by Gwen McMath
Have you ever lived in a place where you knew you were going to be challenged by life on a day to day basis? That’s what I knew when I found myself moving to West Texas to the small town of Afton with a 1A school district called Patton Springs. There were lots of challenges but I don’t think I had ever lived in a place that had so many geographical ones. The nearest big city was Lubbock and it was about 70 miles away, far enough that if you went in to Lubbock to buy groceries you had to bring an ice chest for cold items. The nearest small grocery store was 23 miles one way in Matador or Spur in the other direction. The nearest place to eat was the Caprock Cafe which was about 12 miles away in Dickens. The landscape had a real beauty to it with lots of hills and rolling caprock that looked like scenery in a western movie, there was a beautiful natural spring close by where you could swim called Roaring Springs. The water was so cold it would take your breath away, and it would also keep a watermelon left in it cold enough to freeze your teeth when you bit into it. There were also long stretches of highway where you could see for miles in any direction and see no sign of any civilization. As a city girl, these remote areas especially bothered me, I always wanted to get out of the car and let out a primal scream just to keep my sanity. Seasons changed in West Texas too. There were beautiful snowfalls and ice storms and dust storms. The night sky was the most beautiful I had ever seen with a panoramic view of the Milky Way on especially clear nights. I think my husband Charley summed it up best when he said, “It’s a good place for men and dogs.”
In addition to the lay of the land was the lay of the school compound. The school had been built in the 1930’s and hadn’t changed much since it was built. It was a 1A school district which meant it had about 125 students K-12. Across the street from the school were all the free rental houses for the school faculty. The draw of getting someone out to teach in such a remote area was that in addition to your teaching salary you were provided a house rent free with all your utilities paid. It was definitely quaint but from wherever you were you could always see the school and the other teacher houses so the down side was it had a tendency to keep your mind on school business all the time. It really was like “The Little House on the Prairie.”
This was the scene my family and I found ourselves in when in the summer before school started we found ourselves moving to Afton. When Charley had negotiated his contract, the school board had offered to build us a new house if we would come. This was a wonderful perk but it would take a while to build a house so we were going to have to find somewhere to live for the summer. It was decided that we would move all of our belongings into the gym, which we did. Then, one of the school board member’s father-in-law died and left a furnished house. It was offered to us to live in until the new house was completed. We were very grateful for the offer and accepted it sight unseen. The lady who offered us the house was named Snow White (for real) and she would later become a good friend.
The drive to Afton was very far from Lake Dallas and we were in complete cultural shock when we got there. When we arrived at the school to look it over with our children it was quite different than the new schools of Lake Dallas. We went into the gym where our things were stored only to find the practicing football team pilfering through our belongings! Another strange greeting for us on this first tour of the school grounds was that while walking up to the school Robin, our daughter, was lagging behind us. There was a big stray dog on the grounds who ambled up to her and starting biting her side. The biting didn’t break her skin, he was just kind of chewing on her and scared her to death! Then we followed Snow to her father’s house. We drove up to a house that was built in the early 1900’s and it had a tin roof. We called it the “Hee-Haw” house after the TV show of the same name. It looked just like the house on the show where all the hillbilly family hung out and they sang, “Lazy Bones, sitting in the sun, how you gonna get your day’s work done?” Not only did the house look a little foreboding, Snow warned us to be on the look out for rattlesnakes because they were evidently everywhere and sometimes would get in the house. She said her father had stepped on one in the middle of the night a few weeks before. Needless to say, I never set my feet off the edge of the bed at night as long as we lived there! In the whole town of Dickens where the house was there was probably only a couple of streets worth of houses. Each morning while we were there a lady would come out of her back door onto her back porch and yell, “Pierre, oh Pierre,” and a little poodle would come running up to the door. I thought this was so bizarre, a place where you had to look out for rattlesnakes and a lady was calling her poodle Pierre!
When Charley started working he found out that he did not have enough staff to begin school. For some reason, a lot of the teaching staff was not coming back. I can think of one good reason the elementary teachers didn’t come back and that was because each elementary teacher had to teach two grades in the same room with an aide and the teacher was responsible to do all the planning for two grades which came to making fifteen preps every day. This practice continued my first year at Afton and none of the teachers liked it. In addition to this, Charley had no principals. He found a man, who had graduated from A&M with a doctorate in education and his wife was an English teacher so he hired them both. Fred Schubert would become his principal and his wife would become the English teacher and their two children would add to the ADA. A few days later a lady and her husband would drop by the school who were visiting family and ask about teaching jobs. The man had just quit a job as a pastor and had a teaching degree and his wife was an elementary teacher. Charley hired Larry and Christy McClenney and he told Larry to raise his right hand. Larry did and Charley told him he was a principal! That turned out to be providential because Larry ended up replacing Charley as superintendent when he left and he is still there though he will retire after this year. He also achieved the title of Superintendent of the Year for the state of Texas. Charley thought of a quick solution for more staff, he just started hiring all of our friends that were teachers. We had some friends from college that the wife taught school and the husband had been a museum curator for the state of Wyoming but had lost his job, and Charley hired her as an elementary teacher and eventually hired her husband as an elementary school teacher after he completed more schooling. They had three children to contribute to the ADA. Donna Anderson taught there the rest of her teaching career and retired as an elementary principal and her husband Andy retired from Patton Springs also. One of my girlfriends had gone through a difficult divorce, then met a man and had dated him over a year but he did not seem to be interested in getting married so she took a job in Afton to see if maybe if she left him behind he might change his mind about marrying her. A few weeks after she left he called and wanted to come up for the weekend. He came and was met by Charley and Larry who promptly told him he had better not come back unless he had a marriage license in his back pocket. A few weeks later he came back with the marriage license and they were married in the living room of our new house by a justice of the peace. Wendy and Tom McCoy are still married and now live in the Valley in South Texas. While we were living in Afton I hired a daughter of one of our employees to clean my house. She was very smart and I started encouraging her to go to college. She did and got a degree in teaching. She now teaches in Patton Springs as an elementary teacher and has a beautiful family of her own. As I think back over these people I become aware that all of these people were part of our calling to West Texas. God didn’t just bless us for following him, he blessed all these people that came along with us, many of them with life long results.
Shortly after we moved to Afton, Charley got a lot of teasing from his superintendent friends for moving to such a remote area. They decided to put a picture of Charley on an envelope and put only Afton, Texas and the zip on it to see if he got it. He did! After all, Afton did have its own post office! Another one of the perks of working in the middle of nowhere was that there was a car given to the superintendent and he didn’t have to pay for gas. I don’t remember what kind of car it was besides old but they gave the car the nickname “Air Force One.” When someone would call for Charley on the phone the secretary would tell them that he had left in air force one.
There were many wonderful experiences we had with our children while in Afton. I have to say that they were always ready for the adventure of a new place. One of my greatest pleasures while I was teaching there was to have my youngest daughter Robin, in my class for two years when she was in the fourth and fifth grade. She would later say that she loved it the first year, but the second year the kids would gripe at her if they didn’t like what I was teaching them! One of my favorite stories about Amber was that she was walking across the street one day after school when she noticed a hole in the ground. Upon further inspection she noticed a piece of snakeskin coming out of the hole. So she thought to herself that she was going to pick up the snakeskin as a souvenir. As she started pulling the skin, she discovered the snake was still attached! It came out of the hole coming after her! I wish I could have seen that first hand! The snake was just a plain black snake but they do have the nickname of “black chasers!” She seemed to have a knack for finding reptiles. After a big storm one afternoon, the area across the street from the school was flooded and Amber was wading across the water when she found about a three foot turtle that looked like a dinosaur. She came running in the back door of our house
telling us to come see the turtle, and we were all astounded with it. It had a beak type mouth that could chop a stick in half!
Once while in Dallas one of the school board members had bought a fake gorilla suit which was just the thing for life in Afton. My children loved to put on the head and scare people with it. One year we got a new coach who had a kind of wimpy son that was about twelve years old. The girls and their friends were fooling around one night after dark when someone got the idea to scare this kid with the gorilla mask. They snuck up to his bedroom window which was open and Vanessa put on the mask and starting scratching on the screen. The kid was petting his cat and when Vanessa started scratching on the screen the cat started meowing. The kid was calm enough and tried to calm the cat, when Vanessa started scratching on the screen again and making gorilla noises. The kid jumped up from the bed and peeked out the window and began screaming!! He ran and told his dad that there was a gorilla at his window. Lucky for the kids that they were long gone when the father came outside with his shotgun.
At some weak moment in the parenting of our children while in Afton the girls found a little motor scooter for sale that they wanted, so, of course, their father got it for them. We gave them all the safety talk about it, and because it wouldn’t go very fast we weren’t really worried about anyone getting hurt on it. However, I didn’t understand how creative my daughters were until one evening when I happened to glance out of our window into the street. There was Amber roaring down the street in the motorcycle with her best friend standing up on the back, and another girl on the handlebars, Amber could barely see where to steer. I wish I had a video of that now too!
One Sunday afternoon the girls had all been playing around when all of a sudden they disappeared for a while. They were usually well under foot so I am sure Charley and I were glad for a little reprieve. But along toward evening we still had not heard anything from them. We began to call around and people began to look for them. There were six of them missing so we didn’t think they were abducted. Little did we know what they had gotten themselves into. They had walked over to the school and found a ladder that was leaning on the roof so they decided to go up on the roof. There were some boys around who for a trick had taken the ladder down, and then they had gone on their merry way. While the girls were on the roof one of the girls had laughed real hard and her head went back when she laughed and hit a pipe. The pipe cut her head and she began to bleed. At this point all six girls all went into panic mode and then discovered their ladder was gone. They all began to cry because they thought Dana (the bleeder) was going to die. They hollered and hollered but to no avail, nobody heard them. As it was nearing darkness, one of the janitors was going past the school helping to look for the girls when he noticed the ladder down. When he rescued them from the roof he was the hero of the day. They were all very contrite and Dana was fine, her wound looked worse than it actually was.
After that rite of teenage passage I had hoped that things would calm down but they didn’t. Vanessa experienced the rite of getting her driver’s license and getting her first car, or should I say pick up. Actually her dad had bought her a very nice pick up truck, only a few years old. She went riding around with a couple of friends one afternoon after it had been raining. She had been gone only a few minutes when I heard a big noise that sounded to me like a trash truck picking up garbage. A few minutes later Vanessa came bursting in the back door screaming and crying that she had wrecked the pick up. She hadn’t just wrecked it, she had totaled it by running into the only tree in West Texas! Thank God no one was seriously hurt but from that time forward we never bought any of our girls a new used car when they first got their drivers license.
Most of the activities of the area were around junior high and high school sporting events. Patton Springs played six man football which was one of the few districts in the whole state to do so. We had football, basketball, and track and it wouldn’t be unusual for it to be three hours away for an event. Our daughters had played basketball a little in Lake Dallas but they mostly stayed on the bench because the better athletes got more playing time. Now they were thrust into having to play because the coaches needed every student to play. A few times when they were just learning, our girls would go the wrong way on the court. Vanessa went from going the wrong way on the court to receiving an award for most valuable player her senior year. Our girls also became involved in track every year we were at Patton as well as all of them taking a stint at being a cheerleader. Our family continued skiing during these years and all of the girls became wonderful skiing athletes, all able to ski black diamonds.
Family travel during this time was a necessity. You had to get away frequently for your mental health to get away from the idea that everything important in life revolved around the school. We sometimes forgot that there was a whole world going on outside of Patton Springs. One summer we drove from Afton to New York City. It was our first trip to New York and about as different as it could be from Patton Springs. We also took a trip to Niagara Falls that was a great trip for all of us and to Yellowstone National Park, the Grand Tetons, and South Dakota. We made numerous trips to South Padre Island and always had extra kids in tow from Patton Springs.
Another activity that we all did together as a family was to go to the western dances. They would occur about monthly at any of the rodeo arenas in the area. There were real “cowboys” there, the 666 Ranch was close by and all of their cowboys came to the dances. They were all held outside. These dances caused us all to need western clothes. None of our family had ever had any western clothes and now we all had to have boots, cowboy jeans, and western shirts. We also had to learn how to western dance. It was all quite a change for us city girls!
When we first moved to town I had an occasion to visit the local jail in Dickens. I had ordered something from a lady who worked in the jail and went in to pick it up with my girls in tow. The sheriff (who weighed about 300 pounds and was about 5 ft. 8) was sitting behind his desk when I came in. I introduced myself to him and asked if I might speak to his assistant. He said, “Honey, since you wore those pretty little shorts in here, you can do whatever you want too.” My kids got the biggest kick out of the sheriff flirting with me, and eventually everyone in town was teasing me about the sheriff. Shortly after that we made a trip to Dallas to visit family. We were at my in-laws house (who were missionaries) and a friend of ours came in and greeted all of us and he looked around and noticed Charley was not in the room. He looked at me and said, “Where’s your boyfriend?” meaning Charley. Robin (who was in the fourth grade at the time) answered him by saying, “Oh, you mean the sheriff?” Everyone looked at me and Lucy had some splaining to do!
I have already mentioned a few things about snakes but I have to tell one more story about them. Charley had decided that he needed to learn to shoot a gun and to have one just in case he had to kill a snake. The girls thought it was funny so while we were in town one day they bought a big rubber snake. When we got home that evening, the girls went outside and in a few minutes came running back in yelling, “Snake! Snake!” Their daddy heard them and was excited to get out his gun and go snake hunting. He found the “snake” and quickly put six bullets in him. The girls said, “Did you get him, Daddy?” Charley looked down more closely and realized he had just put six bullets in a rubber snake. He just turned around and went back in the house with his head hung low.
I had a many favorite students while I was in Patton Springs but a very special one came into my class at the beginning of the fifth grade and he did not know one word of English. My Spanish was very poor so I worried about him so much and was so afraid he was not getting a good education by “immersion.” I finally discovered that he loved maps of any kind so when there were lulls in his day I would just get out the maps and he would be happy for hours. Of course this family had come straight from Mexico and they were very poor. They lived in the back of a camper and there were a lot of them. When Christmas came around that year, I made sure that he and his siblings had some gifts. A few days later someone rang my doorbell and when I opened the door there was my little student with a gift in his hand for me. He said simply, “Para mi profesora” (for my teacher). The gift was a pair of pearl earrings probably from the dollar store. Needless to say, they are priceless to me, and I wear them only on very special occasions. That young man managed to graduate from Patton Springs with honors and still lives in Afton with his own family.
We ended up having many wonderful friends in Afton and looking back it was a wonderful place to be for a time. There was one sweet lady that blessed me above all others. Amber has a very artistic side to her and she draws very well. We found out that there was an older lady who taught painting lessons in Afton and we signed up Amber for lessons. Over the time we were there Amber’s drawing and painting improved under her teaching. As I got to know this lady I found out she had a daughter in the state school and because of cut backs she was soon going to be released soon to return to her mother’s to live. The lady was in her sixties and lived alone, and though I knew she loved her daughter she was afraid of what might happen if there were violent outbursts. As time went by and we moved from Patton Springs, I returned one year for their Homecoming weekend. I ran into the lady and she told me she prayed for my family and she knew the names of each of my family members. Here she had had such a hard life herself and instead of keeping her mind on her hardships she took the time to pray for each of my family members. She really humbled me and I have tried to emulate her lifestyle.
During Vanessa’s senior year Charley began to apply for jobs in more populated areas. He went for an interview in Rosebud, Texas and didn’t think he did well during the interview process but he was offered the job and he accepted it. We would be leaving Afton soon after school was out. The graduation ceremony in Afton that year was especially bittersweet for us because our oldest daughter was graduating. It was a real rite of passage for me to have Vanessa graduate and preparing to leave for college soon. It was like being out in the middle of a stream enjoying the water flowing around my feet but not wanting to go on to the other side. It was a beautiful graduation ceremony because Charley got to give Vanessa her diploma and to hug her there on the spot. That was a wonderful perk for a school superintendent.
It was a very sad day for all of us when we left Afton for Rosebud. I will never forget Amber’s best friend Becca’s sweet face as it crumbled with tears as we left town. Amber rolled down the window of the car and said, “Rosebud, here we come!’ That was to be the end of our West Texas tou