.

Growing Up Hubert

What’s in a name? Shakespear said, “That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Shakespear was full of shit. Labels, names, make a hell of a difference. Someone’s name and how it resonates, or fails to resonate, can make a world of difference. Ask someone who knows: me.

The beloved name my parents gave me has haunted me all my life. They called me “Hubert James.” One thing Gen Jones folks did was judge their peers, often by arbitrary and absurd scales. Had I been almost anything from Bill or Charles, or hell, just James, I have zero doubt that my life would have been different. But my family firmly planted me with that first name nobody ever really liked.

My mother named me after her brother, a good man who himself hated the name. Go figure! Being old-fashioned as they were, living in the era when Swing was King, Bill Monroe and Earl Scruggs dominated the country scene and the Marshal Plan was in full swing, they never saw anything problematic with the name Hubert. It was a “good Christian name.” Maybe at some time or other this was true but stick that moniker on a Gen Jones kid with zero self esteem and a home life less than jolly and, well, it ain’t pretty.

When a kid is considered a numbskull not from anything he did but because he was timid and was called Hubert life can really suck. And it did. My brother had the looks and guts, not me. Not then. From elementary school foreward I lived a schizophrenic life. At home I was just me, the kid brother, the “good boy,” and at school I was everyone’s favorite punching bag. I was a nerd before nerds were cool, when ‘nerd’ meant “drip,” or “square,” or totally uncool.

There were too many cliquish bigots in my classes at school. I hardly had a chance there. Away from school I got along just fine. I found friends here and there. I even met my “first love” who moved in down the road from me. We had a few great months together. Then summer ended, school started, and her with her incredible looks and delightful personality quickly drifted away. What girl wants a boyfriend like Hubert?

Sports was a place where personality counted as much as ability back then. I had limited abilities, considering I was a bit chubby (though not fat!). I certainly did not have a popular personality, so I occupied a lot of gym seats and by Junior High was the kid swinging a broom and cleaning up the place rather than being the glorious jock who was loved and admired.

I began to read a lot. By the time I got to Junior High I was reading several books a week. Literature was an escape. I went to many places in my mind back then, led by hundreds of authors into great adventures, wild places, distant lands.

I was not a dolt or stupid person. In fact, schoolwork was easy. I was often a teacher’s favorite because I did well in class and did not act up. Being a teacher’s favorite back then did not get you any rewards with your peers. When classes were in session there was peace. When the class ended there was constant shit from a dozen different directions.

I grew up with a ridiculous sense of duty, responsibility and a fairly high level of religious devotion. I was uber-patriotic. I fancied myself being a soldier, fighting beside brave Americans in the jungles of Vietnam. Body counts, the numbers of “enemy” killed in Vietnam, were given on the nightly news. Vietnam was at the top of everyone’s mind. I also read a lot about World War II, a conflict my dad was a part of. Combat was my favorite TV show. And when I was able to stay up late, I stood at attention and saluted as the station played the National Anthem before signing off.

By the time I was a teenager, in 1970, home life was mostly conflict and pain. Life just droned on with little change from one month to the next. I hung out at times with my neighbor and best friend growing up, Ronald Stubblefield. We eventually started moving in different circles, though. I had a few other friends who lived close by. My family was friends with folks named Lilly. There were a lot of kids in that family, two older brothers and a sister and two younger boys, about my age. Those two boys, Maxie and Floyd, and I, teamed up some and tried our hands at mischief. My brother hung out with the older boys.

I think in the early seventies my mother was just overwhelmed. She pretty much left us, my younger sister and I, to fend for ourselves most of the time. Her and dad helped me with school stuff but at home I was free to do whatever. I really do not have a lot of memories from that time.

I do remember the Jesus era, a couple of years when following Jesus was all the rage. Because I had a background in Christianity and sort of knew my way around a Bible I was befriended by a lot of kids who before were either bullies to me or indifferent. I think I was about fourteen then. I write more extensively about this time in my life elsewhere. One event that stands out was the day I rode my bicycle to visit a girl I really liked. Julie. Beautiful, long blonde hair, great personality, and nice enough to hold my hand and make me feel appreciated at all our youth group meetings.

My bicycle was, as they’d say today, very tricked out. I had lights and a horn and even a tape player. I had a little cassette player mounted in the frame from which came some nice tunes. I remember riding to see Julie with that thing playing a tape from the group Bread. I listen to the whole album several times because Julie’s house was around eight miles or so from my place. The trip there wore me out but it was worth it to see her.

Julie’s parents were both teachers at my school and quite well known in the community. They welcomed my visit. Julie did too, because she was a sweet and kind girl. Sadly, she had not the least romantic feelings for me. If you’ve ever heard the song “The Diary,” by Bread, then you know how I felt. I listened to that song over and over on my way home from Julie’s house. At least until the bicycle broke a couple miles from home and I cussed and grumbled the rest of the way as I walked and carried the bike rather than riding it the rest of the way.

When Julie rejected my romantic feelings I was broken hearted, and not for the first time. Julie was the one single girl at school who treated me like a person so I guess I could not help but fall for her. She was the second girl I fell for that eventually went away and left me all broken and sad. Poor, poor pitiful me.

The summer before I turned sixteen I went up the highway a quarter of a mile and got myself a job at Curry’s Grocery. I was paid $0.75 an hour. My job had me pumping gas, stocking shelves, running our little cash register, working the fresh meat department, cleaning floors, cleaning a coin laundry, and whatever else they found for me to do. I was a good worker. They liked me.

Shortly after I started the job a new manager took over. His name was Mike something, I forget. He was a younger man with a young and beautiful wife. They lived in an apartment built above the store. He immediately gave me a raise to a buck an hour. He was a fun guy and we had some good times. I worked at the store for a few months but one day he would not let me off to go to a Christian youth group thing and it made me mad. We argued. I told him to go eat a frog and I quit. Really, I said, “go eat a frog!” What a way to end a job, right?

Leaving that job became a problem for me. I was supposed to work there as part of my participation in the DECA program at school. It was a program where students learned about business and worked half a day instead of going to school. When I quit that job I had to find another. I went to work at the rattiest grocery store–if you could call it that–in the county. Sharky’s Market. The store had a reputation, and not a good one. I started there just about the time I got my driver’s license and my first car.

Soon after getting my drivers’ license, I bought a car from that crazy guy married to my sister. I paid $300 for it, a 1967 two-door Ford Galaxie 500. What I’d give for one now! It was huge with a big V-8 engine that drank oil. Well, it didn’t drink oil, it guzzled it. Whoever had worked on it had put the rings in upside down in the engine and as a result oil was pushed up into the spark chamber instead of being held in the pan. Thus, I put a can of oil in it a day. Or more. It smoked very badly. I could fog up a place with exhaust smoke better than one of those army engines that put out smoke for cover on a battlefield! Once I revved the engine at a street intersection and the smoke was so thick I could not see the traffic light. But I loved that car.

Where I worked, Sharky’s Market, was indeed an unusual place. We sold model glue to kids who went off to sniff it. We sold Vanilla Flavoring (which is 10% alcohol) to scraggly old men who drank it. And we sold some of the most amazing pornographic magazines and black-covered paperbacks anyone could have. Great place for a sixteen-year-old boy!

I worked at Sharkey’s maybe six months. I didn’t quite hold on to my car that long. One morning, three months after getting my beloved Ford Galaxie, I leapt very late from bed and barreled down the highway to school at the last minute. I usually did that. My school was way out of Lufkin on the side of a state highway. As I approached the school I first passed elementary school then junior high, then high school. On this particular morning when I got to school I was craning my head to see if the high school kids had gone inside. I was not looking right in front of me. On that particular morning a car ahead of me just stopped completely. I could not miss hitting it. I swerved my wheel and hit the car with my left fender. Bam!

The car rolled to the right until it came to a stop in the parking lot of a little store across the street from the school. People came running. There had been little kids in that car I hit (that’s why the guy stopped, to turn into the elementary school). I have no idea how they fared. I was not hurt except for a bruised left knee which hit the 8-track player I had installed. Everything went dead and nothing worked except that 8-track, which was playing good ol’ rock and roll as men tried to pry my door and get me out.

I walked away from the wreck, but my car was totaled. My dad hired a wrecker to pull the poor car home. After a few months I sold it for a hundred bucks or so, more than i paid for it. The engine still ran but the front-end was all mangled.

A short while later I bought a 1965 Chevrolet Biscayne. I was driving that when I quit my job at Sharky’s because, surprise, I wanted to go to a religious group meeting and my boss would not let me off. Me quitting did not make my DECA teacher very happy. I had to stay at school all day for a while, until I went to work for Kroger Grocery Store. That would have been great if the store had not closed the week I started. Me and a friend named Tommy had both started there and wound up losing the job before we ever got a paycheck.

The rest of the year I spent all day at school. That required me to go to PE, a class I always hated. For most of my time in school I’d been given a broom and dust pan to use up my hour. This time I had to suit out and do real exercises! But I was terribly out of shape and could not do most of them. The new school coach, a loud-mouth idiot (so I thought) started yelling at me and berating me for not doing the exercises. After a while I decided I’d had enough. I got up from the gym floor and went to the dressing room. The coach followed me. He shouted, “what the hell do you think you are doing?” I told him I would not put up with him yelling at me. He watched in amazement as I changed into my school clothes, gathered my things, and left. For the rest of that year i just sat alone on the bleachers.

One night during that time I had visited my friend Tommy over in a Hudson neighborhood. When I came home I drove rather fast, around 80 something miles per hour. A state trooper was nice enough to follow me off the highway and up the road behind me. They pulled in behind my car and wrote me a ticket. Lovely. When I went in the house and told my folks I found out they were the reason I got caught. They’d been visiting friends up the same highway and reported some cars drag-racing. The dragsters were long gone but the DPS arrived just in time to catch me. That was why they’d puzzled me when they asked if I’d been racing. Hmmm.

A few weeks after that incident I’d gone to a friend’s house to borrow an 8-track he had. It was the song “Popcorn,” by a group called “Hot Butter.” …never mind, you had to be there. Anyway, I headed home with the tape. The highway was a four-lane and usually fairly busy where the turnoff to our house was. I stopped in the left lane signaling to turn. I looked in my rear-view mirror just in time to see a car come swerving around a truck from the other lane going way too fast to stop. It slammed into my car quite forcefully.

When someone went up our road and told dad I was in a wreck he nearly croaked. We were always very close and he thought I was bad hurt. I was uninjured but my poor old car was not so lucky. The guy hit me so hard he knocked the key out of the keyhole on the dash. He also knocked the battery over under the hood. We discovered that when I tried to start the car and it would not start.

Dad turned the battery turned back over and put the wire back on it. Then the car cranked just fine. I drove it up to the house. A few days later I took a chain and wrapped one end around a tree. The other end I hooked to a steel pipe through a hole in my trunk. I backed up to the tree, popped the clutch and when I reached the end of the chain there was a very loud bang and the back of my car was not sticking up like it was. Of course the trunk lid never worked and the gas tank was a bit flat but the car worked.

A couple weeks later my dad was painting his car a nice dark blue. I took the sprayer and went over my old bent to hell Chevy. No masking and no care about what got painted. I put a little sign on the door that said, “it may be ugly but it’s paid for.” It was all I could do since the guy who hit me did not have insurance. Go figure. I drove that ugly thing for a few more months to school, until I got another one.

My dad helped me get a loan to buy a 1969 Chevrolet Impala. A sweet car. It was cheap because one side was scraped all to hell from a wreck. That was ok with me, after driving the blue bomb. I held on to that car until I was nineteen, after my stint in the Air Force. But that’s a story for another time.

I went to school, about half-heartedly, and worked several places. I worked for a while at A&W Root-beer Restaurant, then at Dairy Queen. I don’t remember why I left either place. Neither can I remember the summer before my twelfth year in school. When school started I do remember I was extremely depressed. I did not even try. My grades fell well below passing as I mostly slept through all my classes. I remember one day going to the auditorium and taking a test that the military gave us. This is significant. Then came that day of the accident.

I could not afford car insurance because any money I made went to pay damages to the car I hit in front of the school earlier. I could not get a sticker to park in student parking without insurance. I had instead been parking in front of the school in a teacher parking area. I always backed in because I wanted to haul ass when school let out. One morning I was backing in when another high school student, a popular young girl, decided she wanted that parking spot. She zoomed in and I backed into the side of her car. There was a collision. Ooops.

It was a mess. The girl was all freaked out though it was her fault. I was going slow and it was only a tiny dent. But when we were called in to the principal’s office and he learned I did not have insurance I was sent home. “Come back when you get insurance,” he said. I went home and never went back. My grades were already in the thirties so missing several days for unexcused absences at five points a pop my grade soon hit zero. I could never have made that up so I quit. Briefly my idea was to go back the next year and finish but that did not happen.

For a couple months I went to Dallas and worked with my crazy brother-in-law. His name was Rusty. He cut down trees. What he’d do was drive through high-end neighborhoods looking for trees that were dead or dying or were leaning precariously, trees that needed cutting. He’d negotiate a price with the owner and we’d pile out of the truck to do the job. He’d cut the tree, me and a couple other of his nephews would drag the brush to a pile in the front by the curb where the city would pick it up.

I worked with him until he got a job with Asplundh Tree Company. They gave him a bucket truck with a crew cab pulling a brush chipper and sent us to Longview. The job there was to clear brush along a telephone line. It was hard work but for me it was kind of an adventure. One of the other guys and I looked for a motel we could afford. We looked at some really ratty places and ended up sleeping in the Asplundh truck. After a few days we went down to Lufkin for a break. While there Rusty started bad-mouthing and cursing a sweet old lady I had grown up with who lived nearby and who had always been a surrogate grandma. He pissed me off and I told him to stick his job up his ass, or something like that. Rusty could be a real prick sometimes.

A short time later Rusty went back to Longview (where he quickly abandoned the job and the truck). Dad and I took a stroll through the old Angelina Mall. I drifted into the recruiting office and wound up talking with a Marine recruiter. He talked me into joining the Marines. He made lots of promises to get me into aviation, the filed I wanted, and I signed a lot of papers. Then I went home. I was supposed to board a bus in a couple days to get my physical and swear in.

I was waiting when the phone rang at home. It was an Air Force recruiter. The Air Force did not have a recruiter in Lufkin. This guy was in Nacogdoches. He’d seen the results from that military test and called because I had done well on it. He wanted to talk to me about joining when I graduated. I told him I quit. He said that sucks but with my scores on the test I could still sign up. The Marine recruiter had lied and said I had zero chance with the Air Force because I quit school. I told the guy about signing up with the Marines. He asked who the recruiter was. I told him. Then he said that guy was an asshole and was lying through his teeth. He asked if I’d sworn in and I said no and he said, “don’t go anywhere, I’ll be right there.”

My parents and I were all puzzled about what the Air Force recruiter had said. True to his word he was at our front door in less than an hour. HIs supervisor had come along with him. He came in and told me what he could do for me. He said forget the Marine guy, the papers meant nothing until I was sworn in. OK, I said, and I signed a bunch of papers for the Air Force recruiter.

I told the recruiter I needed to tell the Marine sergeant I was not going to join the Marines after all. The Air Force guy said, “don’t do that, he’s a real jerk and it will just be a bad situation.” I said he had a right to know and I called him. When I told him he clearly became angry and said don’t go anywhere. Then he slammed the phone down. I told the Air Force recruiter what he said. Then the Air Force recruiter said we should all go to Nacogdoches to finish my paperwork and leave before the Marine got there. I didn’t know why he was so adamant until the Marine showed up to our house in record time.

The Marine walked to our front door, looked at me through the screen, pounded on the door frame and said, “What the hell you mean you’re not going with me. You’ve already signed up.” He then opened the screen and stepped inside. He stood behind our couch. My mom and dad were on the couch. The Air Force guy and his supervisor were standing in the middle of the room. The Air Force recruiter told the Marine rather smugly that I had wanted the Air Force anyway and the Marine guy should just leave. There was real animosity between them. The Air Force recruiter said if the Marine wanted to fight they’d to outside so as not damage our furniture. My mother very nearly fainted. The Marine recruiter just shouted a collection of expletives and left, slamming the screen door and screeching his tires on the road.

I went to Nacogdoches and got all squared away. A day or so later I took a bus to Houston. I walked to the Continental hotel and spent the night with some other random recruit in a less than perfect room. The next day I took my physical and did fine, except I was overweight thirty pounds. I called the recruiter and told him. I said I’d loose it. He said call him when I did. He didn’t think I would. I did.

I went on a strict protein diet for a month. Then my scales said I was at the proper weight. The recruiter was surprised but happy. I went to Houston again and failed the weigh in by three pounds. That was on a Friday. Gloomily I called the recruiter. He asked me if I could lose three pounds by Monday. I said I’d try. I fasted from then to Monday when the recruiter picked me up and I rode with him to Houston where I passed the test and swore in as a United States Airman. I and finally accomplished something I could be proud of.

I was given a delayed enlistment, meaning a few months would pass before I went to Basic Training. I took a temporary job as a construction laborer until March, when I boarded a bus for Houston again. There they put us all on an airplane and flew us to San Antonio. From the airport we were carried to Lackland Air Force Base where my saga continues… for another day.

As you can see already, I’ve lived a rather convoluted life. This little foray into my childhood only covers part of what happened to me. It geta a little crazier as time goes on. In time all those stories will be here. Up to now you have learned about my life as Hubert. I drug my ass through Basic Training. Then I took a bus to Wichita Falls, where I’d be trained as an Air Conditioning and Refrigeration Technician. It wasn’t anywhere near aviation, as I’d wanted, nor was it in electronics. But the Air Force had given us a battery of tests and found out that I was better suited to this type of work so, there I went. Soon I transition from being Hubert to being Teddy Bear, later to Teddy and then just Ted. In most ways and for decades I escaped that name I’d been cursed with.

To say my life has been convoluted and complicated from the day I entered the Air Force to now would be to make a tremendous understatement. It has been a wild ride; not always fun or exciting. You’ll find a lot more about my life on this website.

I have created this memoir because I have stories to tell not only that you might enjoy but also because you might lean a few lessons. Also, I want my kids and grandkids to know what their dad’s and granddad’s life has been like. I want them to step into my world and discover what life can be about and how to avoid a few pitfalls I endured. I want them (and you) to get a glimpse into what life was like for a Generation Jones guy.

Many famous and infamous people share their memoir. I am neither famous nor infamous. I’m not the ‘average joe’ either. My story is neither a rise to the top nor bounce to the bottom but something in between, a screwy yo-yo bouncing up and down controlled only by the Fickle Finger of Fate.

There have been a few wonderful times in my life. There’s been lots of times in my life full of grief, or anger, or confusion. Some of this story is hard to tell. Some of it I might not ought tell at all but it all works together to form one hell of a narrative. In the end I have to say that even though I would have done most of these things differently I did not have a boring life and I learned many extraordinary things along the way. Now read on. There’s much more to come.

Ted Gresham

May, 2026