UPDATED 3/26/09; just got a long email from Jimmy updating and correcting some of the things I posted below, so this is new information. I'll make the corrections to names and photos that she suggests in her email:
Aunt Jesse was a beautiful woman. She played the piano by ear, and played it well. The last time I saw her was the summer before she died in September (just a few days before Jug was born--or was it the next year and a few days before Jug's 1st birthday?). Another anyway, I remember that she played "Jezebel" on the piano w/flourishes and that she had a bathtub that was long enough for me lie down in. I took a picture of her, Aunt Jack, and a pregnant Mother and it's a good picture. I have no idea where it is.
You have Aunt Dell's and Aunt Rubye's pictures reversed. [corrected -RW]
Aunt Rubye had Ben J, Margueritte, Joel Jack, George Earl, and Billy Wayne. The shrine was in the house outside of (I think) Ballinger. I stayed there one time when Audrey was there. The shrine frightened me for whatever reason. It just seemed wrong, even to a 9 year old. Aunt Rubye also had a tremendous amount of "stuff" she gotten off with when Grandma Carroll died. All of that burned as well. Most of what she had of Grandma's had been bought by Uncle Jimmy, including several things he got in Europe during WWII. The aftermath of the funeral was awful, w/people grabbing things and fighting over them. Mother cried and Daddy put us in the car and we went home. I saw Uncle Jimmy and Aunt Jo last summer. He's still lucid most of the time, by the way, and he's still ticked off about what happened after Grandma's funeral and after Grandpa's. And I got to be at both places---not the best of memories.
Aunt Dell & Uncle Rosco lived out in the country until the early to mid sixties when they moved into the metropolis of Newcastle (about 300 people). By the time I remember the old place (and it seemed really old), there were 3 rooms--a front room/bedroom, a kitchen, and a small add-on as a room for LaVelle. There was electricity and, I think, water, although everyone drank from a bucket using the same ladle. Mother always stopped in town and got cokes for me and Jug. There was an outdoor toilet, complete w/a hornet's nest that made it unusable, so you had to just use the great outdoors. I truly didn't like going there. The house in town had 5 or 6 rooms. I was only there twice but I do remember the linoleum floors. I have several stories about Uncle Rosco but I'll hit those another day.
I don't believe that the woman in the picture with Uncle Nick is Aunt Jack. [photo removed -RW]I think it's Florence, his second wife. He married her after her husband died, mainly because they were old friends and both lonely. Nick is buried by Jack and Florence is buried by her 1st husband. Grandpa lived in Seminole with Jack & Nick for the last few years of his life, with occasional stays w/ us in Midland. He moved to a small (2 rooms, I think) house about a block over and behind Aunt Jack's a year or so before he died. Aunt Jack had 3 sons. One died at birth (Mother said the doctor broke his neck using forceps), Raymond Lewis died as a child, and Benny Jack was murdered by his second, soon to be ex, wife in 1969. His 1st wife's name was Fayrene and the only surviving child they had was Benny Bob. Jug, you would have played w/him when we went to the ranch outside Seminole. Uncle Nick managed that one before they moved to Crosbyton. The policeman with the dog is Tommy Deerman, Aunt Lillian's son. [photo moved -RW] The dog was named Streak and he was a wonderful dog. The little boy is David, Tommy's step-son. Aunt Lillian's daughter is named Barbara Fern and, if she's still alive, she lives in Willcox. I've never met her and I have no desire to do so. I did talk to her daughter one time. She informed me that I couldn't be her cousin since her mother had only one and her name was Guinn. I think the gun incident happened the summer between Randall's sophomore and junior years in college. I do know that it caused some major upsets.
-Jimmy
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Here's a post I wrote back in July, but I tried to add an html link and it totally goofed it up; that's what I get for trying to be fancy! Since I just put up the one on the Carroll side of the family, I'm going to try to resurrect it here. Some of the things mentioned here might have been talked about and/or cleared up in posts back in July, so check older ones for more:
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Before I get distracted with other things, I wanted to finish off what I started a while back and keep getting distracted from, more on the Carrolls.
Jim "Pop" and Florence "Maggie" Carroll,
my maternal grandparents, probably in the 1920s
Not to belabor yet another point, but I got to thinking and I could not name one cousin on Roy Lee's side. I know Uncle Sallie had a son named Tommy, I think, or at least that was what he was called. And the Ballards are somehow related. Pat? Sis? Margarite? At least I think they are all on the Webb side. But that's about it, although in the Webb file I found a stack of pages about Aunt Lillian Webb's kids. Somehow we just never spent much time with them, or I should say I never did, like we did with the Carrolls and specifically the Jordans, of whom more later.
So now I'm going to put up some photos and blog a bit about them; this is more to get this all straight in my own mind than anything else. I'll start with the ones I know the least about, Ruth's brothers Shorty, Claude, and Edgar. As noted before, I never met any of them or don't remember if I did. I really do remember hearing somewhere that Edgar died in an industrial accident; I oh-so-vaguely remember Uncle Shorty, mostly in some unsavory fashion. I don't think I ever met Claude, although everything I heard about him was likewise unsavory.
So now the other one whom I never met, and have al
ready written about a bit, Aunt Jessie; that's her on th
e left. She had a son, Carl Eyler, seen in the photo on the right, striking a martial pose; I seem to remember that the other photo of him has him in an overseas cap giving a salute. Did he serve in the military? He's with Guinn; she's in the center, holding Jimmy Ruth, with Randall on the far right striking the "gangsta" pose with the hoodie. Guinn has said that she keeps in touch with Carl; perhaps he would like to add something about his mother to this blog? Other than that I unfortunately know very little about her.
OK, moving on. The next one in terms of how little I know about them would have to be Ruby, the eldest of the Carroll girls. I think I only have the one photo of her, in the group shot of all the sisters, and this is cropped out of that. Given what little we know about th
eir early upbringing and given that it's universally agreed that it was a very unpleasant one, of poverty and even abuse (as we'd define it today), no wonder she isn't smiling. I know that she was married to a man named Ben Flynn, who, as noted below (and I apologize for repeating myself) was a wounded veteran of WW I, who had lost part of a lung or a whole lung because he had been gassed in the trenches. They had several children, of which I know the names of three: Ben Albert Flynn, a son, Joel Jack, another son, about whom I've written earlier, and Billy Dean Flynn, the youngest. He served in the Korean War, but then was killed in a car wreck in Runnels County, Texas, in 1953, right after he got back. Ruby, understandably devastated by this tragedy, created a shrine to him in her house in Breckenridge, but everything was lost when the house burned down some years later. I guess there were more but I have no clue what their names were. They lived, at least when I knew them and I think fairly consistently, in Breckenridge, Texas. I can sort of picture the town and the house; the town had red brick streets, and the house had a screened porch. Other than that I don't remember much, save for the fine watermelon memories that I wrote about earlier in a post of the same name and that I think of every time I eat a watermelon. I also wrote about Ben's funeral which I think we established was in 1966.
Next up would be Aunt Dell (I'm going to skip using their real names, as I never knew them by any other than these). She married a man named Roscoe Jordan; I think they lived in Breckenridge or Newcastle, or nearby as well. It was with her children and grandchildren that I've had the most family contact outside my own, but that's a subject for later on. Again, we probably went to visit them but I don't remember much about it. They lived outside of town; it seems that the house was dark at night? No electricity? That can't be right. There was a chicken in the yard we were
all afraid of, and it seems they had no indoor plumbing although that could be a myth of my own making. I sort of remember Roscoe as a friend of my father's, a rough, gruff, cowboy that I always admired but was afraid of at the same time; I can picture him and remember his voice. I do like the name, Roscoe; if I had a boy I would want to name him that! I heard a great story about him and Roy Lee at the last reunion: that in the 1920s, I guess before Roy started working in the oil fields, they were rough-breaking horses in north Texas, and Roscoe got sick with a severe case of the measles, of which there was an epidemic going on. So Roy had to get him home, to Olney I guess, but he was too sick to ride very far so they would go a little way and then rest, and when they came to a house they would ask for food or a place to stay, and the people would take food out to the front, away from the house, and then go back inside; such was the fear of the epidemic.
Next would be Aunt Jack, whom I remember quite well. When we moved to Midland, which would probably be about 1958?, she lived in nearby Seminole, Texas, and we would often go visit. She was always very nice to me and very doting. I loved Aunt Jack and Uncle Nick, pictured on the left; they were some of my favorite relatives. Uncle Nick sometimes seemed strict but Aunt Jack was always good for a treat or a joke or a laugh. (although Nick had a great sense of humor; I remember that he had false teeth that he would stick out at us kids and make a clacking sound, to our horror and the general delight) We visited them many times and it was always a great time, the adults staying up drinking coffee and laughing at stories; many times I remember going to sleep to the smell of cigarettes and the sound of clicking dominoes. Recently my own family picked up a domino set and the sound of them brought back a flood of memories.
Her and her husband, Nick Hudson, lived in a small house. I wrote earlier that Pop Carroll lived in Seminole, at least part of the time when we were visiting, but I can't remember if he lived in the same house or had his own. I remember driving there many times, it wasn't very far, and going to a stockyard there, where they had goats? But the main memory is of a comic book store where we got to go for the trip home. Jimmy and I would divide the back seat, although without the hostility of other siblings you hear about, and we would each get to buy comic books. Hers were usually, I think, Archie, while mine were invariably Turok, Son of Stone, and Sgt. Rock. I guess an occasional Richie Rich crept in there too. I remember setting off fireworks there, at Aunt Jack's house, including one time in the house where we set a tablecloth on fire.
Jack and Nick had at least one son--there might be more--but this one I remember, Benny Jack. He was a policeman somewhere, I have a couple of photos of him in a uniform. I don't remember much about him, just his face and his association, and unfortunately, his sad fate. He was married to someone whose name I forget--Fay? something with an F?-- and they had a son, Benny Bob, with whom I hung out--more on that in a minute--but they were divorced. Later, if I remember this story right, she called him up to arrange a reconciliation, asking him to meet her somewhere, but when he showed up she had a gun and shot him dead.
I remember the call at our house when we learned this, and the sorrow that the tragedy caused. So anyway, after we moved back to Farmington in 1962, we would still travel back to Texas and usually it was to see Jack and Nick, with whom my parents were close. By this time Nick had gotten a job as a foreman on a ranch outside Crosbyton, Texas, which was east of Lubbock. The ranch was owned by some rich guy and Nick took care of it, and helped out when the owner showed up with buddies. I'm not sure it was a ranch so much as a vacation home, kind of; I don't remember any real ranching going on although there could well have been. It was in a pretty wild area; I remember you would drive outside of Lubbock, then down some dirt road through flat cotton fields, then all of sudden the world would drop out from underneath the car and there was a big badlands canyon that you would drop down into to reach the buildings.
A couple of times when we were there Benny Bob was there; he was about my age and we hit it off. One very distinct memory was when we took off for the wilds once, while the adults were playing dominoes and drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes. We each took a .22 and set off through the mesquite jungles. We went down to the river, a creek really, and were making our way along it, shooting at lizards and cans and anything else, crossing barbed wire fences as needed. Finally, in a very dense mesquite thicket, we heard a sound of crashing and snuffling, and into a clearing came a great big black and white pig. I mean a big pig; he probably outweighed us both combined. This wasn't a javelina, the little wild pigs, this was a feral domestic pig, and did I say he was big? At first we thought ha ha, here piggy, but as soon as he saw us he put his head down and charged at us, making really terrifying pig sounds and looking like he had every intention of doing us harm. We turned and ran, through the mesquites, getting cut and scratched and ripping our clothes, with the pig in hot pursuit; we could hear other pigs coming close too. Finally we came to a big, sturdy barbed wire fence, and threw ourselves over it, getting more scratched and torn; the pigs--for there were about a half dozen by now--came right up to the fence and snorted at us. We still had our rifles and I remember we both raised them and fired at the big pig; the others took off when the heard the gunshots. It was point-blank range and he never even flinched; his skin twitched like a fly was landing on it, and he turned around and walked back into the bushes.
The only one of my mother's brothers that I remember very well was Uncle Jimmy. He was the youngest of her family, born in 1921, and thus was of a perfect age for World War II. I never heard any details but I gather he was in a tank and saw a great deal of action in Italy in the 5th Army. We would also visit him and his wife, whose name also escapes me, 
and their two kids, Randy and Linda, who were about my age; one older and one younger. They lived in Monahans, Texas, and at last word he still lives there. Guinn, Randall, and Jimmy all have very distinct memories of Monahans, but the only thing I remember about Monahans was the Million Barrel Tank, a huge concrete oil tank. Apparently though every time they tried to fill it up, all the oil leaked out. At any rate I remember going over there and exploring around it. [This is where I had the link to some story about the Million Barrel tank that crashed the previous post; it's easy to find more about it if you're interested on a Google search.]
Finally, there is Aunt Lil. Lil and her husband, Red Moore, lived in Farmington, New Mexico around the time I was growing up there, from about 1962 to 1970, when we left after Roy Lee died. She died and is buried there as well. Lil was always a lot of fun; sometimes we would go to her house out by the San Juan River near Farmington for dinner. I remember she grew her own chiles and made a hot sauce that would sear your mouth. Roy Lee, the strong silent type, could never admit that he couldn't eat it so he would just shovel it onto his tacos or whatever we were having and eat it like it was good, but the sweat would pour off his bald head. 
At one time she ran a little cafe on the Bloomfield Highway, near Farmington, which we would often stop at on the way somewhere; usually when I would go out with my dad to an oil field. There was a sign over the bathroom door that was the first double entendre that I ever understood; it was for Coca-Cola and the text read: "The Pause That Refreshes." One summer, Rodger was there, and we got a job with Lil and Red cleaning up the big events center at the fairgrounds. This particular time I remember was after some big convention, and the place was totally trashed; we filled up barrel after barrel with empty whiskey and booze bottles, and Lil kept the ones that still had something in them. Lil's husband at the time was named Red Moore; I don't know what his real name was, but we knew him as Red. He had the most husky voice; we called it a "whiskey voice" but it was more likely caused by smoking. She had had an earlier marriage to a man named Deerman, and a co
uple of kids; I think they were Tommy and Fay? Something like that. But we often visited Lil, wherever she lived and she seemed to move around a lot; sometimes it was a little place in Bloomfield, about 15 miles from Farmington; then the little trailer out by the fairgrounds along the San Juan River.
Aunt Lillian's son Tommy Deerman and his dog Streak
An incident that occurred when we were visiting Lil one time has entered the realm of legend. For some reason Randall was there; he might have been back from the Air Force or something and Mom was showing him off. So we go out to Lil's trailer, where she lived by the river. Randall had gone into a back room and there was a gun hanging on the wall, in a holster; it was loaded. He had unloaded it, looked at it, reloaded it, and put it back on the wall. I went back there later and there was the gun; it looked really cool, like a six shooter in a Western, so I took it out of the holster, pointed it at the wall, and pulled the trigger. POW! It made a huge noise and went all the way through the trailer, stopping in the toilet. Quite the scene.
So that's all of them, from my memories. I have other memories of them but that's enough for now.
