Writing about someone that you spent the majority of your life with is not easy, especially if it has been nearly nine years since their death. Remembering is no longer painful, but bittersweet. Trying to project a picture of someone so special to me, to friends, family and acquaintances that will catch the essence of someone without making them sound more than they were or making me sound like I’m bragging is a tall order, but one I am attempting because living with Charley McMath for over 42 years was an adventure I will never forget, will always cherish and a lot of it bears repeating.
Let’s begin with a little family background. Charley grew up in Dallas, Texas in the late fifties and had wonderful family members on both sides of his family. Both sets of his grandparents were Godly people and big influences on his life. Charley’s middle name was Castle, after his mother’s maiden name, and whenever anyone in the family would talk about Charley they would say, “He takes after the Castles.” This was true, he got his good looks from the Castle Family and his wonderful, loving ways with all people he met. In fact, he never met a stranger. J.B. McMath, Sr. and Mae McMath, his father’s parents, were beautiful, Christian examples in the family for all to emulate. Charley got all his business sense from his grandfather J.B. His grandfather always wore a suit and white shirt to work every day and when Charley became a superintendent of schools, he did the same. He got his love of family history from his grandfather. Grandmother Mae would always take him traveling with her, and she always prayed and witnessed with people on the way. Charley’s mother was a beautiful woman who was a premier southern lady, the President of the Dallas Councils of PTA, and Charley inherited her ability to give speeches at the drop of a hat and entertain groups of people with his humor and stories. Charley was so much like his mother that they would compete, sometimes loudly, over who was in charge. Charley’s father, J.B. was an alcoholic for many years, but was finally changed by the power of Jesus Christ, and later became a missionary in Mexico with his wife, Mildred. I’m afraid Charley inherited his father’s addictive nature, but also his father’s love and zeal for Jesus Christ. One of his mottos was, “If one is good, two is better.” Anyone who knew him well knew this saying when it came to his consumption of coffee.
Even as a young man, Charley moved to the beat of his own drum. By the time he was twelve years old, he was on his own, without much supervision. I know of some of his exploits from this time period. He was allowed to go anywhere he wanted on his bicycle, so he went all the way to Carrollton, Texas on his bike one morning. A policeman gave him a ticket for running a red light, and he came home and hid the ticket behind a frame in his bedroom. His mother found it and when they went to pay the ticket, they shamed the policeman for giving him a ticket! (This is probably where his lifelong disdain for policemen who gave tickets came from.) He got up many Saturday mornings and hitchhiked somewhere. His parents didn’t know he was hitchhiking, because his curfew was that he just needed to get home before dark. He hitchhiked to El Paso and to Oklahoma. His hitchhiking career ended when he skipped school and went to Oklahoma but got caught when he returned home. Another time he built a raft so he could float down the Trinity River. Luckily, he talked his older brother John into taking him to the river in his car with the raft on top because when he put the raft in the water it promptly sank and if his brother hadn’t been along, he probably would have drowned. He also took a trip to New Orleans with all the Dallas Times Herald paperboys who had worked for the free trip with only the paperboy managers as chaperones. His mother found out about the lack of supervision for the trip when she found a caricature drawing of Charley and a playboy bunny under his bed. It was during this time of his life when he first became interested in Texas History. He would read guidebooks and study Texas maps for fun. All of this took place during the time his parents were not Christians and I believe the Texas History kept him busy while his father and mother were not available to him, it was a safe diversion for him. His brother John and Grandmother Mae would take him to historical sights all over the state.
Now comes the time of Charley’s life where I entered it. Charley and I were both high school seniors in 1968. I had a girlfriend, JoNell Toomer who was dating a boy from North Dallas High School even though we lived in Grand Prairie and went to Grand Prairie High. She was always telling my friends and I about the cute boys at North Dallas so one morning before school we went to their drugstore hangout across the street from North Dallas to try to meet some of the guys. I met a cute guy named Joe Phillips and was enthralled with him. In walked this short guy with the ugliest black banana pointed boots I had ever seen and also glasses that were thick as coke bottles. His name was Charley. He was good-humored and funny, and easy to talk to, but he also drove a pickup truck, which in my circle was pretty much instant death. We didn’t have room for individualistic thinkers like Charley either, even if they were nice. So the outcome to the drugstore meeting was that I went out with Joe and one of my friends went out with Charley. I dated Joe for several months until the summer of 1968 when we broke up.
I ran into Charley one night in that early summer while riding around with some friends and I took another look at him. He had just gotten back from a trip to California and he looked a lot better in cut-offs and sandals and with a dark tan than he did in boots! I learned that he had built a camper on his pickup for his trip to California (this made his pickup more appealing) and he and his friend Randy had set off for a road trip that all of us wanted to take in 1968, to the beach in California! Later on I found out that he only had permission to go to his brothers at the Shonto Indian Reservation in Arizona where he was teaching. He had called his parents and told them they had made a wrong turn in Arizona and ended up in California! I began dating Charley that summer and this was the beginning of our romance. We spent the summer getting to know each other, going to the lake to swim, going to drive-in movies and the regular movie theatres. We both knew we couldn’t plan too far ahead because I was going to East Texas State University in Commerce in the fall and he was staying in Dallas and going to El Centro Junior College. At the end of the summer we parted ways and we both assumed that was probably it for us dating. However, my roommate was dating one of his friends, and around Christmas time she broke up with him. I called Charley to go and check on him because he was quite upset about the breakup. We had a nominal conversation but when I got home that Friday evening from East Texas, Charley called me and asked if he could bring some of my things back to me (he had also called twice before I got home). I said yes, and he brought me an empty album cover. I knew then he was still interested in having a relationship with me. We begin to date again and got very serious very quickly. I usually tried to come in to Dallas during the week to visit Charley at school while he was working (he set up 8mm films for professors for class viewing, etc. and did the lights for plays) and we would visit in the coffee shop. It was during one of these visits that Charley proposed to me and I immediately said, “yes!” Years later when Charley read in the paper that El Centro was redecorating he went down there and got two of the chairs from the coffee house and brought them home to me as a gift. Over the years one of them disappeared but I still have one. We married the next November. Charley never ceased to be romantic and loving to me. Since he worked for the school system he always had to go and chaperone the high school proms, so each year I got to be the eternal prom queen. Fridays would always be our date times, and we would usually go to a movie and out to dinner. Many times we would come home and dance in the living room to music from our era. He always bought me yellow roses for anniversaries. I feel like I need to add to this that as Charley got older he lost all of his nerdy looks and became a very handsome man. I think the loss of his glasses to contacts was the best improvement. He was often mistaken for the actor Jan Michael Vincent and others thought he looked like John Denver. I could have not had a better husband and I feel so blessed for having him for 42 years.
An interesting aspect to Charley’s life was his extensive work career. He got his first real job when he was twelve working at Elliott’s hardware store sorting bolts. Sounds exciting, doesn’t it? Another junior high job he had was as a busboy at the Zuider Zee Seafood Restaurant. He didn’t particularly like that job either because he was the only white boy on the wait staff and he tended to get beat up a lot because of it. When he was in high school, since he had a pickup truck, he started a moving business. He ran an ad in the paper and would move people on the weekends. Sometimes they wouldn’t have the money to pay him so he would take historical items for pay. This was where he first got interested in antique guns. Another job he had in high school was to work at the Delman Theatre. They would always get the newest movies and this is where Charley got his love for good movies. The summer before we got married we both worked in an aerospace factory in Grand Prairie called Ling Temco Vought. It had no windows and was very dreary. I filed things and Charley worked on a dye machine, they were jobs we easily said goodbye to but they paid well and earned us enough money to get married. While we were in college both he and I had jobs in the library as part of a workstudy program for students with student loans. During college I found out I had to have some minor surgery and of course, we didn’t have any money to pay for it so Charley had to go to work for the summer to pay for the surgery. The only job Charley could find was on a pig farm! So he worked there to pay for my surgery. It was the only job he ever had that he just quit. The minute he could he got out of the pig business. Another college job was as a volunteer fireman for a little city outside of Commerce. After college, when we began to have children and I didn’t work, Charley would work summers in Dallas for General Motors in Arlington, Texas. This was the beginning of many jobs that were providentially provided for him. He drove new cars off the lot and worked on the assembly line. He worked hard and was well liked by his bosses. He came in one morning about half way through the summer to find that he had been let go. Then his boss came back and said, “No, don’t go, we can keep you.” Then the boss came back and said he was let go again. He left very dejected until he called North Texas and found out the second semester of summer school was starting the next day and he needed to go to get out of graduate school in a year. God had provided the timing. All of the other jobs that he had were school related. He started out as an elementary classroom teacher, then taught special-ed in high school. He taught special-ed in elementary school. This was providential because Charley was offered two jobs at this time, one with more pay and a little more prestige. He told me he felt like he should take the lesser job, which he did. At mid term an assistant principal job opened up and he got it, and that’s why he needed to take the lesser job. He became an assistant principal in high school, then an assistant superintendent, then a superintendent of schools. His first superintendent job was providential in that one of the board members was a devout Christian and had been praying for the right man for the job. When we went to interview for the job we declined it because it was such a remote area and didn’t provide a nice house. In a few weeks the board member called back and told Charley he thought he was the man for the job so we had to reconsider and take it. They ended up building us a new house. The next job was in Rosebud, Texas which was a politically difficult job for Charley, but we ended up being blessed by finding our son-in-law Neil while we were there. And, of course, London in Corpus Christi was providential in many ways, the greatest being that both my daughters moved here and now that I am a widow, it means everything to me to have them close by.
Charley was known for many of his spiritual traits. He went about his life on a day to day basis witnessing to just about everyone he knew and he made friends wherever he went. In his younger days when it was still acceptable to give hitch hikers rides, he would always pick them up if he was alone in the car. Before he let them out, he made sure they had been fed and that he had witnessed to them and prayed for their welfare. Later on in life he would talk to homeless men and meet them at the nearest restaurant and feed them and witness to them. Many men came to know the Lord through the compassion he had. I remember another time while he was helping a guy fix his car that he witnessed to him the whole time they were working and the man became a Christian that day. Whenever he had a friend or acquaintance that needed a job or money he was always the first in line to help. I don’t know how many people he gave money to over the years but I know it gave him great pleasure to be able to help. Over the years he hired so many of our friends to work for him that I’m surprised they didn’t fire him for nepotism. Even if he knew that they probably wouldn’t work out he would still give them a chance. He was always known far and wide for his hospital visits. He was always the one everyone would call and ask him to go to the hospital to make sure loved ones were saved before they died. He would always go and be greatly blessed by it. Many people are in heaven now because he took the time to visit and lead them to a relationship with Jesus. He would stay with people until they died when the family could not face it themselves. Actual church services were not his favorite avenue of serving the Lord. He had gone to church camp when he was about twelve years old and the speaker had described heaven as having your own little bed, a window, a bookstand, and a Bible. Charley thought that sounded more like hell than heaven! He did not like to be confined to one space for any amount of time. In fact, he always said that the way to find a good church was to listen to their band. If the band was good, the church was good. He wasn’t a man to listen to dry sermons. In his later life, Charley joined Adult Children of Alcoholics and received lots of insight into his background and much healing for his soul. He went on a Walk to Emmaus later in his life and was greatly affected by it. He went back as a speaker and enjoyed that avenue of service as well. Charley spent many years in the school system in an office and I know that there was never a person or child that he had contact with that he did not try to talk to about how much Jesus loved them. This was his element and his essence.
As the years passed, Charley never stopped doing and learning new things. His first love of Texas History remained and he was a student of Texas History his whole life. When he died we donated his Texas History collection to London School and there were over seven hundred books. This love led to another new hobby for him which was hunting arrowheads. He could look at the lay of the land and figure out where the Indians had camped and gotten water, so he would go to the creek banks and find arrowheads. He found hundreds of them over the years as well as clubs and primitive painted rocks. He would hike all day on land (with people’s permission) and come home with all kinds of things. He even found an antique gun once. When our girls got old enough to ski, the first time we went skiing he told everyone he would be able to ski because he read a book about it. We all laughed at him, but you know, he did do better than the rest of us. When we moved to Corpus he took up wind surfing, again teaching himself. He also loved going deep sea fishing when he had the opportunity. During our time in Corpus he began to collect and shoot guns at the gun range. He loved to go out with our son-in-law Neil and shoot, and he never lost a foot!
As a man who spent over thirty years in various school districts the bottom line in his theory of education was it was all about the children. He loved all students and did everything he could for them. He especially loved all the children who didn’t fit in or were considered “problem children.” He had a hands on approach to them as he did adults, and when a kid was a trouble maker or hurting they would end up staying in the office with Charley until they got better. I can’t tell you how many kids have come up to me over the years and thanked me for his interest in them. He would always try to take children on interesting field trips which is why we spent many years while at London School District taking eighth graders on a weeklong trip to Big Bend. He would take the seventh graders on a three day trip to San Antonio and the fourth graders on an annual daily trip to Goliad. He was a walking encyclopedia about these Texas historic places.
I can’t leave the subject of children without talking about what kind of a father he was. When the kids were small, he would come home from a long day at school at Lake Dallas and take my children and all their friends to the lake to swim. He had a pickup and he would load them all up in the back (not done anymore) and take off to swim. He would take them to what we called the “boot park” in Denton almost daily. As the girls got older he still remained a great part of their daily lives. Their favorite was for him to take them shopping. He would look at his watch and say, “You’ve got fifteen minutes, gather what you can.” Then he would purchase whatever they drug up. When they would come home from somewhere having just gotten a speeding ticket he would dry their tears and go up to the speed trap where the policeman was and talk the policeman out of giving them a ticket. The rest of the family would always laugh and tell him he wouldn’t be able to succeed but he always managed somehow to get them to tear up the ticket. I guess the least thing they liked about their dad during their teenage years was how he kept up with them. He never went to bed at night until they were all home, and if they were late, he met them at the back door to see why. There was no escaping him. Being a school superintendent, he also kept up with all their dates and interviewed each one before they took his daughters out. He was a wonderful grandfather too even though he didn’t get to be a granddaddy except to Charlie. He died when Charlie was about three but he took him to the park all the time and made him a wonderful sidekick.
Charley’s sickness started out very innocently. He had had prostrate cancer about fourteen years before, a very aggressive cancer, and we had all been grateful to God that it had not spread to any other areas of his body. But, he had developed a dry cough that he couldn’t seem to get rid of even though he had taken a round of antibiotics. When he had decided to go back to the doctor for it I was on the phone with my friend from California who is an RN and she asked me why he was going to the doctor. She told me to ask them to do a chest x-ray so I told him too. He was gone a long time and when he returned life would never be the same. They had taken the x-ray and found a large tumor behind his heart in his lung that was inoperable. We were devastated. We cried for three days while we tried to make plans for what to do. I will say that in those terrible days we said all we needed to about our lives together and what they had meant for both of us. One of my dear friends, Wendy McCoy, called me during this time and I answered the phone and told her what we were going through, she was a great comfort to us. We didn’t really want to tell anyone until we had more information. After a few days we decided to go to M.D. Anderson in Houston to see what their diagnosis would be. They confirmed that the cancer was inoperable but they were much more optimistic and wanted Charley to start chemotherapy to try to shrink the tumor, and they could do the chemo in Corpus. At this point, we rallied, we had always believed and experienced supernatural healing in our lives, and we looked to the Lord to bring his healing once again. We told our children of the seriousness of the cancer and we all set about getting through chemo and back to health. During this time, my mother died and Charley was able to give her graveside eulogy. It was so like Charley’s character to minister to my family and disregard his own serious needs. Charley remained healthy and had no real side affects from the chemo. After the first rounds of chemo we went back to M.D. Anderson and there was little shrinkage of the tumor. We were sent back to Corpus to try another round. We continued to pray for healing. The second time we went back to M.D. Anderson there was little change and it didn’t seem the chemo was working. Doctors there changed the chemo to a more aggressive one, and the new one was making Charley sick. His body began to get a rash on it, and it was on his face, which left him very self-conscious. He really began to withdraw from people around this time and had no desire to see anyone outside the family anymore. I think it was because he didn’t want anyone to see him not at his best. During this time, my brother-in-law died from lung cancer. This was really heart wrenching because Charley and my brother-in-law Phil had been uplifting each other for months. We were able to go up to Dallas for the funeral but Charley was still feeling sick. This was really the last trip Charley was able to make as his health continued to worsen. He began to have breathing problems and on a few occasions we had to go to the hospital to have Charley’s lungs drained of fluid. He began to lose his desire to eat anything. The doctors stopped his chemo and made plans to start radiation. We continued to pray and seek God for healing. The day before he was to start radiation he ended up in the hospital again. The next day they took him across the street from the hospital to the cancer center and gave him radiation. His condition began to worsen and his kidney began to shut down. That evening in the hospital Charley told Robin, our daughter, that they wouldn’t let him in to see Vanessa yet. Vanessa was our daughter who had died a few years before. The next morning Charley’s brother John left for the hospital early to be with his brother. I got there about 8:30 and bent over and gave Charley a good morning kiss. Charley stirred while I greeted him and I went over to the other side of the room to put my things down. In a few minutes John said, “Gwen, I don’t think Charley is breathing.” He was right, Charley was gone to his heavenly reward. He had waited for me to kiss him goodbye. In a few more minutes my children began to arrive. I had prayed that the Lord would help me to be strong enough in front of my children to be able to pray over Charley’s body and release his spirit to the Lord and he graciously allowed me to do so. We had prayed for his healing up until the last day of his life and I was able to give him to God to take him to paradise.
This December it will be nine years since Charley died and of course, I still think of him and miss him every day. It is not something you ever get over. Even though I haven’t met anyone else I still believe that people can fall in love again after such a loss as I have had. Many people have more than one love in their life. There are still times I feel his presence…a wind on my face at sunset on the beach, an echo of a song we danced to, or especially if I go out to London School where my grandchildren now attend, I can almost hear him in his office or hear his steps behind me in the halls.
It’s true that my family has had a lot of heartache. To lose two members of a five member family feels like we are now a tiny family. It reminds me of a farmhouse with a large porch with five posts holding up the front of the porch. The two supporting poles on either end are gone and the roof is beginning to sag at the ends so that when rain or snow comes the roof begins to frown. However, I can see that the foundation is still sure. This house is like the one described in the Bible in Matthew 8: 24-27 from the Message version: “Be like a smart carpenter who built his house upon solid rock (Jesus is the solid rock). Rain poured down, the river flooded, a tornado hit—but nothing moved that house. It was fixed to the rock. Jesus said that if you just use my words in Bible studies and don’t work them into your life, you are like a stupid carpenter who built his house on the sandy beach. When a storm rolled in and the waves came up, it collapsed like a house of cards.” I believe our family has been like the smart carpenter and instead of calamities tearing down our house, our foundation has stayed sure in Jesus Christ. We have added four more grandchildren since Vanessa and Charley died and they will eventually be tall enough to hold up the rest of the roof again. This is the circle of life.
Of all the things Charley said and did with his life he is most remembered for his statement about eternal significance. If you would be telling him something of little concern that was troubling you he would say, “it has no eternal significance.” I’m sure that if he wanted one thing remembered about him it would be for each of us to place our hearts and hands to doing things that have eternal significance or value. If you want to honor his memory just do things every day that have eternal significance, and you will be honoring his legacy to his Lord Jesus Christ. And of course there is no need to do eternal things unless you have a relationship with the author of eternity who is God the Father, and his son Jesus Christ. Put yourself in Jesus’ hands and allow him to give you jobs of eternal significance as Charley did. You too can have a life well lived.