Dear Elizabeth:
When I was 14 years old in 1923, my neighbor, Lucille Chadick, and I were sitting in the shade in her front yard making mud pies. It sounds incredible now in 1966. My home across the street, 416 McKinney, was a large two story house next to the city library near town. Her house was a one story white cottage with a picket fence around the front yard.
I wore a short sleeved blue and brown plaid gingham dress. (We did not know about T-shirts then). I wore my hair in a curl with a barrette hanging down my back. I remember I was making a mud pie of dark mud with the icing made of light mud. To “bake” the mud pies, we reached over to the sunny part of the sidewalk and set them down. When they were baked and dry from the blistering sun, we sliced pieces to show the dark and light.
At twelve o’clock we heard the noon whistles blowing downtown. “Lillian, come to lunch,” my Mother called to me.
My father, Arthur Horlock, worked at the Texas Company which was walking distance from our home, so he came home to lunch every day. I knew that I had to help Mother. My favorite duty was to make a salad. I loved to put canned pineapple down on a lettuce leaf, then some cottage cheese on top. Themore colors I could find, the more I liked this task. I might add a few leaves of parsley or mint or a nasturtium on top.
My home was not as nice inside as it was outside. Due to a fire, the old ancestral house had been made into a duplex. The extra parlor and the dining room had been made into bedrooms. Our dining room was a small breakfast room added onto the back, next to a small kitchen. It was adequate, but a little crowded. When I finished setting the table and making the salad, I went to the front door to greet my father, and called to my brother, who was three years younger than I. “Fisher, come to lunch.”
That afternoon the phone rang, “Is this Lillian? This is Charlie McLane. Would you like to go to the Isis to see Myrna Loy tonight?”
I answered, “I’ll go ask my Mother.”
This was the first time I was asked for a date. My mother asked, “Who is Charlie McLane?”
I answered, “He comes to the park a lot, and I play volley ball with him.”
My mother quietly hesitated a long time while I waited patiently. She asked, “Do you want to go?”
Standing on the border of being a little girl and a lady, I answered doubtfully, “I guess so.”
“Well then, tell him all right then.”
I dressed in my Sunday clothes, a beige pongee with smocking at the top and a sash and black patent leather shoes. My mother brushed my hair into a back curl and attached my barrette. Charlie came about seven. The baseball gang was playing ball in the vacant lot. The game stopped while we crossed through the diamond. We walked down Rusk Street to Main and down Main to Texas to the Isis Theater. Afterwards we had a soda at Madinds Drugstore on Main Street. Then we walked home.
At fifteen years I had the same Latin Class at Central High School as Carl IIlig. I sat on the front seat and he sat on the last seat. We never spoke. I was a friendly person, speaking to most everyone I knew in classes, but since he never spoke to me, I never spoke to him. I didn’t pay much attention to him. I knew him as the boy in the back seat who always wore a white shirt. I always wore a dress to school. I notice now (the day we picked you up at school) the girls wear shorts in summer.
Money was a subject never discussed in my presence. It was as if money was not a worry. Somehow, my mother saw to it that I looked good. She was a good seamstress, and my Aunt Edith, a widow, made a living for herself and three children by designing and sewing clothes for people who came to her home and tried on patterns in her back bedroom. I remember a neighbor turning up the hem of my dress and saying, “Lilly sews beautifully–makes such tiny stitches.”
I had only two dates in high school. When I was a junior at sixteen years, I was glad I was asked to go to the Senior Prom by a family friend, Bobby Byrnes. I knew how to dance; my father had been dancing with me ever since I was 1 1/2 years old when he taught me to jig or soft- shoe. The next year at seventeen I was especially glad to be asked to the Senior Prom by Gene Spenser.
The next big event in my life was to go to Rice. That first day was the worst. Never in my life before Rice or after did I feel as low. I had to roll my hair in 30 pigtails (1930 would be my graduation), put cold cream all over my face and “ride” a broomstick to class.
The first day of my sophomore year who should come up and speak to me…Carl IIlig. I thought to myself, “Why is he speaking to me after all this time?”
He said, “We are going to sit next to each other in Physics Amphitheater on account of our initials: H and I. That was the beginning of our paths crossing. We went together off and on during our sophomore year; finally went steady when seniors, and became engaged soon after we graduated from Rice. He had to go to Law School at the University of Texas for two and a half years while I went to work as a secretary.
First I worked for the Houston Girl Scout Headquarters for a year; then later for a Steamship Company between New Orleans and Houston. I never received a paycheck because the company failed and was taken over by a trucking company which took me on.
All this time Carl IIlig and I wrote letters to each other every day while he remained in Law School. In those days we never dreamed of calling long distance. That was taboo, cost too much. We existed on our daily letters.
This is a far cry from the modern generation’s way of calling home for the slightest reason and talking 30 minutes. We would have fainted away to waste that much money talking. To prove our love we have reams of love letters. Later, when Carl was 85, before he died, he told Elaine “I wish I had married Lillian sooner.”
Birthday Prayer
Dear Lord,
We thank you for all your many blessings you have given us this day. We thank you for the gift of caring people. We especially thank you for my Mother Moonie. We give you thanks for her life, for her health, for her gentle spirit, for her gracious and giving heart, for the smile on her face and the touch of her hand, for all her love and compassion to each person she meets on the street, in the store, in the garden, at church, or at the garden club. We thank you for her roses, and for all the flower arrangements made so beautifully and given so freely, for her pansy place cards, of course hand made: for compost, and seedlings and the tender care she gives each plant. We thank you for food she fixes for her family and friends, for the trays for Thomas, and Curlie, and for Raul, for the touch of beauty, kindness and color harmony that is always present in everything she does. We ask that you send your angels to protect her from all evil and adversity. We pray that you bless her and keep her and make your face to shine upon her and be gracious unto her and give her peace, wisdom and courage now and forever more. Amen