History

Contentedly, their horses tramped the ageless layered grassland and, at times, wove among the White Oak Bottom hardwoods, the damp brown leaves yielding to hoof and iron. Ten years old at the time, my mother Christine Hughes savored the day, as she and her older brother Charles patrolled their family’s Daphne Prairie land.

I remember my parents’ first remote control. It was me.

Keys turned in doors around Mount Vernon’s downtown square; store clerks and bankers all loosened their ties and headed home; the overalled old men on the plaza’s benches folded up their bone-handled whittling knives; and, in his shack on the plaza’s southwest corner, Bud set his Thermos of coffee down, seated himself, and proudly looked around.

The City of Mineola, along with the Mineola Historical Museum, invite the public to open the cornerstone laid at the old post office building in 1936, part of the city’s sesquicentennial celebration 10 a.m. Saturday, July 8.

The earliest movie I remember seeing at the drive-in was Fantastic Voyage. If you haven’t seen that one, it’s essentially Honey I Shrunk The Kids. Only they weren’t kids and it wasn’t a comedy.

“The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.” Thus declared Major General Gordon Granger of the Union Army on June 19, 1865, reading aloud an order of emancipation in Galveston, Texas. Now recognized as Juneteenth, the day represents for many black Americans this country’s truest celebration of freedom.

I’d ridden with an old friend to Cedar Park and checked into a motel, to spend a few days there before visiting my son Daniel and his wife Amber in New Braunfels. When the fire alarm went off that first evening, I picked up the room key and headed outside, smelling the odor of something burning on the first floor and thinking, “I guess someone just tried to light all the candles on my birthday cake at once.”

One glorious spring afternoon in 1999, Mary, our two sons and I enjoyed an early- afternoon feast on burgers “with all the fixings” just west of Tioga. The recently baled hay meadow outside Charles and Carol Shipman’s home made a wonderful spot for boys to run and play, as well as for men and boys to fly four colorful paper kites that Carol supplied.