Mama Pattie and Daddy Joe

I am probably the only person alive today who remembers my father’s parents.  I called them “Mama Pattie” and “Daddy Joe.”

Daddy Joe was born in 1861; he said, “That’s the year the war begun.”   Mama Pattie was three years older.  They met in the Kentucky community where his family lived when she came there to teach school.  His younger siblings, Hugh and Mary, were among her pupils.  The whole family, including Daddy Joe’s parents, came to Texas around 1900.  Most of the men worked for the railroad, but Daddy Joe moved to Comanche County, Texas, where he became a rural mail carrier.  He started delivering mail in a buggy.  I’ve seen pictures of his mules.  What I remember his little model “T” Ford.

My earliest memories are going with my father to visit them, traveling on the wretched two-lane highways of Texas in the 1930's.  The rough pavement always punctured a tire, and Daddy got out of the Hudson, took off his suit coat, and rolled up his shirt sleeves to jack the car, take off the flat tire, and put on the spare.  It had an rubber inner tube, which had to be filled with air, Daddy’s arms struggling with heaving a bicycle pump.

We went through a series of little towns: Burleson, Cisco, Stephenville.   At Comanche we turned off onto an even smaller road, unpaved and dusty.  When the road wound between two little hills called “Round Mountain” and “Long Mountain” we were coming close to Sydney, the place where my father grew up.  The “town” consisted of four houses, two stores, a tiny post office (no bigger than my bathroom), a school, and three churches – Baptist, “Campellite”, and Methodist.  

Sometimes we arrived after dark, and I was carried in to be put to bed in a cold, dark room.  Daddy went across the hall to the where my grandparents waited, a room with a fireplace, and I was left alone, under a down comforter but still cold and miserable in the dark. 

My grandparents’ home was a typical small frame Texas farm house: a front porch, a center hall with one big room on each side, and behind the left hand room, a kitchen.  Three rooms, that was all.  There was no plumbing, no water faucets, no electric light.  At nightfall my grandmother lit the kerosene lamp.  Only one room had heat: from a fireplace faced with rough stone.  One Christmas Santa Claus came down that chimney and brought me a delicate blue china tea set.  My daughter still has the teapot and three cups and saucers at her home in Naperville, Illinois.  

When I was three years old my grandparents moved to Brownwood into a four-room house with a bathtub and a toilet.  It also had electricity for lights and to run a fan to stir the air on hot summer days.  But no fireplace.

Daddy Joe always grabbed me and kissed me.  I did not like that.  His bushy white mustache scratched my lips.  He stood straight as a soldier on parade.  My mother told me he had attended Kentucky Military School as a young man.  To me he seemed very tall.  Actually, he was probably no more than 5 foot 6 or 7 inches, but he was a head taller than my grandmother.

My Mother told me that my grandparents were always arguing with each other.  They disputed everything, but mostly they argued about religion.  They quoted various Bible passages, never agreeing on the interpretation of any passage of scripture.   My brother Don and I do the same thing.  It must be a family characteristic.  I do not remember the arguments.  All I remember is the love between these two old people.  

Mama Pattie and Daddy Joe were married for more than 50 years.  She died in January 1937, after a failed operation for kidney stones.  I was not yet eight years old.  Daddy Joe could not live without her.  He threw off the covers on freezing winter nights and managed to catch pneumonia.  Two months later he, too, was dead.