We came to Texas from Germany in 1970. Fort Hood had recently been described in a national column as the place where you would insert the hose, should the world need an enima. Our initial impressions seemed to agree with that. The story of our arrival and the trials that went with it are subject for another time...today we talk about something else.
In the late sixties and early seventies, Ft Hood and many other places were dumping grounds for soldiers who were returning from Vietnam. I think the rule was that if you had less than six months to go on your enlistment when you got back, you got an early release and just went home. But if you had seven or more, you had to go somewhere and finish out your time. It was an awful time, Armily speaking, Stateside posts had no money for training, there really wasn't much to do at all. The strain on the community was terrible. There were so many acts of violence and thefts and other crimes and incidents that if Ft Hood had been a city, it would be the city with the highest crime rate in Texas. Another stress it put on the community was in the housing market. Houses and apartments for rent were hard to find and if you did find one, nine times out of ten the landlord wouldn't rent to youl
We found a fairly nice trailer at the top of the hill on Hwy 90 in Lampasas. Neither of us had lived in a trailer before, took some getting used to. It was November, a time when Central Texas can't make up its mind if it wants to be temperate or wintery. The water feed to the trailer was a garden hose, which froze solid often...I ruined a perfectly good heating pad getting that undone. The wind rocked the trailer and when it was cold, there were warm spots and cold spots all through it. It was pretty nicely appointed and the kitchen was very usable. We had been in it for about a month, settling in pretty well. One morning, I had had CQ the night before and had gotten home about 0800. I was just dozing off when MamaCharlie woke me up and said there was a man with a truck outside and he said he was going to take our trailer to Louisiana.
The trailer was pretty new and had developed a leak in the roof shortly after arriving in Texas. The manufacturer, in Louisana, would repair the leak if the trailer was brought back to Louisana. The owner and the manufacturer had been arguing back and forth for some time and somewhere in there the owner quit making payments on the trailer until the manufacturer made good on the cost of repairs...or something like that. I was pretty sleepy when the driver explained it all to me. I may have gotten some of that wrong. What I didn't get wrong was the fact that this driver was going to take the trailer back to Louisiana and we couldn't go along for the ride. We were distraught. It had taken us weeks to find this place and now we had to get out of it RIGHT NOW. The driver was feeling awkward, he was a pretty nice guy. He said he had a cousin who lived a couple towns over and he could go stay with him for the weekend, that would give us until Monday to find a place and get moved.
Right away, I got dressed and went to the old retired judge who rented the trailer to us. He wasn't the owner, but like a realty agent or something. He was surprised to hear the trailer was leaving. I wanted to know what he planned to do about it...his plans included some time fishing and a visit to the Gentlemen's Club (Lampasas was a dry county and the only place you could buy a drink was in private clubs)...but nothing vaguely related to my problem. We didn't part as friends.
I went back to the trailer and reported to MamaCharlie on my lack of progress. As we stood outside I looked down the hill and across the highway. There was a small house on the corner and it had a U-Haul in front of it...and they were taking stuff out...not bringing stuff in. I ran across the open lots to the highway and up to the porch. There was a very attractive Texas lady on the porch watching the young couple moving out. I asked her if she was the landlady...she was...and was the house now available...it was...could I move into it...why, sure I could...and we sealed the deal right there. I told the couple moving out that they didn't need to bother with clean up or trash removal or weed cutting or anything else...I even helped them carry a few things out to the trailer.
As soon as they were gone, I took the keys, thanked the landlady, and ran to get MamaCharlie and HBW and Golf and show them our new digs. We threw a bunch of stuff in the car and drove it over, in those days it took about three trips to move everything we owned. I hadn't even seen the whole house when I sealed the deal, that's how desperate I was. I have been calling it a house. Being a stand-alone structure, that is technically what it was. But looks can be deceiving. It was a shack. It was made up of two rooms, each had its own "front door". While we were moving in a wormen pulled up with a young couple. She tried to talk us into sharing the house with them. She saw the two doors opening onto the front porch and assumed it was a duplex. It took a lot to convince her that it wouldn't work, even after she saw how small it really was inside. The first room was a living room, kitchen, dining room...the other was a bedroom and bathroom. The walls were a single board thick. Inside the framing was open, no insulation, no drywall, in fact, in a few places you could see outside between the boards. Heat was provided by gas space heaters, the old ceramic faced things that got hot and glowed and generated heat if you were within two or three feet of it. The nicest single feature of the shack was the huge claw-foot tub in the bathroom. I could fill it up and get completely submerged in it. But you had to bath fast because the water cooled down quick in winter. The roof was corrugated tin, no ceiliing, and when the hailstorms of spring came, it sounded like a serious firefight was going on. HBW loved it, he slept right through. The bed was a big old fashioned brass bed and we had a huge comforter and a home made quilt, and we were young, so we kept warm.
It came with an evaporation cooler (swamp cooler) which blew wet air on you all summer long, it was so humid that the water wouldn't evaporate, but it was too hot not to run it. One big sink in the kitchen...about the size of a utility sink they used to put in garages.
It sure wasn't for much. It sat in the middle of the second most bigoted place I have ever lived (Sorry Tex, Hawaii was first). I had run ins with cowboys, neighbors, sheriff and his deputies and I was sooooo glad to move out. BUT. It was the first home MamaCharlie and I had in the USA. My number two son was born while we lived there. We didn't have a phone and Fort Hood was 30 miles away. When her water broke, she put HBW in his stroller and walked into town to the Dairy Queen (a mile or so) to call me and tell me the baby was coming, then walked back to the shack to wait for me. "Tough" is way too weak a work to describe my girl. We met good friends there, were visited by good friends there, and created some wonderful memories in spite of the crap salad sandwich the rest of the world was making around us.
We went down to Fort Hood a few years ago to see Thing 1, newly arrived. While we were there we drove out to Lampasas to see the old place. Not very surprising that things had changed alot. The traffic circle was gone, roads had changed, there was a Walmart, and lots of other things. But the shack on the corner was still there...and some one was living in it. Man!
The other day our sweet Dana, LH, told MamaCharlie that they had finally torn it down to develop the area. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.