Tag: family

Fondness for a family motoring icon

Let’s leave town on a permanent vacation,
Lock up the house, pack up the station wagon.
— “Outta Here” song lyrics by Kenny Chesney

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“Station wagon—where did that come from,” a friend laughed loudly, talking about her new sport utility vehicle approaching the size of a World War II Sherman Tank.

Station wagons disappeared from dealership model lineups in the mid-1990s. But, for those of us whose first driver’s license predated man’s landing on the moon, there’s usually a lingering fondness for the one-time icon of family motoring.

Two things likely paved the road south for true station wagons. One is the demise of “full-sized” cruiser automobiles that served as the station wagon’s platform. Caprices. Roadmasters. Galaxies. The other was the introduction of minivans and the gussied-up domestication of truck-based work vehicles.

The term “station wagon” originated in the early 1920s during the age of train travel. A wooden wagon body mated to an automobile chassis served to transport people and freight to and from train stations. Hence, “station wagon.” The wood look remained in fashion through the last true station wagons of the 90s, long after metal was the better suited method of manufacturing. The last of the “woody wagons” utilized decorative vinyl to obtain the popular faux wood look.

Old station wagons are cool today. I’ve long harbored a secret lust for a ’55 Ford Country Squire wagon. Black with a red interior.

“My father had a station wagon,” my friend said, recalling where her words came from. “I backed it into a pole and bent the bumper when I started driving. Didn’t think he would notice right away,” she laughed. “I was wrong.”

“We also had one,” I replied. “A 1958 Ford Country Country Sedan. Beige and white. And huge. Dad traded in a ’56 Chevy sedan when he brought the Ford wagon home in about 1960. Mom made frequent after-school trips in those days from Mount Pleasant to Granny’s house in Pittsburg, checking on Dad’s parents.

One memorable day, Mom and Granny were engaged in one of their spirited conversations, I’m guessing over one of my grandmother’s critiques on child-rearing. My grandmother, bless her heart, could ruffle Mom’s feathers in a heartbeat. She really meant well, it was just in her personality to be everyone’s life coach.

Nearing tears over their discussion and deciding it was time to go home, Mom loaded us in the wagon and gave ‘er the gas heading south on Cypress Street. As the motor revved up and the car gained speed, Mom took the column-mounted shift lever and threw it up into the “second gear position.”

Now, that would have have been just fine had she still been driving the recently traded-off Chevy. It was a standard shift. What Mom forgot in her aggravated emotional state was that the wagon was the first car Dad bought with an automatic transmission.

For anyone never having experienced this automotive faux pas, it’s something you long remember. Shifting an automatic transmission car from “D” to “P” at about 20-25 miles per hour and still accelerating produces a conglomeration of noises. The loud and ugly grinding kind coming from under the car. Almost always accompanied by violent lunges when the rear tires start bouncing up and down on the pavement.

Inside the big station wagon, three wide-eyed children flew off the seats and onto the floor. The seat belt craze was still a relatively new fad as a seldom purchased extra cost option. In brief silence after the car screeched to an abrupt and unexpected stop, my mother uttered one of her rarely used vocabulary words usually called on in extreme frustration. Words we kids were sternly forbidden to repeat.

In that moment of silence in the middle of the street, Mom folded her arms on the steering wheel and the tears came. Soft sobs soon became subtle, muffled laughter. Mom had that quality about her.

She carefully moved the shift lever back into “D.” Luckily, the big behemoth continued under its own power. We arrived home without further incidents or subsequent strange noises.

For the next couple of years, the reliable wagon transported everything from camping gear to groceries and Christmas trees to Cub Scouts. It also took us on memorable family vacations including one in the summer of 1960 when we lodged at the Rose Motel in Mena, Arkansas.

Still a year or two away from buying our first television, I was enamored watching the black-and-white set in the motel room. Gazing at the news of John F. Kennedy being tagged by the Democratic Party to appear on the ballot in November against Republican nominee Richard Nixon.

My fondness for old station wagons remains to this day. Maybe one day I’ll find that ’55 Ford Country Squire wagon I’ve been longing for. Perhaps I’ll even offer my friend a ride for old time’s sake.

But I don’t think I’ll let her drive—not if backing up is required.

—Leon Aldridge

(Image above — 1958 Ford Ford Motor Company original advertising piece that today, not only boldly portrays an iconic American automotive vehicle, but also subtly reminds of a long lost lifestyle in the U.S.)

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Aldridge columns are featured in these publications: The Center Light and Champion, The Mount Pleasant Tribune, the Rosenberg Fort Bend Herald, the Taylor Press, the Alpine Avalanche,  the Fort Stockton Pioneer, the Elgin Courier, The Monitor in Naples, and Motor Sports Magazine.

© Leon Aldridge and A Story Worth Telling 2025. Excerpts and links may be used, provided full and clear credit is given to Leon Aldridge and ‘A Story Worth Telling’ with appropriate and specific directions to the original content.

Still trying to remember where …

“Take care of all of your memories, For you cannot relive them.”
— Song lyrics by Bob Dylan and The Band

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Memories. I write about them often. Because at this age, I have a lot of memories to keep up with. And possibly because that’s all I can remember.

Most amazing are moments remembered when I forget everything else. My phone. My keys. My checkbook. It will come to me in a minute, but while we’re waiting, let me share a conversation with a good friend not long ago. We talked about what we remembered as new South Ward Elementary students in Mount Pleasant. Back when Fred Flintstone was still in Bedrock kindergarten .

By chance or destiny, we arrived in northeast Texas just a few years apart; coming from opposite directions. The reminiscing was fun. But what we agreed was really the amazing part was how much we remembered about grade school.

My first-grade year was 1954 at Crockett, Texas. The small white frame structure my parents rented sat in the middle of an empty field next to the only nearby residence. Two houses not far from downtown with a long, shared dirt driveway, surrounded by woods on three sides.

We didn’t have a television, or a telephone. What we did have was the sound of rain falling on a tin roof, the smell of Mom’s morning glories covering the trellis on the front porch, and late-night crackers and milk with Dad. It was his favorite bedtime snack.

A green Studebaker was transportation for our one-car family until the fateful Sunday afternoon when Dad and the neighbor, Mr. Hooks, went fishing. Old timbers on a country bridge failed, sending them off into a dry creek bed below.

The crumpled car and my father in bandages are scary memories. He and Mr. Hooks were banged up and bruised, but otherwise, all right.

My youngest sister, Sylvia, was born in Crockett. I remember Dad showing off our newborn sibling at the hospital’s back door, where middle sister Leslie and I waited in the car. Mom in a bathrobe, ws standing behind Dad. Both beaming with smiles.

My father worked for the long gone five-and-ten-cent store chain, Perry Brothers. Small wooden crates in which china dishes were received at the store served many uses, from garage storage to creative kid’s activities. One pinnacle of playtime was the day I launched one in the creek behind our house to see if it would float.

It did.

Basking in that delightful discovery, I then talked Leslie into boarding it to see if it would still float.

It didn’t.

Thank goodness the creek was shallow.

The bungled boating caper, plus the time I talked Leslie into jumping off the roof, certain that a bed sheet was a good parachute, probably accounts for less-than-good memories of parental punishment. Mom seldom administered any, deferring that chore to Dad. But her warnings were stern enough. “You just wait until your father gets home!”

Dad was good to take me to town following his lunch break on summertime Saturdays. Clutching a quarter and a dime, I walked to the nearby theater where the two coins were ample funding for a double-feature matinee plus popcorn and a Coke.

The last of 1954 summer movies was the beginning of first grade in the basement of an old brick school building.

The quintessential teacher, whose name I don’t remember, wore gray hair up in a bun and lace-up, high-heeled shoes. We wrote 1+1=2 on black chalkboards over which hung examples of cursive writing and the obligatory portrait of George Washington. The unfinished one that renders the appearance of clouds at the bottom.

First grade was my first and last playground fight. It went down near the front steps of the old schoolhouse. I don’t remember what it was about or who won it.

I do remember thinking that I didn’t particularly enjoy it and made a mental note to never get into another exchange of fisticuffs if I could help it.

First-grade classes moved into new classrooms after the Christmas break, from the basement into the modern mid-1950s structure with lots of glass and open spaces. That’s where we stood in line for the Salk polio vaccine. It’s also where a spring tornado turned the sky black, dark as night, as we huddled behind the new green chalkboards.

We left Crockett with our memories in 1955, arriving in Seymour where we lived until 1959 when we moved to Mount Pleasant where we stated long enough to call it home. It was the last relocation my parents would make.

I could tell you about our arrival in Seymour. It was about the same time that a young entertainer named Elvis performed at the Seymour High School gymnasium.

But that’s a different memory for a different day.

Right now, I’m still trying to remember where I laid my keys five minutes ago.

—Leon Aldridge

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Aldridge columns are featured in these publications: The Center Light and Champion, , The Mount Pleasant Tribune, the Rosenberg Fort Bend Herald, the Taylor Press, the Alpine Avalanche,  the Fort Stockton Pioneer, the Elgin Courier, The Monitor in Naples, and Motor Sports Magazine.

© Leon Aldridge and A Story Worth Telling 2025. Excerpts and links may be used, provided full and clear credit is given to Leon Aldridge and ‘A Story Worth Telling’ with appropriate and specific directions to the original content.

Wherever you are, Merry Christmas

“Just remember, the true spirit of Christmas lies in your heart.”
— Santa Claus, “The Polar Express” 2004 movie

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A five-year-old was feeling Christmas magic at his grandparent’s house in Northeast Texas some years ago.

Home for his family back then was somewhere in West Texas. Maybe it was Ballinger, or Muleshoe. Might have been Pampa. One of those places where he made childhood memories before his father decided the family would stop moving after settling in Mount Pleasant.

Visions of St. Nick swirled in his mind as he snuggled close to his grandmother while she read a bedtime story that early 1950s Christmas Eve. “You better go to sleep before ‘ol Santy comes,” she said. “If he sees you’re awake, he’ll just keep on going.”

Suddenly, he heard something. Was that the “ding-ding” of a bicycle bell coming from the vicinity of the living room? “Oh no,” he thought, “Santa can’t see me awake.”

“He’s here,” Granny said. In a flash, she turned off the bedside lamp. The child clinched his eyes tightly shut hoping that if Santa did peep into the bedroom, he would surely appear to be fast asleep.

A few years later in Mount Pleasant, the youngster had learned the secret of how Santa managed to know where to deliver Christmas gifts. And always to the right house. But as the oldest sibling, his duty was to help preserve the legend of Santa for his younger sisters.

Christmas 1945 “V-Mail” telegram my father sent to my mother in Pittsburg, Texas while he was spending Christmas in Europe with the U.S. Army 276th Combat Engineers.

The night sky was fading to gray with the Christmas dawn, No one was stirring when he was awakened by a small voice at his bedroom door. “You think Santa has come yet,” his baby sister whispered?

“I don’t know,” he said. “Let’s go sneak a peek and see.”

All three siblings looked as he quietly opened the living room door just enough for a glimpse of Christmas splendor. His sisters oohed and awed at colors sparkling like shiny magic on the aluminum tree around which were neatly placed gifts from Santa.

He smiled. It was Christmas magic in the early morning dawn.

“I think he has been here,” he whispered to his sisters. “We better get back in bed until Mom and Dad wake up.”

Another twenty years later on a Christmas Eve in Center, he sat in front of the fireplace waiting to make sure both of his children were sound asleep. He had tucked them in bed earlier, using the same line on them that his grandmother had used on him when he was their age.

“You better go to sleep so Santa will come.”

Hoping they had asked for their last drink of water and quizzed him for the last time about mailing their letters to the North Pole, he pulled Santa’s gifts from their hiding place in the closet. Hot chocolate in one hand and tools in the other, he was ready for “Some Assembly Required” duty.

“Just 9:00 o’clock,” he noted with a smile. “This won’t take long.”

About midnight, the Little Suzy Homemaker play kitchen lacked only one “insert tab A into slot 4 and secure with one #6 bolt and one #9 nut.”

“That wasn’t bad, “ he thought. “Only had to take it apart and start over twice.”

All that remained was a tricycle, a doll stroller, and half a dozen small items to wrap. “Just enough time to make a pot of coffee,” he thought. Before experiencing the magic of another early Christmas morning in a child’s eye.

In the decades of Christmas Eves following that all-nighter, he saw a variety of Christmas magic. Like the snowy Yule spent with his family in the mountains of Taos, New Mexico. And the Christmas morning he and his teenage kids rode new bicycles around county roads on Lake Murvaul.

This Christmas, even as he commits words to digital bits and bytes, he’s not sure where he’ll be Christmas Day. So many friends and family from his Christmas past are gone now. And his children live away with families of their own. But one thing’s for sure. Wherever he is and whatever he is doing, the seasonal magic from decades of Christmas joy will fill his heart every Christmas present.

So, I wish … I mean, he wishes for you as well, that the magical blessings of Christmas fill your heart. Not just at Christmas, but throughout the year.

Wherever you are. Merry Christmas.

—Leon Aldridge

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Aldridge columns are featured in these publications: The Mount Pleasant Tribune, the Rosenberg Fort Bend Herald, the Taylor Press, the Alpine Avalanche,  the Fort Stockton Pioneer, the Elgin Courier, The Monitor in Naples, and Motor Sports Magazine.

© Leon Aldridge and A Story Worth Telling 2024. Excerpts and links may be used, provided full and clear credit is given to Leon Aldridge and ‘A Story Worth Telling’ with appropriate and specific directions to the original content.

Slowing the pace of life

“Uninvited, he sat down and opened up his mind,
On old dogs and children, and watermelon wine.
— song lyrics by Tom T. Hall

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Those finer things in life celebrated in song by the American singer-songwriter nicknamed “The Storyteller” admittedly possess powers soothing to the soul. But my most trusted tool for slowing the pace of life was, for many years, something a little different.

My grandfather’s rocking chair.

I never knew where the piece of furniture came from. It was relegated to the front porch before I was born. It’s origin was one of many things I’ve wished I’d quizzed my grandmother about. I had a long list of questions for her, but many remained forever unanswered that October day in 1993 when she closed her eyes for the last time.

The plain wooden rocker with arms and a homemade red oil cloth seat cushion resided on their front porch along with the high-back cane rocker Granny called hers.

The chairs appeared to beckon them to the front porch every evening after supper with some sort of magical power. When John Kennedy occupied the White House, he taunted the value of rocking chairs as therapeutic for back problems. But for my grandparents, I think it was more than that.

My father’s parents settled in northeast Texas long before Kennedy was president. In fact, when they moved into their Cypress Street residence in Pittsburg on Halloween night, 1930, Herbert Hoover was in his second year as president. The railroad brought them to Camp County. Granddaddy worked for the Cotton Belt. He retired in the early 1950s when steam locomotives were still an occasional sight.

So, it’s probably not just coincidence that the small white frame house where they lived most of their life was across the street from the railroad tracks. Or the fact that his chair was perfectly positioned to spot approaching locomotives.

Rocking, talking, and occasionally singing hymns like “Blessed Assurance” were regular activities every evening. And waiting for a passing train when Granddaddy would glance at his pocket watch to see if it was on time. If not, he might declare something like, “The 6:15 is running a little behind this evening.”

My grandfather died in 1967, and with his death, regular after-supper porch sitting also ended. My grandmother lived in the house for another 26 years before joining him, but I don’t recall her ever using the rockers again.

Infrequent use and dirt daubers started were taking their toll on them by the time Granny moved the chairs inside to the living room.

After she died, my sisters and I out picked a few things for memories. Both rocking chairs went to my Hill Country back porch, where they once again waited for evening company.

My occasional “rocking and thinking spells” were mostly monitoring Hill Country sunsets. But when north winds caused Granddaddy’s old rocker to sway gently on some days, I saw him occupying his chosen chair. I was certain more than once that I caught a glimpse of a curl of pipe smoke rising above the brim of his hat.

The first night they spent at my house, I settled into his chair and began to rock. I relaxed and wondered. Did the old chairs really possess magical powers? Maybe, but my grandparents’ life seemed much more manageable at “front porch time.” My rocking was more intense when I consulted the chair to work out details of earning a living, rearing children, and other mindful matters.

Things like, “Dad, I need a new dress for the banquet,” or “Dad, the pickup’s making a funny noise and steam’s coming out from under the hood,” were always met with the same answer. “Give me a half hour and meet me at the rocking chair.”

Over time, the rocker became tattered and a little worse for wear, but I couldn’t bring myself to replace it. Changing anything about the chair would change its appearance, and most likely its powers as well I feared. For that reason, both retained their “as is” condition while I continued rocking and pondering.

During a move back to Shelby County a couple of decades ago, the relic rockers suffered crippling injuries. Consequently, they were confined to storage intended to last only “a few weeks.” But I never located that rare “round tuit” to b ring the back to life. Sadly, they still rest in storage, waiting for their resurrection.

With a little spare time on my hands, the rocking chairs crossed my mind last week. Maybe it was strains of “Blessed Assurance” reminding of their wait for attention. Or perhaps it was catching “old dogs, children, and watermelon wine” on the radio.

Really, I’m thinking it was just the same song my grandparents heard when they rocked in the evenings. The one calling them from the complexities of a hectic society. Wishing for that simpler time in life they remembered.

—Leon Aldridge

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Aldridge columns are published in these Texas newspapers: The Center Light and Champion, the Mount Pleasant Tribune,  the Rosenberg Fort Bend Herald, the Taylor Press, the Alpine Avalanche,  the Fort Stockton Pioneer, and The Monitor in Naples.

© Leon Aldridge and A Story Worth Telling 2024. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Leon Aldridge and A Story Worth Telling with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.