My Low Brow Roots

I confess: I am a “high brow.”  I like George Strait, but I would rather listen to Chopin.  I don’t know why I am this way.  Certainly my parents were “low brow.”  

Both my parents were descended from pioneers.  My ancestors came west in covered wagons, just like the movies.  My father’s great-grandparents, born in Virginia before the American Revolution, built their log cabin in Kentucky in 1790, when that was the “wild frontier” of Daniel Boone and black bears.   

My mother’s people came to Texas “in the days of the Republic.”  They were the first settlers in Rockwall, now a Dallas suburb. Comanche Indians were a constant threat, and buffalo wandered across the plains of North Texas.  They were not concerned about listening to Beethoven or acquiring fine paintings.  

My father grew up in a tiny hamlet in Comanche County, Texas, consisting of a general store, a school, a one-chair barber shop, and three churches: Baptist, Methodist, and “Campbellite”, all conservative Protestants.  The only book in my grandparents’ home was the Bible. 

As a child, my mother lived in Sherman, Texas, but after her father died in the 1918 flu epidemic, my grandmother brought her and her brother to live in the city – Fort Worth -- where she attended high school.  Mr. Paschal was principal at Central High, the only high school in town.  

Mother attended TCU for two years.  TCU stands for “Texas Christian University” with the emphasis on “Christian.”  The campus consisted of half a dozen buildings strung out in a single line along University Avenue.  I never saw any evidence that Mother acquired any sophistication from those two years of “higher learning.” 

The Fort Worth of my childhood was technically a city of more than 100,000 people.  We had 20-story buildings and street cars.  It was an overgrown hick town.  Citizens proudly called it “Cowtown.”  The economy was based on the Armour and Swift slaughtering plants on the North Side of town.  Southsiders prayed that the wind never blew directly from the North.  The odor was overpowering,. 

With this “low brow” background, how did I grow up with a deep interest in music and art?  Credit must go to my teachers in the Fort Worth Public Schools. Little old ladies, none of them married, some of whom had taught my mother in the same red brick building, now renamed Paschal High, one of six high schools in Fort Worth.  (I have no idea how many there are today, probably more than a dozen.)

Why didn’t my mother develop similar interests?  All I know is that Miss Creed introduced me to the beauty of classical music.  She gave me tickets to concerts at the Woman’s Club.  My English teachers introduced me to literature, which I continued to develop on my own; when I went to Chicago I read a translation of Dante’s “Divine Comedy” on the “el” as I rode to my job in the Loop .  Miss Beck and Miss Mixon inspired me to learn more and more about history.  Today I read more non-fiction than fiction.

As for my interest in art, I don’t know how that developed.  I remember going downtown to the Carnegie Public Library and in a loan exhibition seeing for the first time a genuine Cezanne, a still-life of oranges.  I was just a high school girl from a “low brow” family, but I recognized it as a Cezanne and I was thrilled.