There's a grandpa between the covers;
or, a $12 collection of two-minute tales
Bill Henderson's publisher wasn't quite happy with his name for his book - Cranford & Son. Like much about life, the title of 117 anecdotes became a compromise - "Good Times Remembered," reads the cover. "Cranford & Son," says the spine.
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His home is molded into a corner of the pecan grove his grandfather planted about a hundred years ago. His office is tiny, a clutter of books, awards and pictures. A dinosaur typewriter, the old workhorse IBM Selectric whose interchangeable steel ball typefaces once made it the cutting edge thing, sits on the credenza behind his desk.
Times change, bring change, and force change, something he's considered.
Born in 1920, he turned 85 in February. A retired banker, among many things, he describes what he's watched in those years in three economic phases: the farm era, the Lone Star Steel era and the Wal Mart era.
His daddy was Cranford, a farm boy from Dalton, five miles east from Naples, just across the Cass County line.
"I once heard a man describe land so poor it took an acre of it to rust a nail," he said. "That's where I came from."
To hear him tell it is to see farms grew more than crops in those times. Farms grew people, teaching them to be self sufficient.
Money was scarce and most families raised what they ate or faced going without.
"That's just how it was, and it was the same for almost everybody," he said. The exceptions were merchants, the town bankers, and further back liveries and blacksmiths. Saw mills and grist mills passed for local industry, but the people who earned cash enough to feed and house themselves without a direct tie to the land were the exceptions, not the rule.
In 1939 he went to work at Morris County National Bank. The bank had three employees.
There were still a few working "plantations." But for banking purposes, most farms fell into one of two categories. "They either had one mule or two," he said.
They grew cotton and watermelons for cash, corn for their stock, peas for the winter and vegetables to can.
"After he'd grown enough to feed his family and his stock, a farmer's fate depended on making a good cotton crop," he said. "The thing is, the best cotton ever raised in East Texas was seldom better than fair to middlin." The best of the local crop brought 6 cents a pound. To cotton buyers, "fair" described a staple (thread) just shy of an inch in length.
"Middlin'" was just as specific, referencing the purity of the cotton bale - that it was all cotton, not leaves, not stalks, not trash.
"So it really meant something when you asked how somebody was doing and they said, 'Fair to middlin.' For an East Texas farmer, that was about as good as it was going to get," he said.
His work as a teller in the bank evolved into work as a cashier. He learned to post and balance the bank ledger. Within a year he made more in a month than some farmers would see in a year.
"It was a hard year and nobody had done especially well," he remembered. "A bale of cotton weighed 500 pounds. There was one man who'd made three bales and got three and a half cents a pound - that's a little more than fifty dollars." As for cash farm receipts, that was it until spring and the chance to plant another crop.
In the growing season, a woman could snap peas and break the monotony of food, but most peas were left to dry in the field, then stored in a crib in the barn for winter.
The stories in his book are often humorous, typically delivering left handed lessons about life back then.
"High Life," or "Oily Mustard," was some sort of common chemical thing. Think of Ben Gay balm times ten. A drop or two of "oily mustard" on the floor of the crib was enough to burn the feet of the rats that would otherwise have feasted on the corn and peas.
Reading like the grandfather's story it is, chapter 3 is titled "Oily Mustard," and makes only passing reference to the practical use of oily mustard. Like his father, Cranford, his writing reflects more of an interest in oily mustard's entertainment potential.
Cranford moved the family to Naples and went into the gas station business. The station was a gathering spot for old timers. Chapter 3 opens with a one sentence discussion of nursing homes. There weren't any. Aging parents moved in with their children and his story laces around a half dozen such men.
In the center of the station was a single table with a single chair. Cranford had replaced the chair's original cane bottom with a cow hide. The morning's first arriving old timer got the chair -- the others were reduced to sitting on up-ended soft drink bottle cases.
Cranford amused himself one morning by soaking the cow hide seat with oily mustard.
Like a hangover from the Old West, there was a notorious man named Hugh who lived in Texarkana. He was said to have killed several men and was noted as being short fused and ill tempered.
Cranford watched with satisfaction as the first old timer in the station that morning began squirming as the oily mustard absorbed through the seat of his trousers. In short order he excused himself abruptly, mentioning a sudden need to return home.
"Gentlemen," he said, "I've got the most peculiar feeling."
The man from the feed store next door immediately moved to the favored chair. Within minutes he was on his feet.
"Cranford," he said, "watch my store. I've got to go home. My piles are killing me."
It was about then that Hugh, the Texarkana tough, wheeled up to the station. Cranford went out to service the bad man's car. Hugh walked in the station and immediately claimed his seat in the cow-hide chair.
Cranford left.
Get it?
As a writer, Cranford's son gives reader's credit for understanding punch lines. Each chapter is a stand-alone story of just a few pages.
Cranford liked holding court and about the time his son had gone to work at the bank, Cranford began entertaining himself by conducting job interviews. The world was full of men eager for work - any work. Cranford's job interviews made a production of taking down information on any topic he felt might be amusing, often focusing on personal issues.
"Now," he'd say, "when you finish this job, they'll either give you a hundred acres of land or money for the boat ride home, your choice."
Boat ride?
That triggered the final sequence in which Clarence would describe the opportunity to serve in the Ethiopian army, fighting Italians.
Enlisting the local telegraph operator, Cranford's friends devised a ploy to turn the tables.
Depending on which hat he was wearing - literally - the freight agent at the rail depot also served as the Western Union man. Drawn in on the joke, he fixed up a telegram from the state department explaining that Cranford's offer of work in Ethiopia appeared to violate a raft of federal laws and that a state department official would be arriving in due course to investigate. Cranford's friends let him twist in the wind a few days, coming out to watch who got off the train every time it arrived.
Lest his reader lament friends having fun at Cranford's expense, his son's tales make it plain that Cranford was fair game.
Consider the story of the short in the wiring inside the sign pole at the gas station. "The Texaco Sign" builds around the short - not a bad short, just enough to surprise a man, enough to gig a lithe fellow into a two-foot vertical leap, as Mr. Henderson recalls.
If Cranford found himself involved in a conversation of such length that his mind wandered, he'd begin ambling over toward the sign pole. Inevitably, the story teller would naturally move to make himself more comfortable, leaning on the pole.
End of story, is one of the common phrases Mr. Henderson uses to end his stories.
A few months after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Bill Henderson left the bank to join the army. It seems whatever he did, wherever he worked, he was recognized as a man of ability. Before the war ended, he was reporting directly to a full colonel who went on to become a general and later wrote a book about the war. Thirty Seconds over Tokyo is about the Doolittle Raid. Mr. Henderson's copy arrived with a three page hand written letter from the General's widow, along with a picture of the General, taped to an inside flap.
When he came home from the war, Morris County was poised on the edge of the Lone Star Steel era. He went to work as a rural postman. As he was being shown the ropes, the retiring mail carrier he replaced noted that a lot of people had started keeping guinea hens. He can't remember that he ever knew of anybody eating a guinea, and their eggs weren't as big as hen eggs. They made up for these shortcomings in other ways.
The African birds were great foragers. Cheap to keep. They weren't easy prey, not nearly as easy as a typical barnyard hen. Beyond predators, the rapidly evolving age of the automobile posed additional challenges for traditional poultry. On the other hand, said the man who trained Mr. Henderson in the finer points of mail delivery, it was impossible to run over a guinea.
It's a small piece of information, but in the way a story teller's mind mulls over the oddities of life, years later it became relevant when Mr. Henderson read of animal rights protesters' concern with National Trail Day celebrations in Quitaque, Texas. Plans included $100 cash prizes for whoever captured guinea fowl dropped from an airplane.
Factions emerged. A Mrs. Davis, president of United Poultry concerns in Maryland described the plan as "insane, barbaric and mean."
Claiming expertise in such fowl issues, a second activist described guineas as "intermittent fliers" that could suffer physically and mentally from being dropped from an airplane.
"There is nothing," the activist said, "in a bird's evolutionary development that would give it a way to respond to being dropped, arbitrarily, from a height."
While this begged the question of the physical and mental well being of birds dropped unarbitrarily, as an experienced rural postman, the author came down on the other side of the controversy, agreeing with Quitaque Chamber of Commerce President Roye Pigg.
"Guineas can fly, trust me. I know everybody says they can't, but they can."
Next time the argument comes up, feel free to cite two reliable witnesses.
In days of yore, post office hours were 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Counter operations ran in two shifts. Taking the morning shift left Bill Henderson's afternoons free. His experience with bank ledgers was enough to land him moonlighting work in Mt. Pleasant with Mickey McGuire, an accountant. After a season learning the tax ropes, Mr. Henderson went to work moonlighting for himself.
He did the first business tax return ever prepared for "Mr. Ruby Welch," a Sulphur bottom native with a third grade education who'd come to Naples, rented an office and gone in the butane business. It was 1949, and "Mister Rube" planted the seed that Welch family members today have expanded to propane distributorships serving Daingerfield, Mt. Pleasant, Bogata, Clarksville, Texarkana, Atlanta, Linden and Douglassville.
He also planted turnip seeds - see Chapter 71, "Ruby Turnipseed."
"Spring and fall, he carried a sack of seed," Mr. Henderson said. "Anywhere he found a spot of bare ground, he planted. Depending on the season and the rain, you could find turnips anywhere in the county. Depending on whether somebody wanted tender greens or grown turnips, all they had to do was drop by the store and ask. He'd think a minute then tell them the most likely place to go look."
The business had a ten-cent ledger from "Mrs. Tabb's Five and Dime" and a cash box designed for fishing tackle.
"He rolled up his paid invoices, put a rubber band around them, and threw them in a Dearborn heater box that served as the filing cabinet," said Mr. Henderson, who went with Mr. Rube into the butane business.
This was before the present enlightened era in which husbands share equally in household chores, right girls? For the most part in country homes, cooking still required building a fire. The value of his product wasn't lost on Mr. Henderson, and did he have an answer for happy housewives across the land. He could offer rest to men splitting stove wood. Moving beyond bookkeeping, he went into marketing.
And lawsy me if Lone Star Steel wasn't coming on line with its thousands of jobs. Farmers turned steel workers had money to burn, and butane boomed on the farm.
But the change was greater.
"Men accustomed to working sunup to sundown made more in a shift than they'd dreamed of making in a week," Mr. Henderson said, "and they still had time to work when they got home. They gave up farming, turned crop land into pasture and went into the cattle business."
His butane marketing worked so well he was invited to speak to producers across the state at their annual convention.
As he was approaching retirement from the post office, the town banker approached him. He couldn't go right to work - another job would have interfered with his duties as president of the state rural carriers. The banker was willing to wait out the year.
Eight years later, when he retired as the president of the local bank, he remained on the board.
It was the mid 80's. Lone Star Steel had changed the world. Working men made good money - families had medical insurance, fathers were retiring with pensions. Children were sent away to be educated. Then came the massive layoffs at the steel plant, thousands of jobs vanishing.
Naples had hit its peak in the Lone Star Steel era.
To some degree, the fate of the town's retail businesses rode with the fate of the steel plant. Besides the plant, satellite industries ground to a halt. Meanwhile in Mt. Pleasant, Wal-Mart took competition to levels retailers had never imagined.
It took a decade for the business district to dry up. He watched as Naples became a bedroom community, watched as the children of the steel workers moved on or began commuting to jobs in other towns.
"It's changed," he said. "They drive to Mt. Pleasant, Texarkana, Pittsburg. They work for Pilgrim's Pride, Priefert, TXU. Or they work at Lowe's distribution center in Mt. Vernon, or in the trailer industry in Mt. Pleasant."
He wonders, sometimes, if the peaceful way of small town life is enough to sustain his town.
Some years ago now, seeing a natural story teller with time on his hands, The Monitor's Morris Craig approached Mr. Henderson about writing a column. He sat down with his old IBM Selectric and some days he spent all day writing and revising, polishing and honing a story he'd trash and write again the next day.
Tax season rolled around - these days, rather than hawking his own tax return skills, his CPA drives over from Dallas to call on an old friend from banking days. Working in his garden, visiting friends, writing - that's all more important than wasting his time on tax returns when someone perfectly qualified is willing to do the work for a reasonable fee.
"Mr. Henderson - Bill," said the lady after she began reading his weekly columns, "this is good stuff. Put together a book."
It was an absurd idea, at first, thinking he could sell a book of personal tales from the narrow band of the world stretching across Morris County and nudging into western Cass County.
"I'm not from here and I like them," his accountant said.
. . .
On a late summer morning, Bill Henderson went out to tend his tomatoes. As dry as it's been, his vines are still lush, his garden clean. His professional life is behind him now, with the exception of an occasional state propane convention. As it turns out, years ago his marketing ideas caught attention on a national scale. After the time he spoke at the Texas convention, other state associations began recruiting him to speak. The Welch gas people created the Bill Henderson marketing award for Texas. The state railroad commission, which regulates that business, stepped in and asked if they could take the award and make it something officially presented by the state. Sure, the Welch gas people said, and the state made the selection the business of its alternative fuel people, pushing clean burning propane.
He didn't think about any of that while he tended his garden. And he didn't think about it when he moved to sit on the patio in the shade of the pecan trees his grandfather planted. Thinking instead of his first book, he pulled a first-edition copy close, opened the flap, and began skimming his life, leafing through the pages.