June 14, 2014 (Saturday)
Sunday is Father’s Day. Before I retired, I wrote a regular column in the church’s weekly newsletter. One of the Fathers Day articles seemed to elicit an unusually favorable response. In 2009, years later, I tried to remember what I had written and wrote a blog as an effort to reproduce it from memory. If you would like to read it, please click here. Before reading the rest of this page, please read the old blog.
The full names of my three fathers: Charlie Clinton Fake, John Forest Lowe, Sr., and Joseph Herman Heim, II.
I wrote a little something about each of my father figures, but failed to say much about Wanda’s father, Louie J. Sadler, who was a man I deeply respected. He loved his family, his home place (now in and around Lake Limestone) where he was born and where he loved to spend time, grow gardens, raise cattle, and clear land for pasture. Before the lake was built, it was bottom land for the Navasota River, with plenty of opportunities for hunting and fishing. He was a school teacher, along with his wife, Berta, and became Superintendent of Schools in Concord, Texas, and later in the Leon County Independent School District, where the schools were built between Marquez and Jewett on Highway 79. He was the first Superintendent of that district. He seldom went to church, but was a man of unquestioned integrity, whose word was his bond, and everyone knew that. He died in 1987 at 83 years of age. Miss Berta preceded him in death in 1985 at age 81. She was raised in Lovelady, Texas, and her maiden name was Holliday. Her mother’s family name was McPhail, and the McPhails came to America from Scotland.
In writing this blog, intended to be a very brief notation, I got myself started down this track so I may as well keep going…(at 82, I do love to reminisce…).
The rest of Wanda’s family, as far as I know, came from England, as did some of my forebears, but the name, “Fake,” is German, although it was spelled differently in Germany. (Even in this country, however, “Fake” was just a family name with no special meaning until the 20th Century, when the word began to be used in a different way. After their father died, my grandfather’s brothers changed their name, but he decided to let it be). My ancestors also included Scotch-Irish, Irish, and Pennsylvania Dutch. All these branches of Wanda’s family and mine finally arrived in Texas via other states, although her family came much earlier than mine. Her ancestors and relatives included Texas heroes at the Alamo and San Jacinto. My grandfather, Clinton Stone Fake, brought the name to Humble, Texas in 1915, where he lived until moving to Houston. His father was born in Clinton, New York; he was born in Worthington, Minnesota, and my father was born in Prescott, Wisconsin. And, oh yes, I was born in Houston, Texas. I was born at home so that I could be close to my mother (drum roll). Yuk, yuk..I wanna tell ya, friends…(I’ll be here all week…)…