Long ago (in ancient times), when I was a kid, I spent many Friday nights and Saturdays at my grandfather’s in Grand Prairie. He was Granddad to me and MS to the rest of the world. He was born Slater Merlin on February 1, 1889, in Isney, Alabama, in Choctaw County. He later flipped his name to Merlin Slater. He was one of eleven born to Joe and Nattie Lee. Joe and his family left Alabama for Texas in 1903. The men drove their cattle west while the women, children, and all belongings rode in a train’s stock cars. They left Martin’s Mill for West Texas around 1918. The family bought a farm south of Levelland near Clauene and broke sod.

If you looked up “Wheeler Dealer” in the dictionary eighty years ago, you would probably have seen his picture. He hauled freight with three of his brothers, four mule teams, and one wagon. Granddad farmed, ran a sawmill, plowed with a go-devil and an old mule, and sang gospel songs in the Gunn Brothers Quartet. He traded, sweet-talked, bartered, swapped, and cajoled things and people for years.

Granddad had accumulated [don’t ask how] almost two dozen empty houses around Lubbock during the Depression, but was unable to sell or rent them. So, he opened a hamburger stand near the Texas Tech campus. [When I sold pharmaceuticals in West Texas, I met an old surgeon who remembered Granddad’s lean-to hamburger stand!] He once had five acres of a strange, succulent plant with fleshy, spiky leaves and medicinal properties. But he could never figure out how to market all that aloe vera.

Granddad, his brother Cecil, and my father Floyd built many homes in Arlington in the late forties and early fifties. Two houses, mirror images of each other, were built on the west side of Collins Street and stood across the street from a huge, empty field (now AT&T Stadium). Eventually, by the late fifties, Dad went solo and began building custom homes.

Granddad played old gospel music on a scratchy turntable, tapped his feet, and clapped his weathered hands, as a small jelly jar with whisky sat on a wobbly coffee table next to his chair. “I need to fix this table someday,” I heard him say for years. He never did. 

We had fresh veggies from his backyard garden. We would take two milk stools, two Mason pint jars with water, two Mason quart jars with iced tea, and two salt shakers. We’d sit on those stools in the middle of his garden, pick ripe cherry tomatoes right off the vine, dunk them in the water, shake off the excess, salt them down, and eat ‘em. We’d pick snap beans, squash, or okra to have with our dinner of fried rabbit, squirrel, or chicken on Friday nights. Fresh melon with salt and pepper was our dessert.

I’d sleep on a pallet under the swamp-cooler window unit next to the television, which sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t. The swamp box lulled me to sleep, even though the floor was not soft, but it never mattered.

Around 4:00 am, Granddad would kick my feet and ask, “You planning to sleep all day, Boy?” We had toast, homemade strawberry jam, and coffee for a fast breakfast so we could get in the car by 5:00. Off we headed to a private lake in North Grand Prairie that no longer exists. [Shh! We had to sneak in under the fence because we didn’t have permission.]

At dawn, we began fishing from shore with long cane poles and worms from his bait shop in Grapevine [another one of his enterprises]. I always knew where he was because I could see the glow from his lit Camel cigarettes (unfiltered, of course). He’d smoke a pack by 11:00, which meant it was time to clean the crappie we’d caught and get home.

He pan-fried the crappie with onions and leftover snap beans just in time for lunch on rickety old TV trays in the living room. He would have a Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. He always told my folks I had a big glass of milk. Strangely, it tasted more like a 50/50 mix of Pabst and water. We hurriedly cleaned up our lunch just in time to turn on “Saturday Baseball with Dizzy Dean and Pee Wee Reese.” I found the cards, and we played Killer Canasta while we watched and listened to the ballgame. When the game wound down, we did too. Granddad loaded me up in his old Chevy and headed to Arlington to take me home.

Granddad died seven months after Mary and I married.

Ah, childhood memories.