|
a.
|
Note: See Notes Based on what I have been able to ascertain. Sam probably won a construction and trucking (chain driven) companies in a poker game. He apparently turned them over to Kathleen to run and gave them to her in the divorce. But, apparently some very influential people who wanted to get even with Sam, went to Austin and got the legislature to pass a bill that went into effect overnight that outlawed chain driven trucks on Texas roads thereby bankrupting the company.
The following are a few memories and remembrances of my grandmother, Nan Shrewder.
One of the first things I shall tell about is that when I was young, about 8 or 9 I remember finding a sword and scabbard in the house. My memory was that it was very old and very ornate. Don't know what ever happened to it but suspect it disappeared after Mama Pearson died. The only ancestor I can find that was in the Civil War was the Shrewders', feel sure that sword originally came from one of them.
Nan was always telling stories about coming home and finding a hideous drunk man in the front bedroom of the house, how she screamed, woke the man and he ran off. She could tell all kinds of ghost tales and scare herself as bad as scaring the kids, including me. In some respects, my memories of Nan was her bitterness over the loss of Jeannie Felix. I remember a trip to California after Stan Felix had taken Jeannie to Arizona. We stopped in Arizona to see Jeannie and the biggest and loudest shouting match between Nan and Stanley erupted. This was on top of all the screaming Nan and Doris did when we went through the mountains. Every turn they would scream that we were going over the side, instilled a fear of heights in me that I still have to this day. Ward , Jr. was instilled with the same fear of heights from that trip.
Good memory. Almost every Saturday night we would go to eat at the Renfro Rexall Drug Store on Sylvania Street. Hamburgers and limeades. Go across the street to the Morgan Theatre and watch a double feature and cartoon and sometime a Saturday serial. When the Morgan Theatre shut down, we went to the Griddle at six points and had hamburgers and coke in the car and then would drive to the Haltom Theatre in Haltom City. Nan continued taking my brothers even after Mama Pearson died in 1956. When Mama Pearson was alive she never missed going with us. She loved the horses and the old west. Bad memory. There was a cistern in back of the house on Dalford St.., it was always covered, but every time Ward, Jr. or I would get near it Nan would yell that it would cave in or that there were ghosts and dead bodies down in it. Sometimes she told us that it had a pit of snakes in the bottom and that if it caved in the snakes would get us before anybody could get to us. 1
|
