My Quenrencia is two places – One, Navasota, Texas, which lies 75 miles northwest of Houston, Texas, and 25 miles east of Bryan, Texas, and the home of my father, Arthur Gregg Horlock. He lived in a large home at the end of Washington Street, the main street of Navasota. (It is still there with a sign, “Horlock House, Grimes County Heritage Association”).
His father, Robert A. Horlock, and his mother, Agnes White Horlock, had 3 sons and 5 daughters. One son, Bobby, and one daughter, Emma, were born to Robert’s first wife, Ella, who died. Robert Horlock had an ice factory, a cotton gin, and 3 or 4 other industries. He was called “Colonel” in later years. He had been in the South’s blockade runner on a ship as Captain’s Boy at age 12.
My father, Arthur, a handsome young man with no college education, came to Houston to work at the Texas Company as an accountant.
My mother, Lillie Rose Fisher, was a beautiful girl, the youngest daughter of 9 children of Charles N. Fisher and Elizabeth Ann Upsher Fisher, who came to America from Surrey, England, and after traveling with the lumber business chose to settle in Houston, Texas. Lillie, a young lady with curly brown hair, blue eyes and a friendly disposition, graduated from Ole Central High in Houston. Lillie and Arthur fell in love and married on April 28, 1908, in a wedding with 8 bridesmaids at Christ Church in downtown Houston on Texas Avenue. The wedding picture I have of those young ladies in old fashioned dresses reminds me of a picture of the Flora Dora Girls.
The wedding in all its frilly details and handsome setting pictured my mother as a beautiful queen, a height of clothes and beauty she never attained again in all her life.
After the wedding Arthur and Lillie went to Navasota to live with Robert and Agnes and Gladys and other children in the large homestead. In 1909 on May 14, I was born in the large home. My name is Lillian Elizabeth Horlock Illig.
My mother and father moved from the big house of my grandfather into a cottage. I remember the day I started to kindergarten. I was 4 years old. It was a momentous day. First, I dressed myself in tan rompers. This made me feel good because I thought I was now a big girl. I could button down the front of my rompers by myself. First, my mother would have to comb and curl my hair, but it was wonderful to know I was now so smart. But over this feeling I dreaded going to kindergarten. I would have to leave home, leave my mama and daddy and baby brother, Fisher, who was only 1 year old. His round face and white curls resembled grandpa Fisher so much that his name became Fisher and took the place of his given name, Arthur Gregg Horlock, Jr., for the rest of his life went outside and saw the group of children going with me to kindergarten and there was my next door neighbor, Lee McGinty. He had taught me how to sucker his tomato plants. I loved the pungent fragrance when I broke the sucker from the stem.
It was a pretty day, the beginning of summer. We would probably be able to go barefooted pretty soon. My mother always made me wash my feet in cold water, first. The group of children started walking along the sandy path. I hurriedly kissed my mama and daddy goodbye and joined the others. In those days, we didn’t have to worry about traffic because there were no automobiles. Everyone walked. No grownups accompanied us; it was only a few blocks away. We ambled along. I kept telling myself not to cry, to be brave. Just think, I had dressed myself; I would be back home very soon.
Then we came to a fence. Several large dogs came running towards us, jumping against the fence and barking ferociously. It was terrible; I remember it to this day. We finally came to the kindergarten house.
As we went in the back door of the kitchen, a warm spicy smell engulfed us and we saw Mary Pearl, the black, loving cook handing us gingerbread cookies. Now we felt safe and happy. We went upstairs and spent the morning coloring yellow bananas and red apples and pasting them in a book. I surreptitiously watched the boy sitting by me put paste in his mouth. I thought “How awful!”
In those days we called negroes “colored people”. We had no feeling of animosity against them. I had little colored people to play with. I had one to watch me and Fisher had one to watch him. We played games together. I remember one saying or game they talked about “people were buried and their hair stuck out of the ground”. This really frightened me, so much that I still remember it.
When my mother had to go off with Fisher, she would let me go over to black Elsa Mae’s house. I loved to go there. She had a big sandy backyard, and I loved to smell the catfish frying for lunch. Colored people’s houses were not far from ours.
Looking back, I wonder how my mother felt in a country place after living in the city. I remember she had a big pig in our back yard. I would go out and help her feed it. You make funny noises like “sucky, sucky” as you pet them. Then when the pig died, mama felt sad.
One time mama told me how much she missed her family and how lonesome she felt when the Southern Pacific train came through at midnight and blew its lonesome- sounding whistle.
I remember how Fisher and I would stand on the corner of our cottage and wait for daddy to come home from work. (He worked with his father and his older brother, Bobby, at the Ice and Soda Factory.) Sometimes daddy would come home with Walter Boone. They looked alike from the distance, except for one thing–Walter wore a patch over one eye, so we could tell which was daddy.
In later years, Walter Boone, Jr., came to Rice at the same time I did and I knew him through the years.
One time daddy took me with him on the train on business. My mother had me all dressed up and my hair curled. Daddy was very proud to take my hand and put me on the train and I was very thrilled and excited to go with him. I suppose he was going up and down the nearby towns to solicit ice and other commodities my Grandfather Horlock had.
Although Navasota was a little town, the townspeople all dressed up very much to go to church. They entertained with parties and had delicious food. They did more of this sort of entertaining than we city folk did. My Grandmother Horlock came to Houston to buy her clothes at Everett Buelow.
I don’t remember much about our interior in the cottage except one piece of furniture, a china cabinet. Mama’s cut glass wedding presents filled it and one night we had the preacher to dinner. Mama made a walnut cake with burnt-sugar icing. It was put in the cabinet and forever after the cabinet smelled like burnt-sugar icing!!!
For the rest of my life I thought about my grandma and grandpa in that big house and my special family, my mother and daddy and Fisher in our cottage. That was my Querencia No. 1. My parents and brother and my four grandparents formed a loving foundation for me. I felt secure against anything that might happen.
I felt so secure that I never had any desire to look up family history and family trees. These 4 grandparents and my family were so important to me that I feel terribly sad when I think of my granddaughter, Elizabeth, who is an adoptee from Gladneys. My son, Dale and his wife, Sandra Illig, adopted Elizabeth and Carl Philip when they were babies. Elizabeth, now 15, has written a sad letter saying, “I love my mother and father, but I feel awful to think I’ll never know my real birth mother.”
MY QUERENCIA II
We moved to Houston to live with grama and grampa Fisher. I don’t know much about the reason we moved, but later I learned that my father did not fare well with his older brother and father; he got the smaller end. I suppose he went to work with the same large insurance company in Houston he was with formerly. Later he worked for the Texas Company.
The family home at this time, a large two-story house, took the corner of Baker Street (later West Drew) and what was later Waugh Drive. Ditches lay on both sides of the shelled streets. A 6′ fence separated front from back. Tall banana trees grew against the fence. I remember playing with a friend, Gladys Baron, and taking cold biscuits with strawberry preserves (the smell of strawberry preserves always reminds me of Baker Street) out beneath a banana tree to have a picnic. Then we buried a dead butterfly. The dirt was very shelly. The kind of earth I lived in always remained in my memory. The ground seemed covered in shells.
I shall never forget that first Christmas. I must have been 5 years old. You can imagine how many people came. Clarence was the only one unmarried. Charlie and his family lived in Liberty, Texas, so that left 7 children, each with a spouse and children. Bessie, the oldest (the one who was born in England) had 9 children of her own. All came with presents for all the rest. Each family gave gifts to everyone. Someone dressed up like Santa Claus. The dinner table held all the grownups first and the children second. I remember looking at the dessert table with all those cakes and pies and ambrosia (mixture of fresh oranges and coconut).
Today when no one cooks (I hear a lot of women say they never cook), I cannot understand that. I cooked meals for my children and husband and then for my husband alone when the children left the nest over a period of 62 years, and I am still cooking. I lost count of the meals after 5,000. It’s hard to imagine the time and energy it took to prepare the food and buy the gifts for that Christmas, but it was a loving task.
This kind of celebration went on every year for me with the exception of cutting down on the amount of gifts given, until I grew up, married and had a daughter, Elaine. When Elaine was 5 years old, after one of those Christmases, she got very sick. My husband, Carl, an only child without any grandparents and only one parent left, put his foot down and said, “No more Christmas night celebrations. It’s too much.” So never again did we go to Christmas family gatherings. The result was that our children did not know their cousins and great uncles and aunts. Their querencias do not have lots of people like mine did.
While at this home, two unusual things occurred. The first was Granma and Granpa Fisher went back to England to see their family and also the Coronation of George V. All these years I never knew that Granma had written a diary of the trip. Dorothy Fisher, my cousin, found out I was writing and sent it to me. Carol has it now. The only thing I remember about it was Granpa brought each of us cousins a cup with the picture on the sides of the King, Queen and the Prince.
The second thing that happened was the 1915 storm. Being in a huge house, we felt the house shaking. We coudl tell because the plates were falling off the rail around the wall.
In those days it was the style to have a rail on the dining room wall where decorative plates were placed. Every few minutes we heard “Bang” and another plate left the wall. Finally, Granpa said, “We have to go. We’ll walk down to Mrs. Freestone’s one-story house. Hers is the first one on the other side of the vacant lot.”
Daddy held me; mother held Fisher; Granma Fisher walked alone but held on to Grandpa. Granpa held Elizabeth, my cousin, who was staying with us while her mother took her father to West Texas to try to get him well. He had T.B., which was rampant in those days.
We were wrapped up against the wind and rain. I remember peeping out of the blankets wrapped around me to see the hard rain. It was hard to walk against it for my mother, but I felt snug and secure. In fact, I thought it was fun and exciting. We got safely to the cottage and Mrs. Freestone welcomed us in and served hot coffee. I don’t remember any more, but the interesting thing that happened was that Mrs. Freestone turned out to be my future husband’s Aunt Marie. She lived in this cottage with her two brothers after her husband left and she divorced him. Even to this day we own the old cottage. It has a pretty glass in the front door. It is on West Drew and we never have any trouble renting it.
The next thing I knew was living with Granma and Granpa Fisher at the home on McKinney, 416, one block west from the library. Many years later the family sold this house and in it’s space was built the new part of the library, but we lived there until I graduated from Rice in 1930. Living so close to town, Daddy walked to work. We walked to Christ Church and later when I went to Central High School, I walked there, too.
I was six when we first moved to McKinney and started to school in the first grade at a brand new second, Taylor School. It was seven blocks from our home, and I walked to school usually with a group of neighbors. I remember my mother made me wear union suits in winter, and the neighbors would make fun of me, but I didn’t let it bother me. I liked union suits because they were so warm.
I remember we waited outside Taylor School or in the front hall until the bell rang, then we got in line and marched in while a piano played. A feeling of orderliness prevailed. The principal was a tall, dignified spinster, Miss DeChalmes. I remember I’d be tapping my fingers on my desk and Miss DeChalmes’ long fingers would come down over my hand and stop my tapping.
My mother was always on hand at any kind of meeting, or P.T.A. and consequently I was favored with parts in the productions we put on in the school auditorium at the morning opening gathering. I remember I was Mother Goose. Then I remember being a fairy all dressed up in a stiff tutu with golden shoes on my feet. I’ll never forget the smell of banana which we used to mix with the gold paint for the shoes.
We had a brand new school and everything was clean and pretty. The cafeteria in the basement was especially nice. My favorite lunch was a big bowl of chili and a real good hard roll for 5 cents. Most of the time I took my lunch. I can remember the smell of oranges. They always smelled so strong after they sat in a sack in the locker.
Sometimes I’d have a thermos with hot cocoa, which I liked. I just didn’t like locker smells.