My dad was born in 1910. Obviously he’s not alive today, but he died at a very young age of 57. The memories I have of him are pretty distant. His name was Vernon Huston. I was the junior. I’ve tried, knowing this was going to be Father’s Day weekend, very hard to think of some of the good memories and I had a lot of them.
I tried to pick out some of my favorite times as a young kid with him. There are so many. We had no professional baseball or football teams, or basketball anywhere in Texas, but he gave me what he could. He took me LaGrave Field in Fort Worth to watch pro baseball teams. He didn’t take me to a pro basketball game except for the Globe Trotters and that was better than any of them at that time. He took me to a lot of football – nothing professional because there wasn’t anything here – but we went to Southwest Conference games. We never went to a high school game when I was a kid, but we actually drove him to the State Finals in ’65 when we played at College Station. He loved college football and he’d take me to watch Howard Payne against whoever. I mean I was a little but he took me to a lot of neat stuff.
The best stuff that he ever took me to was just letting me watch. He never made a bunch of money. He worked for Santa Fe for all the years that he was in Brownwood and I got to go and probably break the rules several times at Santa Fe. I went to the old round house where they worked on trains and I rode on the trains and I rode up in places where I probably shouldn’t have been. Some of my best times that I had would be when my Dad was on the night shift and he would ask me if I wanted to go to work with him. I’d say, “Yeah”. He’d say, “Well, you’ve got to get to sleep by such and such because I’m going to wake you up about midnight.” Sure enough, he would and I loved running around the trains. I loved the free trips that we got on trains, and I took quite a few.
But, the thing that impressed me at home more than anything, he loved mowing lawns. He loved taking care of our lawn and we always had a beautiful one. What amazed me was on his days off he would go over to other people’s houses who weren’t physically able to do any work, and he mowed their lawns for them – for nothing. He mowed people’s lawns. Push mower. No charge. Several a day.
But, the thing that I remember on Father’s Day most, he loved to fish. Because of my health issues, he had to move from his home on the coast and learn how to fish like we do, in fresh water. I had a ball fishing with him. It was like Christmas Day every day that I go to fish with him. Probably the only time that I really fished with him and him alone was out at Lake Brownwood. He would take me to Flat Rock Park, which was a great fishing place, and fish away the hours on the old Flat Rock dock. We would catch unbelievable numbers of crappie. I loved catching and eating crappie so those were just very, very special times. He would just come in and say, “Let’s go fishing, just you and me.” We’d go to the lake and sometimes Clear Creek. That’s probably my favorite memory of all because I enjoyed it so much and it was just me and my dad.
Until next time, so long everybody.
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‘Out of the Box’ with Dallas Huston is published each Monday morning at BrownwoodNews.com. Dallas was the radio voice of the Brownwood Lions and Howard Payne Yellow Jackets for more than 55 years. He currently is Pastor of Center City Baptist Church and hosts a Men’s Bible Study in Brownwood on Monday evenings. Your comments are welcome at [email protected].