Dad's Birthday--trips from long ago

If my Dad was living he would have been 103 July 14. My brother called me that day and we talked about when we were kids living in Louisiana. I am about 20 months older then he is.

One of his memories was going to Shreveport to eat Mexican food. This was always a treat. Dad was a big fan of Mexican food and even when he was in the last years of his life he liked to have a kind of burrito casserole that I prepared for him. He was known as Mollie to friends and relatives when much younger because he was always making hot tamales. Mom said she used to get a little disturbed at him for this since he would use up needed food items to make tamales.

My brother also remembered that we used to drive to an area near Shreveport (Greenwood I think) to swim in a large facility that would likely be a water park if it were around today. We both recalled it was large and fun. I think it was shut down due to some scare about polio.

My Dad liked to scare us by driving fast up hills on the unpaved roads we traveled. This was of course before seat belts and my brother and I would bounce up and down in the back seat almost hitting the roof when we topped over the hills. We thought it was fun!

In those days the little town where we lived was connected only by gravel roads to the outside world. And actually the paved roads were not very good. It used to be said that boundary line between Texas and Louisiana did not need to be marked because the highway always narrowed by two feet at the border. It was always dusty from traffic and it was a big day when the town people had the road through town oiled to lessen the dust. The road was eventually paved about the time we moved away to Texas.

I was thinking after my brother's call about another big event that took place in Shreveport and that was the Louisiana Hayride. We attended the "farewell" Hank Williams show when he was leaving the Hayride to join the Grand Ole Opry. I had to look up the date for that and it was June 3, 1949 so we would have been traveling in our 48 Frazer Manhattan my Dad had bought the previous summer. Adults had to pay 60 cents and kids 30 cents for admission according to the source I found. We left the show while Hank was still doing encores. We listened on the car radio as we drove. I remember the announcer saying something like "the next 30 minutes of the Lovesick Blues will be brought to you by...." Later in the summer we moved back to Texas.

Any trip out of our town was an adventure but these trips were special. The "biggest" trip ever was a family vacation to Colorado, but that's a story for another day.