My Bampa's birthday

My Bampa and me

I have been thinking a lot about my Bampa lately and today is his birthday, May 17, 1894. He was born, Horace Burleson Armstrong, in Buda, TX, a still small town just south of Austin. His mother died when he was 2 yrs. old and his father remarried a woman who hated children. He would talk about how when he was still very little and have accidents in his bed, she would wrap him up in that sheet and beat him. [Long before child protective services.]

So, at the young age of 12, he left home for the big, bustling city of San Antonio where he was able to find work of all sorts. One of his favorite jobs was teaching people how to drive those new fandangled automobiles, after self-teaching himself. By the age of 14, he had saved up enough money to bring his two sisters to come live with him in a boarding house.

After serving in WWI, he met and married my grandmother ( by selling her Daddy a car), who came from a large German family in Karnes City, 54 south of San Antonio. Her Daddy, Bumbo, owned a large amount of land and gave each of his children large parcels to farm. For awhile Bampa moved the family to Tampico, Mexico where he worked for Gulf Oil Co., but my Grandmother was so homesick for her family that they returned to the farm.

He became a dairy farmer, getting up in the dark of night to deliver milk throughout the countryside. Mother remembers that he always had half-pint bottles for the small Mexican children who would follow the truck begging for milk.

During WWII, he served on the local selective service board, an unpopular task. It was this board that decided who in the community would be signed up to go to war. On one particular occasion, he and the board tapped a particular young man from a Mexican family. The family fought it, as they said they needed him home to help provide for the family but the board stood firm. After several nights of being awakened by gun shots at his home, Bampa saddled up, rode over to the family's house, with his gun loaded and ready and announced, "If it's killing you're after, let's get to it but leave my family alone!" The family backed down and there were no more pot shots at the house.

I spent all my summers with my grandparents. I loved it. One of my favorite memories is when I was about 7 or 8 yrs. Bampa woke me up about 5a, boosted me up on top of a fresh-picked wagon load of cotton, with a red straw hat perched on my head, and we rode into town to the cotton gin with me feeling like I was on top of the world. We were on top of my world!

He also taught me to play checkers and then bragged to everyone that I beat him most of the time, even though he wasn't letting me win. And I loved riding with him in his red pickup. We would go into town and he'd buy me a coke, you know one of those little mini-bottles. He got such a kick out of the fact that as a toddler I knew the right way to drink out of a bottle, top lip down instead of wrapped around the opening. But then he thought just about anything I did was something special.

Now we've come full circle and I'm a Nana and at least for a little while longer, my grandboys think just about anything I do is special. ;-}

Last year, I visited Karnes City for the first time in many, many years as there is no family living there anymore. Here I am, standing in the middle of MY cornfield, land I inherited from my parents, which belonged to Bampa. I am so proud to carry on the tradition of owning farm land in TX.

And I visited the home place, that I thought was so enormous as a child but is actually a very small stone house. It was built in the same spot where a truly large family compound of a home existed before it burned to the ground in 1936. And I looked quietly a the large oak tree just outside the front door, facing the main highway, where my grandfather, at the young age of 65, put a gun to his head in a place where he would be sure to be found.

I visited my grandparents graves, a deserted graveyard that has sadly been neglected because there are no more family members left to care for it. I tenderly pulled away the worst of the weeds from their graves.

He suffered from depression, severe diabetes and bouts of drinking (which I never, ever saw) and after we had all been there for a visit, he got up one morning, had breakfast with my grandmother's sister and husband, went to town for a haircut, arranged all of his business papers neatly on the desk and took his life. What's really strange, is that I vividly remember the last time I waved goodbye to him and feeling so sad. I was only 10 yrs. old, sitting on his bed, in front of a window, waving as his red pick up drove out of sight.