The Life of Me: An AutobiographyJohnson, Clarence Edgar
History
The Life of Me: An Autobiography
Johnson, Clarence Edgar
Fisher County (Tex.) -- Biography; Fisher County (Tex.) -- History; Johnson family; Johnson, Clarence Edgar, 1906-1994
Now, the road up Pike's Peak is, for the most part, void of
suitable parking places, even for emergencies. And all this
sleet and ice falling suddenly out of the sky did create an
emergency. However, before we arrived at an emergency parking
place, Ima was very unhappily sitting in a puddle of snow and
sleet and ice that had fallen into the front seat and had worked
its way down to the back side of her lap.
When we found a little place to pull over and stop, we put up the
curtains. But Ima's unhappiness remained with her much longer
than I had hoped it would. The truth is, she carried a large
portion of it, as well as a little bit of dampness, all the way
back down the mountain to Colorado Springs. And there, we found
the same type of slush curb to curb four inches deep.
I never quite forgave the weather for that little stunt it pulled
on us. It was a long time before I could get the family to go
with me again anywhere outside our home county.
Time not only "waits for no man," it seems to go faster and
faster. We were getting older and our kids were growing up.
Dennis finished high school in Hamlin in June of 1949. In the
fall of that same year he began to hear advertisements on radio
about cheap farm land in Arkansas, and he sent for a catalog of
listings. When it arrived, I had to admit there were some
interesting bargains offered in it. The more Dennis read the
catalog and listened to the radio, the more he was convinced that
out there somewhere in this big country of ours, there was
something we had been missing. Then one day he said to me,
"Daddy, let's go look at some of these places. All we are doing
here is working ourselves to death and getting nowhere."
We talked it over and I agreed that, if it suited the rest of the
family, we would go look. Dennis and I went first, not to buy,
but only to shop around. We went to Ft. Smith, Arkansas, and
looked all the way from 60 miles north of there to 60 miles south
of there. We liked what we saw and the prices were right. Then
we returned home, and Ima and I went to Arkansas, this time not
just looking; we were buying. After looking a few days, we found
and bought a small farm three miles south of Mansfield.
We moved onto the place in the early spring of 1950. Anita
stayed with the Tarlington Willingham family to finish out her
Sophomore year in Hamlin High School. She joined us that summer
and spent her Junior year in Mansfield High School. Then she did
some special work during the next summer and, in the fall of
1951, instead of entering Mansfield High as a Senior, she entered
the University of Arkansas as a Freshman.
Three years later Dennis also entered the University as a
Freshman. Then three years after that, Dennis and Anita both
came to me and told me it was my time next. They promised to see
me through. They would handle the finances; it would be up to me
to make my grades.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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