by Gwen McMath
If you have ever rolled down Highway 77 on your way out of Waco, Texas you have probably found yourself in the little sleepy communities known as Rosebud-Lott. They are small, rural cities that together probably boast less than 7,000 people. Both cities fill the description of “don’t blink” or you will miss them. These two towns house the Rosebud-Lott school district to which my family and I found ourselves moving to from Patton Springs, Texas. In the city of Rosebud, there were two blinking red lights, one as you came into town, and one in the center of town that separated the service station and Main Street. As you came into town on the right was Tonn’s Grocery Store (the only one in town) and further down a small post office. At the intersection you could turn right by the service station and literally go over the railroad tracks into the black population of the city. If you turned left you would come upon two blocks of old buildings which housed an antique store, a video rental store, and an old fashioned dime or variety store. Further down the street were the churches (one of each kind) and a library. Down from the service station there was also a Diary Queen and another restaurant called Pizza and More. Truthfully said, Rosebud was a pretty dismal town but it was still bigger than Patton Springs. But even though it was bigger and closer to the larger cities of Waco and Temple, we didn’t realize until we got there what a depressed area it was and how badly it needed renewal in every sense of the word.
As with Patton Springs, one of the few perks of moving there was that the school district provided a house for the superintendent. However, when we arrived in July for Charley to start his new job, the house was still being remodeled so we had to move into a three -bedroom apartment until the house was ready. We were really just camping out in the apartment until we could move into the house. The house was finally ready for us to move into in August and it became a very comfortable home for our family. It was wood and brick and had four spacious bedrooms, two baths, a large light-filled kitchen, living room, dining room, and den. As we began to explore the small neighborhood we had moved into across from the intermediate school, we discovered that down the street and around the corner there was an older home set back in some trees that looked spooky and un-kept. For some reason our attention was drawn to this house. Occasionally some family would move in for a few months but then it would be vacant again. We noticed that when you walked by it you could see into the upstairs window and it always looked like someone was looking down at you. We begin to refer to it as the “haunted house.” We did not know until later that it was the family home of the murderer Kenneth McDuff that had been executed for the murder of at least two young girls in Waco and suspected of more. During McDuff’s time at Rosebud Lott high school he had gotten into trouble and one of his parents had come up to the school with a gun, threatening the principal. Guess they should have listened to the principal. It was obvious that Kenneth McDuff was a troubled teen with a toxic family but no one bothered to ever try to help them while he was in school. This was a pattern for Rosebud Lott schools, a pattern which became a real conflict between the school board and my husband’s philosophies of education. My husband wanted to do everything he possibly could for each child in the district, and the school board historically and currently shut their eyes to the needs of the children in the district. The city and the old house were symbolic of things that needed to be fixed.
When the time for school to start came around, I found myself with a special education job in the primary school. I was responsible for special education students from the first through the third grades. Normally students don’t enter special classes until about third grade because school personnel don’t like to label or test children when they are very young, so you know that any student in special education in the lower grades usually had major physical or mental problems, or both. I found the students I had came from very poor homes as well. I could tell not just from how they dressed or perhaps smelled, but by the things they told me. For example, I told them I was going to Dallas for the weekend once and they said, “Oh, Miss McMath, you better not go.” When I asked why they said, “You’ll run out of money and have to come home.” Another example was when I had them bring empty cans and boxes from home to school so we could have our own grocery store to learn about money and one little girl brought me ten empty cans of a store brand of spagettio’s. When I questioned her about it she said it was she and her brother’s dinner for the week, she ate breakfast and lunch at school. Both she and her brother were provided with breakfast and lunch without cost by the governmental lunch program of the school district. There was a real need to provide this same program in the summer and it cost the district nothing, but the school board would not approve it for the summer. They didn’t want to provide the black and lower white community with free food. This same little girl brought me a sweet, wrapped gift at Christmas time. It was a stuffed animal that had been loved to death, it was dirty and tattered, just like she was. My children were home when she brought me the gift and I don’t think they will ever forget it. This gave them a picture of what it means to be poor. Lots of times on Saturdays teachers would see my students outside the grocery store trying to get someone to buy them some bologna and bread. One Christmas I came back from Dallas and someone called and told me that three of my students from the same family who were living with their grandmother (both parents were in prison) had been taken by the child protective agency because their grandmother had died over Christmas. I got in my car and drove over to their house to find the old frame house empty with only a little tiny Christmas tree in the front yard covered with scraggily tinsel that was blowing in the cold wind. I cried, I had grown to love them and I was sorry they had such difficult lives at such a young age. This kind of story happened a lot in the black community, there was lots of drug and alcohol abuse, and no programs of the community or churches to help. In fact, the churches were segregated. I had another student who had cerebal palsy, he walked with a funny little gait like the hunchback of Notre Dame, and even though he had such problems, he always came in with a beautiful smile for me. He cried far more because he missed his parents than for any of his disabilities. He lived in a foster home while his mother was in prison and he didn’t really know his dad. These sweet children all had a profound affect on my life and I hope I had the same on them for I feel God sent me to love them unconditionally for those few years.
During those years at the primary school I had a wonderful principal named Toni Priest. I was a very good teacher but during those years I could be a little late arriving at school because I never left home for school until my girls had all left for school. Sometimes Toni would be waiting for me as I came in, he wouldn’t say much, but I know it probably annoyed him. I was rushing in from the back parking lot one morning and I looked to see where Toni was. I looked into the big window in front of the parking lot and noticed that all the teachers were in the teacher’s lounge, watching me and smiling because I was about to be late again. When I got out of the car I noticed I had on a slip that was getting too big for me. All of a sudden it fell past my hips and onto the ground! I was horrified and didn’t know whether to leave it on the ground or pick it up. I picked it up and stashed it into my teacher bag and prayed no one had seen me. I opened the door to the laughter of all the teachers. They had seen the whole scenario from the window and I never lived it down as long as I lived in Rosebud!
Working in the schools had perks for Charley and I and one of the biggest ones was that our children were entering their teen years and they couldn’t get by with anything because someone from the school always saw them and told us what they were doing. We never told our children our sources but the principals who always knew where the parties were or where misbehavior occurred would report to us about our girls. Then there were Charley’s secretaries, Ms. Beinhauer and his business officer, Ms. Hoelscher. They felt sorry for my girls for always getting told on so they would lend them lunch money, etc. and let them go home if they told them they were sick. That was a perk for the girls.
My daughters really didn’t have it that bad in Rosebud Schools and I think they were fortunate to be able to see firsthand what it was like to live in a poverty area with so little provisions to better yourself. Yet, at the time, I was more concerned that my children bettered themselves. I have always thought my children had the right to grow up without the world knowing everything they had done in life so I have always tried to let most of the mistakes they made be their own lessons to them and for them to tell or not tell. And, truth be told, they were all better than I had been at their age. However, there are some things they did that I can mention in passing and not make them mad at me, so I will share some of those just so you will know that we were not perfect parents and they were not perfect kids. Even though none of the family was perfect, our trials and mistakes made us better people.
When we moved to Rosebud, Vanessa was just starting college and was going to Hillsboro Junior College on a basketball scholarship. She was not very happy about being misplaced in Rosebud because she had left her first serious boyfriend in Patton Springs and was having to have a long distant romance. Both Charley and I and her grandparents whom she spent a lot of time with, were trying to cut her a little slack for this by letting her still visit the boyfriend. Things didn’t work out for the relationship, which made things slide with school and gave her a difficult year. The next year she went to Austin Community College and shared an apartment with her cousin Jenna, my sister Shirley’s daughter.
Amber, the ever- social one of the family, adjusted well to Rosebud life and had many friends. She found her first boyfriend and started dating him a few months before her sixteenth birthday. She also had her first heartache when they broke up. Another mishap was when she went off one evening to babysit with a friend and they talked the parent of the babysitter into letting them drive a car, even though neither girl had a license. The girls managed to turn over the car and total it without either of them being hurt. Thank goodness the man didn’t press charges!! Amber was like her mother in that she had a penchant for being late to school and she got in more trouble for it than I did. She decided that she would “burn” her demerits off by talking one of the principals into letting her get licks just like the boys did, a decision she later regretted. He decided he would make an example of her and she got licks so hard she could barely sit. I was very upset over this. Another time after an argument with us over something, Amber ran out of the house announcing she was running away from home. She had forgotten her shoes and it was raining. Her dad went looking for her and found her at the Diary Queen, about the only place you could run away to in Rosebud.
Robin, the youngest, had joined the band and showed a real talent for musical instruments by playing both the drum and the xylophone. She was still playing the piano and doing very well with it. One day after school we were in the den and I was lying on the couch covered up with a comfy blanket and she was playing the piano. The phone rang and I got up to answer it and it turned into a long call. I didn’t notice when I went back to the couch that Robin was not still at the piano, and I crawled back under the covers. All of a sudden I felt someone in the covers with me and it scared me to death! It scared me so bad that I got up swinging and had gotten in three or four punches before I realized it was Robin. She had gotten under the covers and covered up to scare me and scare me she did! She began to laugh and I just kept swinging. It took me a while to see the humor in it.
Both Amber and Robin made friends in Rosebud-Lott that taught them life lessons about living in a city with few resources. Robin had a friend that got pregnant in high school and she stayed in Rosebud and had drug problems. Amber had friends who had much potential but ended up going back to Rosebud after college and also having drug problems. Amber had a friend that was left alone all the time by his parents and was deprived of family life. These children made us all more grateful for the family we had.
I can’t close writing about my children during this time without mentioning Vanessa’s first marriage. During the third year we were in Rosebud Vanessa was still living in Austin and going to school when she began to work for an answering service and there met a young man named Cliff that she quickly fell in love with. He and Vanessa were quite athletic and both spent a lot of time on bikes in and around Austin. He was not all we had dreamed of for Vanessa but we just assumed we would have to help raise him as we did our own girls. They got married the last spring we were in Rosebud. They had a beautiful outside wedding in a gazebo in Salado and had the reception in a restored school building there in Salado. The wedding was important to me because it was one of the last events my daddy was able to come to and for those memories, I am grateful. Adding to that memory was that my sweet aunt and uncle Buddy and Annette brought my parents in for the wedding from Athens. They were special relatives to me and my Uncle Buddy is no longer living either. I remember Daddy’s feet being so swollen from poor circulation that he could barely get his shoes on, but he was determined to go and we all had a wonderful time at the wedding. Sad to say, the marriage didn’t last. Cliff did not live up to the vows he had made to her, and their marriage was annulled in less than a year. The affect the dissolved marriage had on Vanessa lasted many years. Fortunately, as providence would have it, she ran into Cliff a few years later in Austin and they were able to forgive each other. He went on to marry again and has a son about twelve years old now. He lives in California and pursues a career in skateboarding. I keep up with him and am genuinely able to pray for him now.
On a happier note, Amber graduated from high school in Rosebud, and Robin graduated from the eighth grade. It was a wonderful perk for the both of them to receive their diplomas from their dad.
I would like to relate a little story as an example of our parenting skills. During our time in Rosebud, Charley and I both spent a lot of time with the girls both together and separately. When we had lived in Patton Springs we had a little community nearby called McAdoo, and from that city’s name the girls gave us the nicknames of McAdoo and McAdon’t that parroted our parenting styles. Charley was called McAdoo because he always said yes, and I was called McAdon’t because I always said no. So, needless to say, when it came time to go shopping the girls wanted their dad to take them. When I took them shopping I would say, “Let’s look at what’s on sale first.” When their dad took them he would say because he didn’t like to shop, “You’ve got fifteen minutes, get busy.” Then he would never look at a price tag, he would just buy whatever they brought up to him after fifteen minutes. They loved it.
Charley had a hobby to himself during this time of his life, arrowhead hunting. He could look at land and figure out where Indians had camped, where their water source was, and how to look in the creekbeds after a rain and find arrowheads in the soil where he wouldn’t have to dig for them. He met a man that owned a lot of land in the area who told him he could hunt arrowheads on his land all he wanted to so after a few years of hunting he had found hundreds of arrowheads that he mounted and displayed.
I, on the other hand, got to make a lot of women friends during this time, because as the girls got older I could leave them by themselves some, which freed up some of my time to be able to do things with friends again. One good friend was Cheryl Bell who I taught with and we both had three daughters in common. Another good friend was Robin Polk, who still is one of my very best friends that I see very often. They were not the norm for Rosebud and also wanted change for their communities. Robin worked as a nurse for the school district and had a program that helped students with children to finish high school. Not only that, but students were helped with learning parent skills to help the babies (meaning the teenage girls) raise their babies. She also taught in the schools a pregnancy prevention curriculum. After we left, this program was cancelled as another example of the school district’s uncaring attitude.
It was no secret that as far as jobs go, Rosebud was a difficult job for Charley. He always had issues with the board there. However, it was still sad to leave and I still remember the day we left town. My friends were there to say goodbye and I was so sad to leave them that I was crying. There was a moving van and I was in one of the three cars behind it. As we went down Main Street for the last time, my husband, always the movie buff, pulled us off to the side of Main Street where he took a tin star out of his pocket and pitched it in the street as his way of saying, “Good Riddance.” It was just like the scene in the western High Noon with Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly. We were leaving town for good.
As providence would have it, we still have a connection to Rosebud. Our son-in-law Neil’s parents still live in Rosebud so we still go through there occasionally. It reminds us of a time of difficulty but also of great reward. It was not a place of great spiritual opportunity, but it was priceless with memories of my beautiful young daughters becoming beautiful young women and God equipping them for the future. We were ready to go forward once again to Corpus Christi, Texas and London ISD.