We arrived in San Antonio in early summer of 1921, and the rectory was not available: Baltimore again. The family spent the summer at a boarding hotel on a mountain in Kerrville, a resort area north of San Antonio. I call it a mountain because that is what the locals called it. Mother, who was used to the Rockies in Wyoming, would smile to herself at the designation. Everyone used it, however, so she adapted. That summer was a time when the planet Venus showed unusually brightly and was even visible in daylight. My father, a keen amateur astronomer, was able to pick it up and arranged a special pointing device that enabled me to see it—an occasion never to be forgotten.
During this summer my father bought the first car he ever owned, a Ford sedan. It must have been a used car because a young man, a jack-of-all-trades at the hotel, thought it needed new piston rings. Piston rings involve an almost total teardown of the engine, a complex operation. The young man persuaded Dad that he could do it and got the go-ahead. I watched every step and must have been an awful nuisance. To this day I am convinced that I could do a ring job on a 1920 Ford if there were any around. It all went so well that the young man decided to do it on his own car. That one didn't go so well. At first it overheated, and he had to repeat the whole thing.
When we finally got to San Antonio and moved into the rectory, it turned out to be a great home for kids. Everyone had his or her own bedroom, but all of us except Grandma slept out on a big second-floor sleeping porch. It was screened and equipped with rollup blinds that could be lowered to fend off the infrequent rains. In those days, long before air conditioning, south-facing sleeping porches were very desirable. They took advantage of the wonderful Gulf breeze that almost invariably came up about 9:00 pm and blew gently through the night.
My room did not have a bed, but it did have a sink and running water, ideal for the Porter Chemical set that was under the Christmas tree. The house also had a generous attic, and the attic had an old kitchen table that someone had equipped with a small vise. The whole setup provided an ideal place for experimenting and building in fields mechanical and electrical. I built a radio set on which my father and I were able to listen to a well publicized broadcast of a prizefight. It was a very simple crystal radio equipped with a set of headphones but adequate for a time when there was only one radio station. Later on, when there were several stations, I built a tunable crystal radio following instructions in a magazine, American Boy, that someone had given me for Christmas. My father was very impressed.
Shortly after we moved into our new home came the first day of school. True to the word of the Calvert School headmaster that “they did three years work in the first two years,” the powers that be started me, an eight year old, in the fourth grade. I never had any trouble with classroom work, but it was the first time that I had been exposed to baseball (softball). I noticed that I was usually the last one selected when teams were picked, but it didn't bother me particularly. At that school I met my first hamburger. A man had set up a small stand with a gas-fired hot plate in a vacant lot next to the schoolyard, but right on the property line. He had little balls of meat, about one inch in diameter, which he would flash cook by squashing them with his turner on the hot plate, turning them and squashing again, putting the meat on a soft roll, adding liberal lacings of mustard, finely chipped pickles and onions, and lots of salt and pepper, and topping it all off with the half of the soft roll that had been toasting on the hot plate. All this for a nickel! No hamburger since has ever tasted so good as that first one.
As I remember it, life at home ran along smoothly enough. I got along well with my sister Ann. For our first San Antonio Christmas we got a mechanical train with cars and a circular track. We would play for hours with the train, staging wrecks and contests of various kinds. I played with Lloyd Feldbaum who lived across the street and had a workshop in an outbuilding in his backyard. My school friend, Pleas McNeill, Jr. had a Mah Jong set. He and his parents would invite me over to play in the evenings. I often wondered at his parents' patience with those games. I raved so much about it at home that we got a Mah Jong set for Christmas. Grandma made a fourth, but somehow it wasn't quite the same as at the McNeill's, and it never caught on with my family. Goodness knows it wasn't for want of patience. I was often sick. Something about my heart, I never quite understood what. Mother and Grandma were very patient readers who spent hours reading to me when I was ill. One book that was popular was Vagabonding Around The World, written by a professor, Harry A Frank, whom Mother had known at the University of Michigan. Dad would take over for the evening, giving the day shift a rest. I learned years later that because of the heart problem the Doctor had said, “Don't get him a bicycle.” At the time I wondered, but I thought to myself “They probably can't afford one” and never complained. One result is that I never learned to ride a bicycle. I can't imagine why I didn't learn anyway, but now (at age 87) it is a little late.
Our first winter in San Antonio was unusually cold. The freezing winds from the north were known as "northers". Especially frigid ones were "blue northers." Well, that first winter we not only had blue northers, we also had snow, very unusual for San Antonio. Fresh from the north, I was the only kid in the area who owned a sled. Instant popularity.
Our second Christmas brought a wonder of wonders, an electric train. Like its mechanical cousin, our Lionel just ran around on a circular track, but with its transformer one could vary the speed and the impact of wrecks and indulge in all sorts of fantasies. The train was put away with the Christmas decorations, but the transformer was allowed to stay out and provided hours of stimulating activity at my attic workbench.
After two years in elementary school, fourth and fifth grades, I started in something new, a junior high school. Nathaniel Hawthorne Junior High was a bit longer walk than the elementary school, but the chief difference was that teachers specialized in their various subjects and the students came to them. Two classes I remember especially, Mrs. Evelt's Math and, although I cannot remember the name of the teacher, two years of Spanish. With the junior high system, we were getting ready for high school when mobility would be the order of the day. My first year there was the first year of the school. It had a fairly extensive library, and I joined the library club. We helped with shelving books and learned to bind magazines. During my last year I discovered that the library had four biographies of the great inventor Thomas Edison. I read them all.
During our time in Texas Grandfather Brotherton made his usual one-day stopovers for the first two years. During these visits I used to walk with him, and talk with him, and quiz him about the other members of his family, about my mother as a little girl and about his business. In 1924 I became aware that there were problems with the business, that Grandfather was moving to California to start a new business. He also wrote that he would no longer need his roll-top desk and was sending it to me. In due course it arrived and was installed in my room. Talk about a life-shaping experience. The desk gave me a focus for my school homework, a place to do it, and, I suppose, reinforced what was proving to be a fairly studious nature.
During our four Texas summers we went to the Farm once. There we renewed family bonds and enjoyed the outdoor life with its boating, fishing, and swimming. It is strange how, after all these years, the Farm looms so large in my recollections. Grandfather had a large impact on the lives of his grandchildren and most of it is focused on our years together at his farm.
Along about 1922 or 1923, I think, I began to feel that I might be a little old for Sunday school. My father suggested that I might like to be an acolyte, the person who carries the cross at the head of the procession as the choir and clergy enter or leave the church. I liked the idea a lot and started right in. At about that age I would normally have started the lessons that lead to confirmation as a member of the Episcopal Church. I was about to start these lessons when, early in 1925, news came that my father had been elected bishop of the Diocese of Olympia, that part of the Church, which is located west of the Cascade Mountains in the state of Washington. Bishop of a diocese is a permanent assignment; we would be moving to Seattle and would live there, at least until my father retired. I decided to pass on the confirmation classes until we moved to Seattle and my father could confirm me. Since he decided to have his consecration service in San Antonio, I got to be the acolyte who carried the cross at his consecration service.
The year 1924 had marked a very special event in our family. The long expected baby, born on January 15, turned out to be my brother John Arthur. About a week after the big day I remember an ambulance pulling up to the house and attendants carrying Mother and baby up the front steps and into a bedroom, standard practice in those days. When we took the train to Seattle (by way of Detroit and, perhaps the Farm) I remember the train being met in St. Louis by a uniformed employee of the Walker-Gordon Dairy with eight or ten sterilized bottles of milk for the baby, a service they provided nationally for travelers. All six Hustons arrived in Seattle with a house ready to be moved into.
Copyright © 2002 by
Wilber B. Huston.
All rights reserved.
Inquiries to
Herb Huston
<herb_huston@yahoo.com>.