The Penny Record (Bridge City, Tex.), Vol. 40, No. 25, Ed. 1 Wednesday, October 21, 1998 Page: 2 of 24
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’ tl, 1000 THE RECORD
Grade School Sweethearts
Commissioners
Prom Page 1
From Page 1
ilies in contrast
Above: Toddler Homer Stark enjoys an outing with
his mother, Nita Stark.
Left: Baby Becky Havens, left, with brother Tom
and sister Virginia and their mother at their home in
Echo.
remembered. Homer recalls his mother donating
"tons" of milk to local hospitals and his father
helping the community families to survive with
work, and sometimes just seeing to it that local
kids didn't have to do without the basic
necessities.
"My granddaddy, W.H. Stark, always just said
never to sell the land," Homer recounted. "He
said sell anything else you have to, if you must,
but never sell the land."
One day during the Depression, Homer
noticed an X-mark on "Grandpapa's" fence and
mentioned it.
"Grandpapa told me when men down on their
luck came through and stopped to ask for food
and help. If the family was nice to them, they
marked an X like that on the fence. Then the
next man passing by would know that here was
a place to find help," Homer explained.
In the slang of the time, the Xs were called
"sucker marks,” but Homer's grandfather wanted
it left there, so people would know that here
someone did care and would help.
Homer said his grandfather was one of the
best men he ever knew ... but that didn't stop
him and twin, Bill, from "pranking" Grandpapa
just like they did everyone else. Like the time
their grandfather bought a prize Arabian who
could "single-foot." It was his pride and joy.
The elder Stark would get up on that horse, and
it would prance around and look regal.
So Homer and Bill just naturally had to go out
before him and put a well-placed cockleburr
under the saddle. Needless to say, the horse did
a lot of things with Stark in the saddle, but
prancing wasn't one of them.
"Grandpapa got off the horse and asked which
one did it," Homer snorted, "but he never did
anything about it."
The Stark boys liked hunting, fishing,
shooting marbles, playing "shinny" and football,
basketball and swimming. They really liked
pulling pranks.
Becky, the tomboy of the Havens siblings-
Virginia, Tom, Justine and she-said her favorite
games, since they lived next to the railroad
tracks, included ducking back and forth under
the trains warming up to take off, seeing who
could go back and forth under the cars the most
times before the wheels rolled by. She and her
friends made "poppers" out of bamboo and shot
hobos as the trains went by.
"My mama said she swore I would never live
to see IS," she laughed. They also played
shinny, cops and robbers, and played in the
gravel roads that were the main streets of the
day.
Homer's pets were the neighborhood
attraction, they both related. Where the junior
high school track field now lies, off Green
Avenue between 14th and 15th, was where
Homer built a big pond. Then he and his cronies
went out to the swamps and caught alligators,
dumping them in the pond.
"There were 40 or 50 of them in there," he
chuckled.
"Yes, and he fed them LIVE chickens," Becky
added.
Homer recollected school at Anderson being
strict with no disturbances in class. Although he
did recall that the late Albert "Cowboy" Adams
once rode his horse right into the schoolhouse.
"Helen Carr, the principal, got all over him,"
Homer laughed. "That woman was one of the
best educators I have ever known. She was
special to all the kids." .i
Outside of getting into the usual things, Becky
said she was a pretty good kid. However, with
• two to get into things, Homer and Bill continued
their tricks.
"Bill and me and Ernest Reeves were playing
out in the yard, and we had a whole bunch of
fireworks," Homer remembered, "and a car came
down the road. We chunked a big handful in the
car window. It set the car on fire. We took off
running.
"The car was owned and driven by the police
chief," he laughed. "He couldn't catch us, but he
knew who we were. My father ended up paying
for that police car, I guess.
"Me and Bill paid, too!" he said. "Mother
would spank, but she didn't hurt. When Daddy
took that strap out, we were real sorry for
whatever we had done."
Homer's dad had him thrown in jail... twice.
"Neither time was my fault,” he remarked. "In
1939 Daddy was sending the Drum and Bugle
Corps to competition by train. I didn't want to
go on the train, so I followed the bus in my car.
Eventually, I thought the bus was just going way
too slow, so I took off, went about 20 miles and
stopped to get a burger.
"Jack Hamby, the bus driver, decided I took
off to Chicago on my own. He called my daddy.
My daddy called the police," he related, "and the
next thing I knew, there was a policeman there
asking me who I was, if that was my car and
telling me I was under arrest."
"That jail was full of drunks, and we had to
fight in there," he said. "A big colored man said
he'd help me and he was stacking 'em like
cordwood."
After a Texas Ranger got him out of the
lockup, Homer protested to his dad, "You had
me arrested for something I didn't do. Now I'll
NEVER be President of the United States!"
Becky said her biggest problems growing up
were violin lessons.
"Mama made us take those lessons from Old
Man Hess. He would hit my hand with that
bow. Daddy and Homer both said my playing
sounded like two cats with their tails tied
together thrown over a wire," she laughed, "but I
did love the saxophone. I loved to hear violin
music, but I sure didn't want to have to play it.”
Tomboy that she was, Becky would climb a
big sycamore and sit up there for hours, escaping
her mother’s punishment for misbehavior.
"I was like a pole sitter," she grinned. "I
wasn't coming down."
But when her father arrived home and asked
why she was up there, she confessed she was
waiting for him so she wouldn't get a spanking.
He brought her down ... and spanked her. Her
pole-sitting days were done.
She did manage to get into her share of
mischief, she admitted.
Like the time when her older sister's boyfriend
came to visit from Louisiana. Becky, 11 years
old then, got into his car and started it. Problem
was, she didn't know how to stop it.
"I was driving back and forth over the railroad
tracks yelling for help," she said. "I had to go
around the block a few times because a train was
coming, and I didn't know where the brakes
were."
Finally her sister's boyfriend jumped in and
stopped the thing. "They told me not to do that
again, because I might have hit a train," she said.
Getting in dutch was commonplace for
Homer. He told of the time he and best friend
Dick Jackson, later head of DuPont-Orange,
were out shooting rabbits in Colorado.
"We were gonna (drive) over this bridge," he
said. "I was going along, looked down as we
crossed the bridge ... and there was no bridge!
"It had been there the year before," he
laughed. "I didn't even look. I piled that Model
T up!"
A few weeks later they were driving on a
narrow mountain road when a lady coming
toward them took up more than her share of the
roadway, and off they went, down the side of the
mountain.
"The car rolled a couple of times,"Homer
reported. "Dick has stitches from landing in
barbed wire. My cousin, Raymond, was in back.
The jack came up and hit him in the back of the
head on the last roll. It just knocked him out.
"It didn't hurt me at all," he said.
The Hudsons next door, Shon and Rona, were
Becky's pals and playmates. They were
unwitting, if not unwilling, accomplices to many
of her peccadilloes.
"We were just a couple of blocks from St.
Mary's," Becky said of her neighbors and
herself. "I had to go into confession and told
Shon and Rona to come on, I had something to
show them.
"There were streetwalkers in the town," she
laughed, "and after I went into confession, I
parked us on the back row, and as those women
got louder, we could hear all the details of their
lives they told Father George in confession.
"Rona and Shon were bug-eyed," she
recounted. "Then here comes Fr. George. He
said, 'Rebecca, you've been to confession, but
you've gotta go again after you kneel at that altar
an hour and say this and that prayer.'
"Fr. George took me home afterward and told
Mama," she concluded.
There wasn't a tree tall enough in Orange
County to save Becky from the spanking she got
THAT day.
See Part Two of the Starks' tale next week.
Like a
good neighbor
State Farm
is there.®
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Bill Nickum
1930 Texas Avenue
Bridge City. Texas
735-3595
Mitle I’lMIII
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Pete
Sterling,
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3127 N. 16th. St
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During the afternoon session, commissioners voted to make the
employee holiday Dec. 23 and 24.
Despite this. Commissioner Cok declared his intention to take an
informal poll of oounty employees to see if they would prefer
having the day after the day after Christmas off rather than the day
before the day before the holiday off.
Thibodeaux said, “If he finds out that all the employees want the
26th off, we can always go back and change it. Christmas is more
than a year away right now.”
County holidays for 1999 at this time are: Friday, Jan 1, Monday,
Jan. 18, Monday, March 1, Friday, April 2, Monday, May 31,
Monday, Sept. 6, Thursday, Nov. 11, Thursday and Friday, Nov. 25
and 26, Thursday and Friday, Dec. 23 and 24, and Friday, Dec. 31.
In other business Monday, commissioners were informed by
assistant county attorney Connie Wilhite that a major lawsuit filed
by former employee Vera Bacon against the county had been
thrown out.
Vera Bacon was employed by the Orange County Sheriff’s
Department in the jail.
Following her termination, she filed suit in federal court alleging
sexual discrimination and harrassment as well as retaliation as the
cause for her termination.
According to Wilhite, “The county alleged she was terminated
because she fell asleep while guarding a prisoner at Baptist
Hospital-Orange leaving her gunbelt exposed to an unshackled
prisoner.”
Judge Joe Fisher issued a summary judgment in favor of Orange
County and dismissed the charges.
Judge Fisher is currently presiding over motions for dismissal in
a similar case against Jefferson County.
In that case, the jury awarded the plaintiff $750,000. Jefferson'
County is attempting to have the judgment reversed.
/
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WELCOME FRIENDS
1597 Texas Avenue
[Bridge City • 735-9197
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The Penny Record (Bridge City, Tex.), Vol. 40, No. 25, Ed. 1 Wednesday, October 21, 1998, newspaper, October 21, 1998; (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1170006/m1/2/?q=hamilton+county: accessed July 17, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; .