Food Stamps Program Begins In Dallas County

I grew up hungry as a child, with frequent periods of a sole diet of rationed rice or oatmeal, or perhaps a single pan of cornbread split between 3 boys and a mom for the supper.

I was 17 before I realized that white people could get welfare, and that was because after my mother remarried our step dad drove us to California to visit family and I asked about the government marked food cans in their garage, where they came from, how did they get them.

She worked full time and the mornings started early as rain or shine she would walk to the bus stop, and she got home late and had plenty to do in a house with 3 little boys,so I didn’t see much of her, but something that fascinates me is how when there was only cornbread, she would sit at the table with us and talk nicely and be very motherly and indulgent in listening and sharing with us, and even then I knew she was distracting us from what we were eating, she was impressive.

Wow, interesting (and rough) childhood. I grew up in the ‘burbs with Dad having a great job at General Electric. We fortunately never knew want like that. My mom grew up in a very modest small-town Idaho family and probably knew times like that, but she never told us stories. Her brother went on to a successful career in lumber sales at Weyerhaeuser. Mom married my dad at the University of Idaho and left small-town life.

I could tell you wild stories about my dad picking us up as little kids and then disappearing for days without leaving food, in an unfinished house on a bayou, that sort of thing was common with him and I have incredible stories such as a shack he had built on stilts in the bay at Freeport on the Texas coast on a sandbar the size of a car, surrounded by water leaving us alone with nothing but a beat up old race boat and crab traps, and all the close calls we used to have in those situations, and then he would show back up, and take us home or if he was bucks up put us in a taxi for the ride back to Houston, not to mention helping to wreck old buildings as unpaid help, when he was doing demolishing, or getting the same treatment from him deep in Mexico when we were so little, he was somewhat indifferent to kids.

When he was rolling in dough it could be better, for instance my brother and I being set up in the fanciest hotel in Houston (the Shamrock Hilton was tops in the region at the time and he illegally gambled there a lot for huge stakes), unlimited room service, or fishing off his 44 foot yacht when he had that, or maybe a 28 foot Chris Craft, or his shrimp boat for awhile, he was a wild guy, with a lot of high rolling business and gambling, and some periods where we would visit and it would be pinto beans and tap water.

I have countless stories about him that would blow your mind if I told them in detail, plus he was always a bit of a mystery to us and that never changed, but the money sometimes came in big for him, and mystery surrounded him and his world of crooked Houston lawyers and judges and treasure hunting with Mexican police chiefs, he became friends and made deals with people like Larry McMurtry of Lonesome Dove, he had no box that he was in, he moved in his own space, it probably would have helped if he had paid child support, but that kind of thing escaped him.

You should hear the stories about my life, wild and unstructured with so many periods of high lights, yet not from one thing, such as only military adventures, or career related stories, or college days stories, or the single points and short period of most lives when they talk about exciting things outside of normal, mine are wide ranging and cover different decades, different ages, different circumstances and types of situations, and of very different adventures from each other, I made my adventures wherever I went and in fact being footloose and a drifter was helpful to my adventuring and was actually required for it.

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