Janice Williams Loves Austin

There is a lot of catching up to do from this week. It has been busy! Sam Baker, along with Scott Davis and Karen Mal, put on a fabulous show Wednesday night at Mercury Hall. I hope you will be there this coming Wednesday night for an evening with Walt Wilkins and Jamie Richards.

Tomorrow is the Superbowl and I’m heading to Dallas to watch it with my family there. My younger nephew, Connor, is in town for the University of Texas / Baylor basketball game right now (Go Bears!! Sic ‘Em!!) and when it is over, he and I will be driving to Dallas together. I’m excited about that! How often does an aunt get four hours alone with a nephew? I probably haven’t had it since they were little boys and I babysat a lot. Even then it was usually the pair. And Connor has a lot more to say now that he is 18 than he did at 2 or 3 (especially since his big brother rarely let him get in a word edgewise).

And today is Daddy’s birthday. It would have been my dad’s 80th birthday and it makes me sad that he isn’t here to celebrate a big birthday like that. He died on December 15, 2006. A lot of my listeners did not know that he died because it was Christmastime and there were vacations and they didn’t realize that that was why I was off the air that week and through Christmas. I miss Daddy a lot, especially on these “family occasions” when we would get together. His birthday weekend had become a great weekend to celebrate and watch the Superbowl together. It is also Groundhog Day, too, of course, and it has struck me odd all week when newscasters and Letterman and others talk about Groundhog Day. It seems like if Daddy has gone away, Groundhog Day should have, too.

I have wanted to write a lot about Daddy for a long time. In fact, since his death I keep swearing I am going to write an “all I know about my dad” kind of document to pass along to future generations. I still haven’t gotten to that and this isn’t going to be it either. But I have some favorite pictures of Dad that will give you a little idea of who he was.

This has always been a favorite of mine:

That’s about 1950 in San Antonio when is was stationed there in the Air Force. He LOVED that Harley. He carried a picture of it in his wallet until the day he died. When we would come out of a restaurant and there would be someone there with a Harley, Daddy inevitably pulled out the picture and told stories of his days when he had a bike. He sold that motorcycle in 1952 to get the down payment on their first house in Amarillo.

Daddy was a surveyor. This was probably my first trip to Austin in my life. We came down for Daddy to take his Texas Licensed Surveyor exam. We have some great home movies of this trip at a motel that was probably somewhere along South Congress and has long been overrun by a fashionable bistro or an auto parts store. Now that I live here, I wish we had more pictures from this trip and more identifiable buildings. This is somewhere around the Capitol grounds and that’s my sister Mackie (she’s the dark-headed one).

Next up is a four generation picture of the Williams family when I was about seven. My great-grandmother Mattie (Lett) Williams was in her 80s here, but she lived on to 1978 and age 95. Born in Alabama, she and her family came by wagon to Williamson County when she was a little girl. She married my great-grandfather at Corn Hill (near Jarrell) and then they moved on to Clay County and Wise County and finally Runnels County. Again, I keep saying I’m going to write down everything I know about these ancestors, because I’m the only one in our family that knows these little details (like the fact that she and her older brother would wrestle and fight as kids and their father kept a switch in his cotton sack to beat them to make them stay on task picking cotton). Grandma Williams lived in Cleburne in my memories of her. She lived in Burleson (DFW) when she died and she is buried in Winters, Texas.
Pappa is Andy Williams (no, not the singer) and he died before his mother in 1973. He did a lot of things in his life, but was a truck driver for Red Ball Freight all of my life. He made the run from Amarillo to Denver twice a week.
And that’s my handwriting at the bottom, circa 1966 or so. That’s when the picture was made. I don’t know when I wrote that on there. It’s cursive so it was probably later. Notice the hollyhocks (in black and white they don’t look like much). This is behind Mamma and Pappa Williams’ house between Amarillo and Canyon. Mamma had a green thumb and had flowers and plants everywhere.

Daddy’s grave is not far from this house. Mamma and Pappa moved there in the early sixties and then we followed and moved a house to a bare field in the country in 1964. I say “we.” I didn’t have a whole lot to do with it, but I have a lot of happy memories during the “fixing it” phase. Dad, Mom, Uncle Homer, Aunt Dorothy, and other friends wired and plumbed the house and sheetrocked the walls and painted and made it livable. Me and Mackie and our friends made playhouses from lumber scraps. I most fondly remember the hamburgers from Stuckey’s that were our main sustenance during the project.

We moved to that house and Daddy happily became a farmer again. He still had the surveyor job, but he was so happy to have a field to plow again and a few cows in the pen and even a horse. We also had chickens. This is one of our earliest pictures at the house (although you don’t see the house) with Daddy bringing the eggs in. That was usually our job, I think, but I expect we got bored with the “thrill” of farm work pretty early on and Dad and Mom ended up gathering the eggs most of our days on the farm.

All of these pictures are from so long ago, but I love the pictures in black and white. They just seem to show so much of an era, beyond just the subject. But lets move into more modern history. There were so many pictures to choose from, but this is another favorite.

That was Daddy and his last tractor, just before they left the farm and moved down to near Denton to be closer to me and Mark and Mackie and Theo. Notice the bucket over the smokestack. You have to do that, I guess, to keep rain out of the engine or something. In earlier days, Daddy always put a coffee can over the smokestack. It was always fun to see Daddy start up the tractor without taking it off and BOOM, that can would go flying up in the air. This was a more modern tractor that started more easily, but his first tractors on the farm had a big round thing on the side that he had to turn and turn and TURN to get it to turn over. There was also usually a lot of cursing involved (not “real” cursing, just Daddy cursing like “DOMMIT”—no, that is not a misprint).

We had a lot of good years after Mom and Dad moved closer. It was great fun to be able to go up just to spend a Sunday. Mark and I had jobs that kept us busy mostly at night, so there were a lot of lunches with them in little towns around their little town (Aubrey, Pilot Point, Ponder, Tioga) before we moved to Austin.

They were also closer for all of the boys’ events and got to be there for baptisms, elementary school “grandparent’s days,” and many concerts. Here is Dad and Mom with Connor after one of the performances at the Meyerson Symphony Hall in Dallas. This was just a year or so before he died.

Daddy’s last year was quite a struggle for him and if he had lived through the surgery he would have had such a hard recovery, I know it was a blessing that he didn’t make it through. I just wish he hadn’t had to go through the surgery and those last six weeks. But during that last year we still had some great visits. I took him and Mom to a cemetery in Chico, Texas, and we found the graves of his great-grandparents. We all got to go as a family to my Uncle Jays’ 80th birthday party in Eldorado, Oklahoma.We didn’t know if he would be up for it, but we were so glad he was and so were all of my cousins that just adored Daddy. He and Mother (who was recovering from breast cancer surgery) were able to be at my sister’s and brother-in-law’s 50th birthday party that summer, too. But the best event of the year was my nephew Brandt’s graduation from high school. We were all so grateful that Daddy was able to be at it, because he was so incredibly proud of his grandsons. He was able to see Brandt walk across and get his diploma and he was able to see Connor, a junior, lead the Coppell High School Band as drum major and then take over the reins as head drum major that day and be the “main guy” for the first time.

So that’s just a glimpse of Durward Williams. See why I am so daunted by writing the WHOLE story? I can go on and on about the things I love about Dad and what I learned from him. Fortunately, I have lots of pictures, lots of his “stuff,” things he made for me (benches, birdhouses, wishing wells, tables, and on and on), and memories galore. It is a wonderful heritage.

Happy Birthday Daddy!