January 8, 2014 (Wednesday)
Today’s date, January 8, is a date my grandfather taught me to remember. It is the date of my mother’s birth in Lufkin, Texas in the year 1912. It also became the date of her funeral service in Houston in 1990.
Mother’s father, John Forest Lowe, was born in Donaldson, Arkansas January 13, 1882, and her mother, Mary Gladys Ross, was born in Leon County, Texas, November 3, 1885. As a small child, she moved with her parents to Lufkin in a covered wagon. My mother’s father went to work for the Southern Pacific Railroad with a job that required living in homes furnished by the railroad up and down the railway system in East Texas. One of those homes was in Lufkin, where my mother was born.
My mother and father met in Humble, Texas, one of the towns served by the railroad. His father had moved to Humble from California in 1915. His birthplace was Worthington, Minnesota, where he grew up and married a girl, Annie Fisher, across the headwaters of the Mississippi River in River Falls, Wisconsin. They were living not far from there in Prescott, Wisconsin, when my father was born March 27, 1907. My father’s dad (first name, Clinton, after his father’s home town in New York, and middle name, Stone, his mother’s maiden name) moved first to Colorado, where his older brother lived, then to California, where his younger brother lived, and finally to Humble, Texas. Annie’s father, John Fisher, a wounded (at Chancellorsville) veteran who fought for Ohio in the Civil War, lived with them until his death.
My mother descended from Scotch, Irish and Scotch-Irish people and my father from German and Dutch folks. Of course, English, too, and who knows what else. That’s the way it is with us Americans. They married in 1930 and divorced in 1941.
Strange how many memories can be stirred up by remembering a birthday. There’s a lot more to say, but this is a blog–not a book. Besides, I can see you yawning, so it’s time to say, “the end.”