My Life
and Times,
Per Year.
Here’s a fast walk through all my born days…
This page holds little snippets, little vignettes, from my life. For longer pieces there’ll be links.
I was born Hubert James Gresham on August 29, 1957, in Lufkin, Texas. My dad’s name was E.C. and my mom’s name was Ilene. Dad worked for KTRE radio when I was born. Mom was always and forever a housewife. I had two older siblings, a brother named Bobby (Robert James), 8 years my senior and a sister named Vickie Jean, 9 years older than me. We lived a lower-middle-class life. The family lived in a small rental house a few miles out Highway 103 West.
We moved to the only family home I can remember, a small two bedroom frame house located on a dirt road off Highway 103 not far from town. The radio station’s “transmitter building” and radio towers were just a quarter mile on down the road past out house.
My sister Rebecca Virginia (Becky) was born in June of 1960. The two of us were called mom and dad’s “second family” since we were so much younger than our own siblings. We had a happy life, I think, through those years. We played a lot, went to Murfreesboro, Arkansas (my parent’s home town) very often, and spent a lot of time on a lake or river. I played around in the yard and learned to fish. My mother played games with us and taught us handcrafts.
I have no memory of those years, with one exception…
Some time before I started to school we were all out behind the house in our garden. There were some old logs burning. My sister and I were just playing around the edge of the fire while my brother kept chopping the wood. I walked behind him once as he swung back with that ld double-bit ax. I was too close. He hit me in the head on the left side. It looked like he’d hit me in the eye. My wife was frightened out of her mind, of course. She grabbed me up and ran to get some transportation. My dad had the car at work.
She got a neighbor to carry me to the hospital. I only have a slight memory of being hit and then of being lugged by my screaming mother as she ran along the old road looking for help. It turned out that I did not have a damaged eye. The ax struck my forehead just above my left eye. I remember later on lying in bed trying to sleep with my eye so swollen I could not close it. The scar was visible for a very long time.
September 1963 – Starting School
I began school at Hudson, ISD. At the time it was a small school with the entire school at the same place. It’s located on State Highway 94, a few miles west of Lufkin. In the era when African American citizens were fighting for equality and schools were becoming integrated, Hudson was an all-white school. For a very long time black people would not dare live in the Hudson district. Black students didn’t appear on the Hudson campus until long after I left. Hudson was such a wonderful school, not
My first teacher’s name was Ms. Butler. I remember that because we always made fun of it, calling her Miss Butt. Not to her face, of course. Life was mostly normal for my first two years. The only significant event during those years was when Kennedy was shot. That day we did not know what happened but I remember teaching stopped and teachers were walking around with little radios at their ear and most were crying. School was out for several days. I sat at home watching the TV show the news and the funeral of J.F.K. I have no other memories of those two years.
Third Grade – 1966 – 67
Third grade was a horrible experience. My teacher did not like me. Maybe because of how she treated me. or something else. I can’t remember, But this was also the year people decided I was the class joke. From that year, life sucked at school. It’s a long story. Read about it here.
Fifth Grade – The Bus Wreck
It wasn’t really a wreck or crash, really, more of a mishap. It could have been a wreck, a bad one, but our quick-thinking driver kept it from being one. We were on a very old bus that day, the substitute bus used when our regular bus broke down. I and my sister rode on Route 8, driven by Roby Christopher. He was a middle-aged teacher at Hudson with whom I had a history class with later on.
Our bus route went down Farm Road 706 from Hudson School to State Highway 103. It began dropping students soon after, working around through dirt roads and back to Highway 103 until it reached my house, about an hour after leaving school. On this day we were riding the bus along as it came down FM 706. The farm road went down a steep hill before it dead-ended into Highway 103. As the bus started down the hill it began taking up unnatural speed. I learned later the brakes had gone out.
Rather than just letting the bus zoom across the highway, possibly hitting cars on the highway and certainly slamming into a grove of trees across the road he pulled the bus over and into the ditch. It was a bumpy ride. My sister and I were seated over the rear wheel and beneath a metal book rack sticking out from the wall of the bus above us. The bumping caused me to lurch up and hit my head on the book rack.
When the bus reached the place where the two highways crossed it hit a high bank. The bus flew upwards high into the air. Students and books flew around everywhere. I still remember it seemed like ages that the bus was high up and sailing down on the highway. When it hit the ground, moving forward much more slowly it lurched right suddenly. Mr. Christopher had turned the wheel fully to the right so the bus jerked hard when it hit.
Back on the ground, the bus slowly rolled along the side of Highway 103 until it came to a stop on the shoulder. Mr. Christopher started checking on everybody and we all piled out of the bus. Nobody was injured badly. I think I had a knot on my head from hitting the book rack. Papers, books and notebooks were scattered all over the bus. Many on the bus used this excuse for not having their homework the next day.
My sister and I survived the ride. The next day we were all minor celebrities. My teacher had me write a short few paragraphs about the event which she posted on the classroom bulletin board. It was the first thing I ever wrote that other people read.
Random Memories
My Family Through The Years
Life was not very good to my family through those years.
There was one event that changed my family quite a bit and for which I’ve always blamed myself, though I probably should not have. It was a typical evening four us in the spring. I don’t remember which year. As I was prone to do, I took a big beetle into the house when we went inside. My brother, the prankster, took it from me and threw it on my older sister. She didn’t think it was funny. She screamed bloody murder and then proceeded to throw a full glass of water on my brother, who was sitting on his bed. It soaked the bed.
All of that started a fight that went on seems like for hours, involving those two and my mom. Suddenly my mom hit the floor and seemed like she was not breathing. My older brother and sister panicked, tried to revive her, and called dad at work. Eventually she recovered and no ambulance was called but everyone was subdued after that.
The event passed but everything seemed to change in our house. I know the whole event fucked my head up quite a lot.
Monday-itis
There was one time during school when I was maybe in the second or third grade when I began getting nasty stomach aches Monday morning. I would complain and mom would yell at me and demand I go on to school. Sometimes I did, sometimes not. The family all thought I was just trying to get out of school by faking illness. I wasn’t. I really had stomach aches.
Eventually my mom took me to the doctor. That was because one morning I was backing away from her and fell upon a bicycle lying in the yard. I landed on a bolt sticking out of the hub, the wheel axle. It tore a nice, neat hole in my rear. I was home that day and went to the doctor.
The doctor said I was over-eating over the weekend and that caused me to have undigested food in my stomach on Monday, which made me sick. This is what I remember. The reality was that I probably had psychosomatic pain caused by my really not wanting to go to school. Either way, it was a fairly significant time in my childhood.
My older brother and sister began to go out and sometimes get into trouble. My brother started drinking.
KTRE
My dad worked for KTRE Radio, 1490 AM, a very popular station in the sixties. It was owned by the same people who owned KTRE TV. Both stations were operated from an office in downtown Lufkin when I was a kid. The station played swing and pop music. (That must be where I got my love for swing.) I have lots of great memories about the station, too many to catalog here. Read the full story here!
The years from 1970 to 1975 so such a tremendous change in my life. I became a teenager in 1970. Thirteen. Junior High.
Jesus Saves!
Once upon a time Jesus came to School. How different my life was for a short period of time. Then he left and I returned to being the butt of jokes again. This story describes when I had my first love, my first “calling,” and my first major humiliation in front of a big group of kids at church.
Space Ships
When I was in nineth-grade, I think, I was placed in “dummies” level classes, not because I had limited abilities but because I had not done well and my grades showed it. That year school was pretty easy for me. There was one class, science, that I really enjoyed. I was in class with many of the bullies that picked on me but we had a good teacher who kept us interested in our class.
When we started studying about space our teacher asked us to all draw a spaceship. Most of the kids scribbled some sort of rocket-shaped thing with levels for people in it. None of them were done with much thought or any consideration of reality. My entry was very different.
I remember getting some large sheets of drafting paper and designing a ship that could become reality. I was already a Star Trek (TOS) fan and had my head in the clouds all the time. I drew out a ship with two rings connected by a shaft-like unit. The rings were for artificial gravity and were where the crew lived and slept. The central shaft held the main control room and the engines. I don’t remember what kind of engines I came up with. My drawings were very detailed and I spent days on them..
My teacher recognized me for my effort and praised my work. It was one of the few times I was congratulated by fellow classmates for something I accomplished.
Vickie
I was about fourteen years old when the Collins family moved in down the road from us. We didn’t have a big neighborhood, just a few houses along the west side of a small road. The house at the end of the road had been occupied all the time I was growing up by an old couple and some of their children, I think. The old man there had his hundredth birthday while living there. He claimed to be a former bandit with Jesse James and told lots of stories but those are lost in time. They passed on and the house became empty. Until The Collins family came.
The Collins family consisted of two girls and a boy. The oldest girl was my age. Her sister was pretty young. The boy was much younger, maybe six or so. The woman who lived there was the children’s step-mother. I do not at all remember Mr. Collins or Mrs. Collins very much. I do remember the kids, especially Vickie.
Vickie was, to my young brain, the most beautiful girl in the world. And she liked me! For one wonderful summer we played around together. She would often ride behind me on my banana bike. It was one of the happiest times of my life. We had a lot of innocent fun together.
There was the night, then, after some church event, that I went down to their house and hung out in the girls’ room. While I was there Vickie’s sister, whose name I can’t remember now, proceeded to change into her night clothes. That was interesting. HA! Later, Vickie put some music on the record layer and we danced. If you could call it dancing. I sort-of waltzed around the floor while Vickie simply stood on my feet. Wow.
First Job