October 3, 2016 (Monday)
Today Wanda and I would have celebrated our 63rd wedding anniversary. My friend, J. Howard Smith, pastor of the Fruitdale Baptist Church of Dallas, performed the wedding ceremony in his church parsonage. My best man got lost and could not find the place, so we were two hours or so late in starting the wedding.
Afterwards my mother and stepfather took Wanda and me out to eat at “The Pulley Bone” in downtown Dallas.
Then we started northward toward Turner Falls, Oklahoma, even though it was very late. A cold front was coming through with very heavy blinding rain and when we reached McKinney, Texas, we stopped for the night. The next morning we worshiped at First Baptist Church where Dr. Myers was pastor. Then we resumed our trip toward the falls.
We could not stay long, but it was a beautiful few days together for a honeymoon. I had to get back to my Greek class at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary at Fort Worth. Wanda had already moved to an apartment on the second floor of a residence in Cleburne, where she was teaching music in the public schools. We stopped at a hardware store on the north side of Fort Worth to buy a few things for the kitchen.
I found a job at Vandervoort’s creamery, not far from the seminary in Fort Worth. After I got off work each afternoon, I drove to Cleburne where Wanda had supper on the table. Soon we were expecting a baby, I was getting weary of school, and Wanda did not feel she could continue to teach while pregnant. A church in Lampasas called me to become their pastor and we accepted the call, moving to Lampasas at the end of 1953. Our first child, David Gregory, came to us on August 11, 1954. We remained there until the summer of 1955, when we moved back to Fort Worth and I got back in school, taking a job at the General Motors Auto Assembly plant in Arlington. After we moved back to Fort Worth, our second child, Daniel Jeffery, was born October 19, 1955.
Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary
Without reciting all the details, we moved to Briar, a comunity north of Azle, near Fort Worth, Wanda returned to teaching, the church there called us to be the pastor, and I graduated, after which we moved to Kosse, Texas to pastor the First Baptist Church. Soon after the move, our third child, Deborah Lynn, entered the world August 22, 1959.
We moved to Dallas in 1961 and our fourth child, Dianna Dale, was born there May 10, 1963. We moved to Rockport in November, 1964, and our fifth child, Dwight Forest, was born in Corpus November 4, 1966.
These are some of my memories every year when October 3 rolls around.
