was in Marlin, Texas at the Latimer Family Reunion:
THE HORSE AT MARLIN
For several years, probably about four, the Latimer family held reunions at the Marlin Saddle Club in Marlin, Texas. I wish I could tell you everything about those reunions. I can't. I don't remember what we ate. I don't remember most of the conversations. I do remember the Latimer group picture. My Granddad turned around and looked at all those people and asked, “did I start all of this.” I don't remember exactly who attended each year. After all these years, most of those details have disappeared.
But I remember the horse. I was probably in junior high at the time. The reunion was being held at the Saddle Club, and there was a horse there that I somehow managed to ride. I needed a halter. Back in Brady, Ted and I had made halters for horses, so I knew what I wanted to do. The problem was that I didn't have the proper material. That didn't stop me. I found some small electrical wire and made a halter out of it.
Then I rode the horse.
Like Floating
I had ridden horses before. But I had never ridden one like this. That horse had the smoothest gait I had ever experienced. There was almost no sensation of bouncing up and down. It felt as though I were floating along above the ground. I remember that feeling more clearly than almost anything else about those Marlin reunions. I wanted to keep riding. Then Uncle T.H. put an end to it. He made me put the horse up. I was terribly disappointed. At the time, I probably thought Uncle T.H. was simply spoiling my fun.
Looking back, I suspect he had a very good reason. This was the Marlin Saddle Club, and that was obviously no ordinary horse. With that extraordinarily smooth gait, the animal was probably quite valuable. And here was his young nephew riding it with a homemade halter fashioned out of electrical wire. Uncle T.H. may have been less concerned about what the horse might do to me than what I might do to the horse. So, my ride ended.
That ride happened before the later Marlin reunion when Ann persuaded Charles to drive us home for her date with James Davis. I remember little else from those reunions, but more than seventy years later I can still feel that horse’s smooth gait. It was like floating. Then I entered Brady High School. By the time I entered Brady High School, we were living in town and much of my childhood world had changed. Music had come with me, and during my freshman year, 1959–60, we formed an FFA band.