Money - my ather

Daddy worked from the time he was little. I could say I did too, but he was good at it. He was famous for how fast he could pick cotton. From about age 15 he became THE farmer of the family while siblings, older and younger, went to find their livelihoods elsewhere. Dad (Daddy's father) was stove up most of the time. I’ve novelized this story for those interested.

Daddy read Dad’s Socialist literature. He read everything he could get his hands on – novels and history mostly. He had thought he might be a lawyer. He worked all sorts of jobs along with his farming and was the iceman when he started going with Mama. The crash of ’29 got him interested in the merry-go-round of money, especially the concept of speculation and it’s inherent harm to economies and, especially, the concept of valuation based on productivity as opposed to perceived potential worth. He grubbed out iron tough mesquites, bought a few acres here and there. He scratched a little money together for his first farm and went in with his brother and his nephew and bought land that he cleared (their cash, his muscle). He got a little mineral rights out of the deal. He built a few houses around and then when the crops were in the family went to Corpus Christi and Galveston to build Navy bases. He kept farming and then added side jobs like working tower on oil drilling rigs (that means climbing 50-75 feet up the derrick and catching swinging, slamming pipes to attach to the drill string). He built a few more houses. And raised fantastic crops, including vegetables he and Mama canned and later froze. He bought a few cows and ran them on various fields. He leased land. He made the $10000 crop. His and Mama’s seven kids were all phenomenally healthy. Daddy and some partners and with the help of Mr. Truman started a Farmer’s Coop. The local ginner cursed and went to honest labor.

Then the drought and then cancer.

Without the dole of free cheese, flour, corn meal, canned pork, butter (real), dry beans, dry milk and a few other staples (produced as surplus up north somewhere) to go with the pitiful dried up garden crops AND without the loan shark (Texas had a 10% max interest by law then – they charged more) he would have had to sell his land, which was debt-free, and quit. The banks wouldn’t loan money during a drought. Hospitals had to be paid – no insurance and no Medicaid.

He struggled back to solvency. We boys got jobs and payed our own ways to college. The girls found husbands early in life.

Then the gas wells came in. In his late years, Daddy and Mama went to New York and Alaska and Mama went to see the twins in Hawaii during Viet Nam. The bank loved him. When he died (at 86), there was the sum of two hundred thousand dollars and a small part of the farm left for Mama to live out the rest of her life (‘til almost 92).

I learned a few lessons: building houses seems to be a good bet for side money. The oil field brings in steady cash, sometimes. Farming might kill you (the cancer was caused by cotton poison – arsenic). Capital is so dear that you should never expect any to come without thick wires attached. Sometimes even bad money can get you out of a jam.

Money - My Roots

The human condition, as I’ve read in historical accounts, religious writings, fiction (sometimes as true as “history”) and observed personally (including what others have told me) is harshly controlled by money. Children know this early. When Daddy made $10,000 off his cotton crop in 1948, it became a legend in the family. When Tennico bought a lease on the eighty acres in 1953, Daddy bought a new Pontiac, finished off the house (a bathroom) and we took a vacation. And the negatives were to come later.

Mostly negatives controlled the lives of my grandparents. My grandfather Forest Henry Hudson, born during the last days of the US Civil War, was carried soon after by his parents from Mississippi to Texas. Less than a year later his father died while serving as a physician in a typhoid epidemic in the Nacogdoches area. That left his mother, with four small children, to manage during reconstruction and other financial lows that followed in East Texas. Though his mother had tasted luxury growing up and in her early marriage in Alabama (her close family produced a governor and later a Secretary of the Navy – also Truman Capote was a not-distant cousin), they remained in poverty for several years. However, Forest (called “Dad” by everyone) was in a lot of ways “up and coming” when he reached marrying age. He married well (from the perspective of money) but by the end of the century, and a couple of recessions, including the 1890s panic, he was widowed, broke and wondering what life held for him.

Dad emerged into the twentieth century as a socialist/utopianist. He saw financial institutions and governments as primarily corrupt and the society structured around agricultural production as upside down. Here is my interpretation of that structure (sort of a pyramid) as influenced by my father’s and my own mid-twentieth century observations, stories like Places in the Heart and John Grissom’s Painted House, and a few history books – to mention a few sources: 1) primo was the bank and its share holders 2) next were the doctors, lawyers, insurance brokers and other “service professionals” 3) following was the ginner and the storage middlemen 4) then came the retailers 5) finally were the land holding producers – the farmers (all of those above improved their position by being bank share holders) 6) after these were those who worked for the above, including such as school teachers and road workers, etc. 7) on bottom were the share croppers, producing for those who held some position above and scratching a slight living 8) people justa passing through. Dad dreamed of and preached about ways of altering this structure to the benefit of the producers and his whole family suffered because of it. After physical mishap and ruinous financial decisions, he wound up in south Texas, dry farming on 40 acres that Daddy worked for him (with Dad’s, Granny’s and his siblings help). He died about the end of WW2, somehow thinking maybe the Russians had it right.

There is less to say about Granddaddy Hick’s economic thinking. He was converted from his worldly ways at about age 21, quit smoking, drinking and gambling and then quit the Lodge and the Klan. He would serve the Lord. Making a living was an afterthought. He wasn’t a preacher or visionary, but looked at money as primarily a nuisance, perhaps like he thought Jesus must have. They always made do and Mama’s older brother seemed to skim what extra they ever had. He lived to be ninety-nine and on his birthday quipped: “ninety-nine, never paid a fine.” I could add: never cheated, never lied very much, never lusted out loud, never strived for gain, never worried much about more than how he would feed his chickens if his corn ran out and if a killing frost would come in November and take away his fall garden. He did fast and pray – saw a doctor for the first time when he was seventy-five and had had a wreck that knocked the stuffings out of his head. He probably never saw a doctor again, ‘til he died. He and Granny and Mama saw money as a highly negative influence, “like the Bible says,” they said.

I Did Not Serve

I did not serve. I didn’t join any military service or any religious order nor go to the peace corp. I grew up, put myself through college and then went to work. There were flirtations with possible officer’s programs. I was “close” for getting into the Air Force Academy (free education), but the psychological test was hard. It asked me whether I would rather go to a dance, watch airplanes land and take off or stay at home and read. There are five thousand things I would rather do than the three, but I had to choose one of the above. I may also have missed out because I was a little color blind.

Somewhere after my nineteenth birthday, I realized I had no desire to be a pilot. That was also when we found out that a hot war in “Indo China” was brewing. I was in the Army ROTC at the time and was fast realizing that the Army and all its chicken shit regulations, procedures and protocols were beyond my endurance. I’m sure if a gun were being held to my head I could have made it through to some sort of end, but it saw, closely, that it was not a life I wanted to put up with. A little later I was convinced that the Marines PLC would be the right thing for me. The marines were serious. They were about getting things done, like invading a sovereign state that had not attacked us except on what they considered their land (Halls of Montezuma) and rounding up a bunch of Barbary pirates and getting their own tails whupped (Shores of Tripoli). I’ve always been burdened by knowing our country’s history and the often sorry excuses we had for going to war. These things and a few others, notwithstanding, helped me let the summer experience of the Platoon Leader’s Corp pass me by. But Vietnam was looming and right before I graduated from college I dashed down and got myself admitted to the Air Force OTS. The week before I was to join up, my daddy called me and told me the draft board would let me take the job I’d been offered at Texas Instruments – it had engineer somewhere in the name. We were going to make a giant computer that the military envisioned itself using. Later, I got a high lottery number and then passed by on one side or the other of the draft net.

Daddy didn’t serve either, except as a farmer and navy base builder. He was too old for WWII anyway – in his thirties. His father before him did not serve, being born during the end of the Civil War and thus too old for any twentieth century war to end all wars. His father, however, was prime to be conscripted into the “saw bones” brigade – doctors who followed the troops and relieved the survivors of bloody remnants. But he hid out. He spent the early 1860s somewhere in the countryside of South Alabama or Mississippi and occasionally made a baby with his wife, who told no one where he was. Later, in Texas, he gave service to those he chose and contracted typhoid and died, having a post mortem declaration that he had “served” his community.

Perhaps none of my direct ancestors fought in wars, in the last millennium. I have no record of any doing so on my mother’s side either. There was a cousin who went native, like in “The Heart of Darkness”, and some record of a great uncle of my grandmother being some sort of officer in the Confederacy.

I probably would fight a war that put my family in harm’s way. I am convinced that none of the wars fought since I was aware (say 1948) were worth what they cost. I believe that the people who died there died in vain. The wars were not in my best interest or in the interest of the United States of America. They were pitiful attempts to prove some sort of point like – “We have to make a stand”, “If we don’t attack, they will think we have no stomach for war”, “If Saigon falls, so will Manila, Bangkok, etc.”

I know that we, as the richest nation need to defend ourselves. I don’t know the full argument yet – maybe I’ll work it out later. But for now, I am trying to find out how to identify roadside bombs before they blow up “our troops”. I do not believe as some do that those who choose to be warriors should pay the penalty for the leaders who send them to war.

Making Jesus Come Back

Though this topic warrants many books and will, perhaps, not play out in the lifetimes of any reading this, I must address it. I grew up on the edge of the controversy – when will Jesus come again and how will he come? My family always said, not withstanding all the preachers who came and went and how many radio preachers my grandmother sent money to,- “we don’t know; we can’t know; anyone is a fool to say they know.” They had bible verses to back this up. Notwithstanding, there was a print of a painting on Granny Hicks’ wall at all the places she lived in my lifetime that depicted the event, replete with 1950ish trains, planes and automobiles, driverless, crashing. Some in white raiment were rising from graves and mothers were leaving their meal preparation to join a Raphaelite Jesus in the sky. The caption below read “The Rapture”. This is the “event”, from a set of Bible fragments along with the writings of a few preachers who arose from Protestantism in the same era as Shakers, Mormons, Brethren, etc. (the common thread is making the teachings of Jesus secondary to later revelations), that became first a cottage industry, the money machine along with border radio and finally the mega million dollar financial colossus that includes Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell and Ken Lahey (of “Left Behind” fame). Personally, I don’t know how the “end times” will play out, but this late-arriving, science fiction-like scenario does not sound like what Jesus had in mind when he spoke of His Kingdom.

So why do I worry about such? These people are hijacking “Evangelical Christianity” which I once thought I was part of. A couple of years ago, on NPR, I heard an interview of “leading fundamentalists” discussing their excitement that the number of influential people now in the US government are bible believing Christians – meaning “dispensationalists” they explained to Diane Rehm. Diane had not a clue, it seemed, to what they were talking about. This group claim as their leaders, a kind old soul - Billy Graham and frothy-mouthed John Hagee of San Antonio. The Sunday before the 2006 Texas gubernatorial election, Rick Perry, our good old boy governor, was in splashy evidence at Hagee’s church. I first came to know of Hagee back in the eighties when his daughter by his first wife was trying to make it on $100/month living expenses at Baylor (I knew one of her suite-mates). He was at the time sporting a new wife and a new church and developing his, what I call, “how can I make it ready for Jesus to come back?” theology. This approach includes using part of his millions to buy Russian Jews plane tickets to the West Bank while some of his fellow travelers are searching for a Red Heifer that must be found in order to rebuild the Third Temple in Jerusalem. AND it is this theology that drove Tom Delay’s and, perhaps, Bush’s Middle East policies. W is not your regular old Methodist.

The web is full of information about dispensationalist ideas and I encourage readers to look at a little of what our foreign policy is being based on. What does the God of Abraham think when he sees this scurrying around to force his hand? Hint – I will not be in the battle at Har Megiddo and I think too that Jesus will not be there as some nouveaux Leonidas slashing Arabs and effete San Franciscans, but will continue with his gift that is truth.

My start

From stone-bridge.blogspot.com credits to Jim Mcculloch, Austin TX.

The Texas Persimmon, Mexican Persimmon, Black Persimmon, Chapote, Diospyros texana as shown above in a picture I stole and modified, was the form from which I sought to further my striking power as a boy. Yokes, Ys, forks or bifurcations that fit my hand and provided support for “live” rubber and leather for sending rocks toward some imagined enemy or prey was what I sought in waking hours as well as dreams. This perfect creation, provided uniquely by the gray, slick-barked shrubby tree, became a symbol of goals set, the focus for found art I could sculpt further, the medium through which I could hone a grip and construction skills. I could, through this wild activity of making, grow toward becoming – an engineer, an artist, a biologist, a builder - to be what I do.

Thus, it is from this perspective I write - the perspective of the persimmon of my youth. It is the perspective of the search, but not the search for the answer – it is the search for the tool, the medium and/or the material from which I hew the object of art, of usefulness, and/or of innovation. All this to cleave toward hope and possibilities.

My topics will mostly focus on religion, politics, human industry and money with some diversions to talk about the glories of parenthood and of being an “observer of life” as my wife describes me.