My parents met during World War II in Ft. Worth. My mother was from the panhandle of Texas and
moved to the big city seeking equal parts employment and relief from terminal
boredom. I can remember my mother
telling me that everything in Plainview, Texas either “Sticks, Stinks, or
Stings.” While the town may not have been a great place to live, it was a
wonderful place to be from. (The from-er
the better.) There were defense plants
in Fort Worth that fueled a roaring wartime economy, and if you could walk and
chew gum at the same time, you could land a job.
My father was from Winters, Texas—a town so remote that,
even today, the town proudly boasts the recent arrival of cable-radio. My Dad had come to Ft. Worth while serving in
the CCC—the depression make-work program for teenaged boys and young men, named the Civilian
Conservation Corps. The motto of the CCC
was “Have Shovel—Will Travel.” After
Pearl Harbor, these khaki-clad young men were marched into the nearest recruitment
centers where they exchanged their shovels for rifles. Well, to be accurate, in my father’s case, he
got a set of wrenches since he was a flight engineer.
Once my parents met in Ft. Worth, the problem was how to
date on a limited budget. Neither had
any money, so they depended on free public amusements and their favorite was
the Botanical Gardens. The largest and
oldest such garden in Texas, the original name was The Rock Springs Arboretum,
but the name had to be changed when too many people thought it was a fancy name
for a swimming hole. Renamed, the
gardens quadrupled in size over the years.
Evidently, the gardens have always been spectacular. I know this because my parents took a lot of
photos, usually from the same place--leaning against a railing and smiling
directly into the camera. Looking at
that photo, staring into those smiles, you can almost see them planning their
future, wondering about their lives after the war.
Fifteen years later, I have memories of the gardens as a
child. My parents would take my brother
and me to the gardens because the gardens were still lovely. And because the gardens brought back special
memories for them. (And, no doubt,
because the gardens were still very inexpensive.)
Today, seventy years after the war, my parents are no longer
with us and my wife and I live in a desert hundreds of miles from those
gardens. My son (not What’s-His-Name,
but The-Other-One) lives in Fort Worth with his wife, the Leprechaun, and their
child, the Munchkin. He took the family
to the Botanical Gardens last weekend. Evidently,
finding a
cheap family outing is still a problem in my family.
In due course, my son sent my cell phone a photo of the
Munchkin standing in front of a garden that I immediately recognized. A few minutes later, I sent back one of those
photos of my parents smiling at the railing sometime during 1943. Seventy years later, you would think that the
garden would have changed dramatically.
I know some changes did occur—the people of Ft. Worth have added a
Japanese Garden—a highly unlikely to have been there in 1943. (Two hundred miles south, San Antonio renamed
its Japanese Tea Gardens—for the duration—to the more patriotic-sounding
Chinese Tea Gardens.)
About half an hour later, my son sent me a second
photo. This one was of him and his wife
standing at the same railing, smiling into the camera, with the same thoughts
and the dreams of the future evident in their smiles. The two photos are not separated at all by 70
years and three generations. In all the
most important ways, they are identical.
The Doc and I are planning to visit Ft. Worth soon. We will go to the Botanical Gardens and have
our photos taken. We’ll stand at the
same railing and smile at the camera and think the same thoughts.
