a little more about it
March 17, 2010 (Wednesday)
Towns I lived in after Houston. Previous blogs have discussed Marshall, Waco, Fort Worth, Lampasas, and back to Fort Worth. I only touched briefly on Lampasas, so let me backtrack a little and discuss it a little more.
When we arrived in Lampasas, the state was in a drought that was going to get worse each year. I had visited Lampasas a few years earlier while still a college student. I’m glad I got to see the countryside before the drought, because it did not look the same. The summer of 1954 was the hottest I had ever seen, when our thermometer went up to 118 one day. As I recall, the drought lasted about seven years.
We lived in the church parsonage next to the church. Here’s a picture of Wanda and David in front of the house.View image
I forgot to mention something important yesterday. I went back to the seminary for one semester in the spring of 1955, driving the 370 mile round trip twice each week with my dear friend, Gene McCombs, who was pastor at the School Creek Baptist Church near Lampasas. We took his car on Tuesday and mine on Thursday, or vice versa. I took six 2-hour courses, which turned out to be difficult, because of the assigned outside work for six courses. Keep in mind that I was a full-time pastor, so it was hard to keep up, but I tried. So I got 12 more credits at the seminary while I was pastoring the church at Lampasas. How could I have forgotten?
My car cratered on one of those trips. It was a 1950 Nash Ambassador. I had traded for it when the church called me, because the car I had (1941 Mercury) was a ten-years-old repo (I think it was a repo from the junk yard) and not in very good shape from day one. But I was just a kid at the time and didn’t know better. It did serve me, however–taped windows, burned wires, smoky engine and all–for two years. The Nash was a big, comfortable car, but it threw a rod in Granbury, and the mechanic who towed it home for me neglected to make an adjustment that caused the transmission to burn up, too. So I suddenly had no car. I traded the Nash for a 1951 Styleline 4-door Chevrolet, with a Powerglide transmission, which I had for the next four and one-half years. Here, with Wanda and David, is the car when we got it. View image