My mother and daddy and I were driving around in our old Chevrolet looking at rent houses. Each house we looked at was worse than the last one. We would look at the newspaper clipping and scratch off another address and go on to the next house.
Daddy had been drinking: his breath filled the car and I thought about those pretty new houses he and his builder were making in Riverside Terrace. In fact, I never would go look at them when finished because I was angry we didn’t have a nice home of our own.
We had been living at McKinney ever since I was 5 and now it was run down. Uncle Charlie, Granpa’s oldest son, was the person renting the house to daddy. He never fixed the wall paper in the kitchen. It was coming away from the ceiling and things were hanging out of it. Why couldn’t we have a home? Other people had homes of their own.
I got madder and madder as we looked at rent houses. Finally I just burst out screaming and asked, “Why can’t we have a nice home of our own? You left the Texas Company and took your stocks and built nice homes for other people.” I lost my breath. My voice got choked up. I was in a twirling suck hole being pulled into it. I felt awful. The smell of whiskey enveloped me. I was beyond reason. I just began to cry and cry louder and louder. I was hysterical. I couldn’t stop crying; my mother had to slap me–but not on the face–to bring me back to normal. We drove back to McKinney.
In 1950 my husband, Carl, bought me a beautiful home. I loved every inch of it inside and outside and took care of it and grew flowers around it and was happy and thankful.