The early roads/highways in South Texas were two lane. Many of these had overpasses where trains ran. In the ‘30s there was an effort to widen the roads which meant that the overpasses made of large chunks of Texas granite had to be torn down. (I don’t know if this measure was a part of the FDR’s federal work plan or not but it surely would have qualified.)
Texans and the public in general were invited to load up the large chunks and haul them away for free. Every weekend for the time it took to collect enough for a house, Alice Louise and Arlis loaded up a trailer with these large chunks and took them down to the lot they had bought near Matagorda Bay halfway between Port Lavaca and Palacios.
Eventually enough chunks were accumulated to build a cabin consisting first of one long room paralleling the water. There was an entrance in the back onto a small porch (later housing an “icebox” refrigerator) and other accumulated beach items. There was also a “front door” onto the beachfront part of the property and finally onto the beach itself and the water. This long room was sub-divided into an eating area with a long table and a living room with a large fireplace. Wooden shutters divided off a kitchen area with a small gas stove; a sink; and some little counter space. Next to that was another room with a large shower area over which was a large metal tank holding Artesian water and behind that a bathroom. One had to walk through the shower area to get to the facility. Sitting on the roof over the shower area was a large water tank which fed the shower.
A sleeping “porch” which could be shut off with double doors was just beyond the living room but ran from the front of the house toward the garage and dirt road. Five white metal hospital-type beds were lined up along the windows running the length of the sleeping area. More wooden shutters made a closet/dressing area and a place for a dresser with a mirror. (7 beds in all with 2 in front and 1 turned sideways at the back.) Later a master bedroom with a bath was built on the other side of the back entrance hall.
Before Bob and Louise entered school Alice Louise and the children would go down after Easter and stay until late September or October. Arlis would come on the weekends with bushels of fruit and vegetables from farmers markets and meats from German meat markets. (These “bushels,” especially the three bushels of peaches meant that Bobby and I had to peel a large turkey pan full each morning before we went out to play so that Mother could put them up.) Large chicken wire cages were built next to the garage near the road where we kept chickens and pigeons to supplement our vegetables.
Between the house and the pigeon cote and chicken pen was a large barbecue pit built of the same chunks of railroad granite. We would use the barbecue pit for parties. Arlis would often invite friends to come for a weekend bar-be-cue and swim. He would bring the meat and a case of beer, Alice Louise would make a huge pan full of potato salad and mix some wonderful barbecue sauce for Arlis to use to swab the meat with every hour or so. Smelling the meat all day as it cooked made everyone ravenously hungry toward late afternoon. There would also be a metal tub of iced cold drinks. Then there was a croquet set put up and of course balls of all sizes, etc. for those who didn’t want to swim.
OTHER STORIES: One Thanksgiving when I was a toddler Alice Louise had brought a woman to help her fix the meal at the bay house. There was a rather small yellowish gas stove standing high on its four legs in the small kitchen with maybe two burners on top and an oven to the right side near the door opening.. The oven was on high to cook the turkey and the tea was still hot, as they had just finished making it. Suddenly the gas oven blew up. Louise was standing under the tall oven and the fire caught her hair and also burned her eyelashes and eyebrows. The helper thought quickly and used her hands to put out the fire on Louise and then she and Alice Louise poured and patted tea on her head and face. The maid would not let mother pour the tea on her hands. She had the scars for the rest of her life. The tannin in the tea kept Louise from having any scars from the accident, but Alice Louise would never ever have a gas stove in any house she lived in.
Another spring as we came down to spend some time at the bay house both Bob and I got out of the car and started around the back of the house to look at the water. Alice Louise nearly screamed but held her breath as Louise stepped over an enormous rattlesnake. The snake slithered on probably as afraid of us as we were of it. We always had to look out for snakes that lived in the extra pile of rocks at the back of the property.
During World War II when Josephine and Martha (and later, Buddy, too) would come down to the bay while Horace was serving in the Army during the Second World War (three summers in all and one summer with a young woman to help her).
Of course summer storms would sometimes blow in. We had a glass container with a spout on it filled with a red solution in it (a primitive barometer) which was our storm warning system along with the radio. One summer when Josephine and Martha were with us we heard on the radio the warning that a storm was approaching. Alice Louise told Josephine that we needed to pack up and go inland to Victoria to escape the storm. Alice Louise began packing the car with clothes and food and was ready to go when she called to Josephine to come on but she couldn’t find her. The red solution in the storm warning container started coming up the spout which indicated that the pressure and the storm was getting very near. Josephine was in the large shower washing Martha’s hair in “this wonderful Artesian water which made Martha’s hair so soft” as the storm clouds rolled over us and he rain started pounded.
One of these summers, as soon as we arrived, Bob put on his bathing suit and ran as fast as he could run and jumped off the end of the short, low pier into the water. He screamed and ran back out as fast as he could up the beach and the sidewalk to our house, blood gushing out of his leg by his knee. He had jumped onto a broken bottle someone had carelessly thrown into the shallow water. Mother immediately put a tourniquet on his thigh just above the deep cut and told all of us to go get into the car because we would have to drive back to Victoria to have Arlis sew him up. Josephine drove because Mother had to release the tourniquet every now and then to let blood through. The winds were blowing fiercely and the storm was so near that the decision was made to go the longer but safer inside route by the small town Alice because in almost every strong storm parts of the causeway over the bay between Midway (the convenience store/filling station nearest our house) and Port Lavaca inevitably blew away making it impossible to cross.
Josephine had driven not more than twenty-five miles when a tire blew out in the middle of nowhere with no traffic in sight in either direction. Josephine got out of the car and miraculously within fifteen minutes a man drove up and stopped. He changed the tire and drove on with our waves and many thanks for his help. Josephine and Alice Louise got back into the car and both swore that this man was an angel sent by God, because Bobby would have died there on that lonely road from loss of blood had the man not come by and stopped. In Victoria Bob was sewn up and he healed but still has a scar and, hopefully learned the lesson that one checks the contents of the water before one jumps in.
During WWII every night we could see search lights across the bay. On a really clear day we could just barely make out the outline of a military camp across the bay. Toward the end of the war an abandoned German sub was discovered in nearby waters.
Our family dog named Brownie – a Chesapeake Bay retriever – always went down to the water with us when Bob and I would go to play or swim. He would never allow me to get beyond knee deep – he would pick me up by my bathing suit straps and bring me back to the shore with me kicking and screaming for him to “put me down!”
Another time when we were NOT by the water (we were actually eating lunch and looking out to ward the water, Brownie followed the child of our next door neighbor (a school superintendent from San Antonio) out onto the long pier which went to their boathouse. For some reason the little boy jumped into the water at the end of the pier where it turned to the actual boathouse. Brownie jumped in after the boy, grabbed onto his suit and swam with him to the shore where he deposited the child!
We certainly were NOT creative when we named our dogs as young children – Brownie served as the name for 2 of our retrievers and Blackie was the name of our small Cocker spaniel.
Louise loved to go down to the water’s edge in the early morning and search for washed-in items such as sand crabs, snails in interesting shells, cabbage heads, the occasional man-o-war, small fish, etc. Bob had a net seine attached on either end to two wooden poles. He quite often wanted to catch small bait fish, shrimp, blow fish, or other creatures to use for fishing. The catch was that he had to have someone on the other pole to seine properly and the seine had to practically scrape the sand so that the fish and other bait would not escape, so that each had to bend over for what seemed to Louise like uncomfortable hours in order to collect a number of bait for his bucket. Louise HATED this activity! But she was persuaded through begging, but more often through threatened or sometime hitting until she consented.
Ruth also came down to the Bay House and brought Earl and a young boy companion just a year or two older to watch after him. Louise has had long hair almost all of her life. Ruth and Alice Louise decided that Louise’s hair needed to be cut to make it faster to dry after swimming, etc. Ruth cut Louise’s hair and then decided that it needed a permanent to make it curly. The family went to Port Lavaca – a thirty minute trip – to buy a home permanent which Ruth had used in Bryan and was comfortable with using. Of course they stopped by the dime store for browsing and picking up small toys and then all had ice cream cones before returning to the bay house. Ruth first stirred the clear relaxer solution which would stop the curling solution in a large yellow mixing bowl and left it on the high mantel of the fireplace. Then she rolled up Louise’s hair on the curlers provided in the permanent wave kit and applied the curling solution. She set the timer and told Louise to have a short nap while the waving solution worked its “magic.”
Meanwhile Alice Louise was picking up clothes and toys and generally straightening and cleaning up the house. When it came time to take down the curlers and use the clear solution for stopping the curling Ruth went to the mantel to get the bow; but it was gone! Alice Louise had seen the bowl of what she thought was just water and thrown it out. Then there was a small panic. It was four forty-five on a Saturday and the stores closed at five for the rest of the weekend. Everyone ran to the car, got in, and they drove as fast as possible back to Port Lavaca to get another home permanent. This was a time when the home permanents were found only in beauty parlors – not in drug stores or anywhere else. They want to one beauty parlor but it was locked and knocking and yelling brought no response. They found another beauty parlor, but it, too was locked. Finally they went down a back alley and found one person locking the third shop. Ruth begged the owner to please open the shop and explained the problem. The owner had one permanent wave kit left. It was bought quickly, everyone piled back into the car and drove back to the bay house. The solution was mixed and finally poured on Louise’s VERY CURLY hair. That was the first and only permanent Louise ever had – to this day!
Daddygrand started the tradition of giving each of us (Bob and me) a $100 bond (which became War Bonds later) when we were born. In one of Mother’s efforts to try to stop or slow Arlis’ drinking, she told him that we would give him our bond money to help with his office re-furbishing above the downtown Victoria First National Bank if he would promise to stop. I never saw the written paper with his name and promise, but I remember very clearly the day she took us out of school so that we could go to the bank and sign over the bonds to him. I always loved school and didn’t want to miss so this was very emotionally important to me. This memory is somewhat tied up with a variety of wartime memories like all the church bells ringing and, I believe, the literal bell at the school ringing when the war ended, because the picture comes back to me of standing outside Juan Lynn school with Bob and my mother as we left school for this purpose. Needless to say, I also remember being very angry when our money saved for college was gone and there was nothing to show for it from our father.
–Louise Mosley Smith
E R Nash Sr. and Family 