Clarksville, Bicycling, and God

A year or so ago, I pedaled around Sun City in Georgetown, Texas for my health. In hindsight, I probably shouldn't have gone quite so far the day after donating two pints of blood. Also, if I had it to do over again, I would have eaten breakfast first or at least had some orange juice. I thought about all this while parked on the side of the road trying to decide if I should call 911 or just throw up. After some deep breaths, staying close to the flower garden at the woodworking shop, I managed to get past the nausea. I had already thought of a way to hold on to the branch of a tree for support if needed. But soon, I felt better and was back on the bike heading for home. 

Perhaps I was delirious, but as I rode the rest of the way (mostly downhill, by the way), I had vivid memories of bike riding as a kid. I remember sneaking off when I lived near Clarksville in Austin, so I couldn't have been more than nine years old. My friend, Bobby Bayer, went with me. We told our parents we were just going to see someone a few blocks away and we ended up in deep South Austin, near the Broken Spoke area. I felt terribly guilty for lying to my mother. But not guilty enough to keep me from repeating the trip again and again.

Those memories and reminders of the guilt I felt, made me think about Brian, the male protagonist in Where Love Once Lived. Don't forget I said I may have been delirious at the time all this was going through my head.

In the novel, Brian had been brought up in a Christian family and attended church every Sunday. What's more, he loved to go to church and continued to do so while he was away from his California home attending the University of Texas. Then, he commits a sin and, even though he knows better, the guilt he feels is so strong he believes he is being punished by God. His punishment is to be in a loveless marriage.

He drops out of church for the next thirty years. This is all leading up to my wanting to tell you this is not a biographical story. It didn't happen to me. I was brought up in a Christian home and my life revolved around the church. I still have friends I met at church and we still get together frequently. I'll tell you more about the Combine as we go. I continued to be involved in church in college and while in the marines. After marriage and kids there were times when I wasn't involved as much as I should have been, but that didn't last long. I may tell you about that period of my life someday, if I'm ever delirious again.

How about you? When did God become a major part of your life? Have you ever dropped out? What brought you back?

Publishing a Neighborhood Magazine

I'm often asked "When did you first become interested in writing?"

My earliest memory of writing is when my sister, Barbara Cagle, decided we would publish a neighborhood magazine. We were living on Pete's Path in Austin at the time, so I had to be about twelve years old. She had written and produced some neighborhood plays several years before this when we lived on Josephine Street in South Austin.

But, my involvement as a writer didn't occur until the magazine phase. By publish, keep in mind that the magazine was handwritten and each copy was handwritten as well. So there wasn't a wide distribution and the magazine only lasted for a summer. When school started we were too busy to continue the publishing endeavor. But I remember getting to write and I remember the encouragement from Barbara.

She told me I had to keep a journal of all the movies I went to see so we could include movie reviews in the magazine. I got a spiral notebook and on one side I pasted the ad for the movie clipped from the newspaper. On the other side was the movie review itself. I wish I still had that spiral notebook. It was lost in a heavy rain that flooded my basement bedroom years later while I was away in the Marine Corps. I lost all my precious books in that storm, but that's a story for another time.

I had the writing bug from then on. Aptitude tests showed an interest in creative writing, but my school counselors said I should think of it as a hobby since few people made a living from writing. So, I ended up majoring in computer science and wrote for the fun of it.

I took a correspondence class on writing short stories. One was published in Navy Magazine. Much of the writing I did was for work. When the boss learned I could put two sentences together and make sense, I was called on to do the reports, apply for grants, and all sorts of writing.

I wrote a computer book with my lawyer boss, James Dunlap, called Automated Law Office Systems. It was published by West Publishing.

I think writers have a need to write. My sister is still writing. She had a funny article published in the Sunday magazine of a Houston paper and she has placed in several writing contests as well.

Growing Up White Next to a Black Neighborhood

That's me in the middle

The area of Austin called Clarksville is different than it was when I was born December 6, 1936. At that time, and up until the time we moved to South Austin in 1945, the former slave neighborhood was located between West 10th and Waterston Avenue with West Lynn Street on the east extending west to the railroad tracks that are now in the middle of MoPac.

It's hard for my children and grandchildren to understand that time in Austin's history when schools and neighborhoods were segregated by race. Only blacks lived in the area called Clarksville and the children didn't go to Mathews Elementary where my sister and I went.

My family lived in four different houses just outside the black neighborhood. At one house our backyard was up against a black family's backyard. That's where we lived when I was between five and nine, and I remember talking to some kids over that fence there often, or until my parents told me not to. Since most other blacks lived east of Austin, living where we did gave me an opportunity many white kids didn't have. I got to know some of my black neighbors, even though I had to keep it a secret from my parents.

I grew up in a segregated town, not really understanding why, and it wasn't until I was in college in 1954 that blacks in Austin began to be reluctantly accepted in some places. I left Austin in 1956 to join the marines. One of my friends was a black private from Houston. In California, we could go to restaurants together and the beach and just about anywhere we wanted. My friend rode back to Texas with me once and by the time we got to Austin, without discussing it, we started getting our food to go.

Perhaps due to my early experience growing up in Clarksville, I've always believed in equality of the races. I included a character in my novel, Where Love Once Lived, who is about my age and is black. I gave him my experiences, from the other side of the fence, however. Several scenes take place in the neighborhood, including memories of the neighborhood, Mathews School, the Confederate home, and what it was like to live in a segregated area. There is also an interracial marriage in the book.