Section 3 of 14
Meandering through the county are a skein of shallow rivers. Most days they move slowly, but a summer storm can send the Lampasas and Leon rivers swirling out of their banks.
The towns of Belton and Temple lie in the heart of Bell County, where the rough-edged and scenic west gives way to the smoother and tamer east. The towns have minor differences. Temple boasts more people and fine hospitals, while Belton, six miles to the southwest, is the seat of county government as well as Mary Hardin-Baylor, the county’s prestigious private college. But the people of the two towns are much alike. They speak frankly and slowly. They value hard work and independence. They voted for a Republican, Herbert Hoover, in 1928 because they couldn’t bring themselves to vote for a Catholic, the Democrat Al Smith. Yet when Franklin Delano Roosevelt ran four years later, they preferred him to Hoover by ten to one, and repeated that vote ratio three more times for FDR. Even more amazingly, in 1938 the two towns and the surrounding farms of Bell County found it in their hearts to cast 2,335 votes for W. Lee "Pass the Biscuits, Pappy" O’Daniel, a populist flour salesman who ran for governor on a platform of the Golden Rule and the Ten Commandments. O’Daniel’s three opponents got a total of thirty-four votes in Bell County.31
Temple and Belton live for football, an autumn religion requiring Friday night worship. They save their year-round Sunday devotion for Christianity flavored with fundamentalism.
Henry was a Baptist. The four youngest Waskow children received their scripture lessons at Dyess Grove Baptist Church in eastern Bell County. They got their grade school lessons in a one-room schoolhouse—in English.
The Waskow home where Henry spent much of his boyhood was south of Temple, downhill from a cemetery. The house was crowded—the girls and the parents slept in bedrooms, but the boys slept on the back porch. The porch could be opened to air circulation during the miserable Texas summer, and closed off by tarps during the winter when a surprisingly cold wind, which Texans call a "norther," blows down from the Great Plains. In the yard were a garden, a stand of pecan trees that supplemented the family diet, a smokehouse, a barn, and a chicken-wire enclosure that the oldest boys had built around a tree trunk. Squirrels frolicked inside the cage, running inside a revolving wire cylinder and eating pecans snatched from the fingers of Mary Lee, who poked the shells through the spaces in the wire mesh. The children’s love of squirrels and other wild animals came from their mother, who named every chicken and mule in the family’s barnyard. But it had its limits. Mary Lee recalled a time when August and John Otto took clothespins and pinned her kittens to the clothesline by their tails until she cried for them to stop.32
Also in the yard stood an outhouse. Few rural homes had an indoor toilet; Henry’s introduction to such conveniences came at the Bell County Courthouse in Belton.33
Like nearly all cotton growers of the 1920s and 1930s, the Waskows had little money. During the 1920s, American cotton sales to overseas markets were slashed by the increasing production of cheap Egyptian and Indian cotton. In addition, American overproduction hurt the domestic market. Unable to find orders overseas, the American cotton industry stockpiled its crop without substantially cutting production. The resulting glut had cut the price of American cotton from 18.7 cents a pound in 1929 to 5.5 cents in 1932.34 By 1933, there was enough cotton in warehouses to meet all possible demand—even if not a single boll were picked that year.35
Having little income, Mary Goth Waskow made clothes for her children out of flour and sugar sacks. She occasionally received a piece of new material or a hand-me-down from her sister, Rosa, who had six daughters, or from Frank Waskow’s sister Ida Harris in Houston. Each Waskow child usually had one pair of shoes, which had to last through work, play, school and church. Most shoes were passed from child to child, but Mary Lee recalled that she had new shoes more often than the rest of the Waskow children. That’s because before the hand-me-down shoes could be handed down to the last child, they had worn out.
Henry and Mary Lee had a ritual to keep their church shoes clean. Their Sunday morning walk from home to church took them across a small river, near their farm but far from any bridge. At the ford, the water splashed two to three inches deep over the smooth gravel. The children removed their shoes and socks and carried them across the creek. On the other side, they sat and dried their feet with a towel, hung the towel in a tree, put their socks and shoes back on their feet and continued on their way. After the services, they repeated the ritual on the way home.
Despite privations, Henry wrote that "a fellow never had a better family than mine."36
His father, Frank Waskow, was kind-hearted but expected his children to obey.37 He seldom had to correct Henry, who worked hard at school and at home. The boy regularly read books and Temple’s daily newspaper—for free, at the library or the courthouse—and was serious-minded. As a young child, he faithfully performed his chores. They included carrying milk pails to the house, shooing the dogs away from the cattle and adding wood chips to the fire in the smokehouse where the Waskows cured their own meat. Henry also drove the mule around a circular track at the hay-baling machine, and he passed that chore along to Mary Lee when she was old enough to do it. Like all of the Waskow children, Henry chopped and picked cotton, and collected pecans.
"Then sometimes he’d drive the wagon and I’d ride along when we were gathering corn," said Mary Lee Waskow, who now goes by her married name, Cox. "The [older] boys would get unhappy with us—we’d be giggling and getting silly about something, and they’d throw ears of corn at us."38
Their silliness was seldom enough trouble to earn Henry a reprimand, Cox said. But when Frank Waskow did chastise his youngest son, the boy was "very meek and mild."39
At an early age, Henry exhibited a sensitive streak and was especially protective of his younger sister.40 Once, Mary Lee had trouble sleeping because she couldn’t ignore the mournful lowing of their cattle. Too often they went hungry during the lean years of the 1920s and ‘30s, she said.
"I just cried and cried when I heard it," she said. "Henry tried to comfort me. He said, ‘They’ll be all right.’"41
Two times that she recalled her youngest brother getting into mischief were accidents that became a part of family lore.
The first occurred when his mother had gone to the fields to work, leaving Mary Lee and Henry, who was seven or eight years old, in the care of their sister Selma. Henry sat atop a giant butter churn as the three of them played outside. Something gave way, and Henry fell into the cylindrical chum. It was just the right size to fit snugly around the rear end of his folded-up body, but his head and legs stuck out above the rim. At first, the girls laughed. Then, they couIdn’t yank Henry free.
"We pulled and pulled. We couldn’t get him out," Cox said. "Of course, we were crying and having a fit, and rolling that thing around. We beat on it with sticks. We tried everything. Mom came, and—oh, she was unhappy with us. Finally she had to call in one of the brothers from the fields, and between them they finally dragged him out of there."42
The second time occurred a few years later, when Henry’s curiosity gave his mother a bigger scare and possibly earned him his only nickname. The Waskows lived near a farmer who had a big family and supplemented his income by making and selling white lightning, which he stashed in his basement. The home brew not only was illegal during Prohibition but also was frowned upon by many of Bell County’s stem Christians.
When Henry was about nine years old, Frank Waskow and his children paid a visit to the neighbor’s home and stayed long enough for a sit-down meal. Tables were prepared for the kids, and the farmer, a good host, disappeared into the basement for a moment to fetch something for the adults. When he reappeared, he carried a tumbler half-full of clear liquid, which he held out toward Frank Waskow. Apparently thinking it was water, Henry snatched the glass out of the farmer’s hand and gulped the liquid down.
The detonation was immediate. Henry wobbled and acted silly. His brothers had to help him walk home across the fields. Waiting at the Waskow farmhouse was their mother, whose anger about Henry’s condition was tempered by her need to attend to her sick son. She wrapped him in a quilt and placed him in a chair in front of a crackling fire, thinking it best to sweat the alcohol out of Henry’s body. Instead Henry became dehydrated. Then he became violently ill.43
His introduction to alcohol was not a happy one, but undoubtedly his brothers found it amusing—at least, once he had returned to his senses. In later years, Henry, the serious boy whom no one ever called Hank, was known as "Snort"—slang for a quick drink of hard liquor—to his brothers.44
Henry’s mother was gentler and more sensitive than her husband. She read her Bible frequently and encouraged Henry’s love of books and probably his love of coffee. She made bread every other day, and an especially large batch on Saturdays so the Waskow children could invite friends to visit on Sunday afternoons. Mary Waskow specialized in cinnamon rolls and coffee cake, and filled a corner of her quilt box with a tin of tea cakes that her children were welcome to raid when they got home from school.45
When Henry was ten, he wrote in his "memory book" that his mother was his favorite friend. Upon the line where he was supposed to put the name of his favorite girlfriend, he wrote "not any."46
Girls, however, admired him. He had an even temper. He seldom initiated conversations at school, but he responded warmly to those who addressed him. He grew into a baby-faced young man with brown eyes and light brown hair that he kept either sandpaper short or immaculately combed when he let it grow out. He avoided sports, perhaps because he was slightly built and a few inches under six feet tall—too small for the competitive football and basketball teams at Belton and Temple high schools—but more likely because he just wasn’t interested in competitive athletics.47 His classmates, when asked sixty years later what Henry did to have fun, said they did not picture him in games or amusements. Instead, they recalled him in the simple pleasures of thoughtful conversation and helping others.
It seemed natural for him to want to teach. He told his younger sister it was his life’s ambition.
"I can remember him saying in the cotton patch, especially in the spring, when they were chopping cotton and he’d count how many stems he chopped out, ‘Some day I’m not going to have to mess with this red stem cotton any more,"’ Cox said.48
