“My Anabel”

LOCATION: Tennessee; Texas
PERIOD: 1754-1868
DRAMATIS PERSONAE: Owen McLemore (1791-1868); Anabel March (1796-1832)

The memory of his wife, Anabel, is kindled by an old friend’s letter that Owen McLemore has kept all these years. Alone and peering into the West Texas prairie he relives the grief of his wife’s passing, and friends and a life lost to time.

Owen McLemore was born in Tennessee, but his family originally came from Ulster Ireland, Scots-Irish, landing in North Carolina in the mid-18th century. Owen’s grandfather, Allen McLemore came to North Carolina as a young boy in 1754, he stayed there acquiring some land not far from his father’s farm and also lived as a sustenance farmer. His son, Jason was the McLemore who left North Carolina , crossing the Appalachian mountains and making his way to middle Tennessee by 1788.

Owen McLemore was born in 1791, the second child to Jason and wife Lucy; a girl had been born in 1789, but only lived a few months. Owen grew up on his father farm and learned everything he needed to become a farmer himself before marrying Anabel March in 1812. Together they worked a sustenance farm in Tennessee and began to build seeing their first son Allen McLemore come into the world on Christmas Day 1812.

Anabel gave birth to six other sons: Jason (1813-1876); twins Edward (1815-1861) and Leeland (1815-1887); Jacob (1818-1863); Donald (1824-1884) and Arthur (1832-1834), before dying in 1832. After Donald’s death in 1834 the family migrated to West Texas where Owen died in 1868 at the age of 77 (see songs “Blinkin’ Back a Tear”).

MY ANABEL
(F. D. Leone, Jr.)

It’s a cold December day
The light is slowly sinkin’ away
What I feel I can’t hardly tell
Oh Anabel, my Anabel

Holdin’ a letter from an old friend
Golden leaves dance in the wind
Somethin’ broke in me, aw hell
Oh Anabel, my Anabel

Piece of paper creased and soft
Watery lines almost worn off
Raindrops spittin’ in an empty well
Oh Anabel, my Anabel

That dusty road is still the same
The prairie wind still carries a name
The tolling of a distant steeple’s knell
Oh Anabel, my Anabel

© 2018 Frank David Leone, Jr./Highway 80 Music (ASCAP). The songs and stories on the Highway 80 Stories website are works of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

“Missouri”

LOCATION: Texarkana, Texas
PERIOD: 1930s
DRAMATIS PERSONAE: Levi Lester Motts (1909-1999); Julia Taylor (1909-1931); Joshua Taylor (1877-1945)

During the 1920s and ’30s the boll weevil devastated the cotton crop in several Southern states along the Highway 80 corridor.  Many farmers gave up and left their farms since the weevil appeared to be impervious to all attempts to drive it out or kill it off.  Ironically the thing that finally caused the weevil to move on, was a widespread drought in 1930, which farmers did not see as much of a savior.  After the drought the Great Depression caused the remaining farmers who had managed to survive the weevil, as well as the drought, to be threatened yet again with economic collapse.

The West offered a virgin land, a territory full of promise.  The allure was irresistible for some men who uprooted themselves and often their entire families to try their luck “out West”.

Levi Luther Motts’ great-uncle was Levi Motts (1843-1864).

MISSOURI
(F. D. Leone, Jr.)

There’s land in Missouri
I’ve heard tell it’s rich and dark
Ain’ nothin’ for me ’round here
I’d like to make a brand new start

Boll weevil killed my cotton
What drove him off was a drought
I’ve had enough of Texarkana
I’m thinkin’ hard of movin’ out

To Missouri – I’ll head west
Where a man can start fresh
I won’t rest until I’ve left
To Missouri I’m bound

Ol’ man Taylor thinks I’m lazy
Says soon it’s bound to rain
I should stick it out and make a crop
No matter where I go it’ll be the same

Since my Julie took sick and died
I’ve got no reason to stay
Texarkana is for Taylor
As for me, I’ll move away

To Missouri – I’ll head west
Where a man can start fresh
I won’t rest until I’ve left
To Missouri I’m bound

© 2019 Frank David Leone, Jr./Highway 80 Music (ASCAP). The songs and stories on the Highway 80 Stories website are works of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

“Love in the Afternoon”

LOCATION: Tyler, Texas
PERIOD: 1915-1931
DRAMATIS PERSONAE: Lillian Cobb (1894-1986); Walter Murphy (1889-1966); William MacLachlan (1894-1984)

Lillian Cobb’s marriage to Walter Murphy was not a happy one. It is not surprising since from the outset, Lillian reluctantly married Walter, her father’s choice, while at the time being in love with William MacLachlan, the prospective son-in-law her father would never accept (see song, “The Butterfly of Tyler”).

Walter Murphy was a successful businessman, parlaying his law degree into a series of successful business ventures with some of his clients. He had built a large mansion in Waxahachie, Texas, for his wife and children: Peter his oldest son born in 1917, Nora in 1920 and his youngest Andrew in 1928, following two miscarriages in between the last two.

Walter did not know that his wife Lillian, after ten faithful years, had ultimately been unfaithful to him, with William MacLachlan, with whom she had remained in love since the outset of their marriage.

Things got worse for Walter and Lillian when his fortune was devastated in the Great Depression. With their wealth gone, Lillian and Walter could no longer sustain the fiction of their marriage, and it happened that during one of their many arguments Lillian flung Willy MacLachlan in Walter’s face. They were divorced in 1931, Lillian retaining custody of their three kids.

Lillian and Willy had a small private wedding without delay, but ironically, without the excitement that their illicit affair had produced, the routine of day-to-day married life had the effect of cooling their romance somewhat. However, they remained married since there was always warm affection, and they had two children, in addition to Lillian’s three from her former marriage.

LOVE IN THE AFTERNOON
(F. D. Leone, Jr.)

They’d meet in the house her husband built
But never in her bedroom
She didn’t second-guess, felt no guilt
Love in the afternoon
 
Told herself she’d earned this happiness
She didn’t choose her husband, he was her father’s groom
After ten faithful years she had a dalliance
Love in the afternoon
 
It happened by accident
On one of her trips back home they fell together
Eyebrows were raised, there were comments
But it was no surprise those two were lovers
 
Her marriage had grown cold over the years
The papers were drawn up very soon
Down the road for her it was crystal clear
Love in the afternoon
 
The lovers cast their lot in the marriage game
But sadly the blush was off the bloom
Their life became routine and was not the same
As love in the afternoon
 
It happened by accident
On one of her trips back home they fell together
Eyebrows were raised, there were comments
But it was no surprise those two were lovers
 
They’d meet in the house her husband built
But never in her bedroom
She didn’t second-guess, felt no guilt
Love in the afternoon

© 2019 Frank David Leone, Jr./Highway 80 Music (ASCAP). The songs and stories on the Highway 80 Stories website are works of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

“Go West”

LOCATION: Big Spring, Texas
PERIOD: 1903
DRAMATIS PERSONAE: John Henry Hardin (1878-1949); “Henry Adams Hardin (1926-2015); John Farley Hardin (1927-2020)

Homer and Virgil Hardin were distant relatives of Louanne Bowden, on her mama’s grandma’s side.   They typified a certain mindset among the American pioneers: ruthless independence and no need for civilization. For a while, the kind of life they desired could still be found by leaving the settled towns and cities and going further west.

GO WEST
(F. D. Leone, Jr.)

John Henry Hardin was an engineer
Railroading for the T&P
He had a good wife and two ornery sons
This would’ve been about nineteen and aught-three

The Hardins come from North Carolina
Alabama, then Texas in eighteen-seventy-nine
They would move on about every ten years
Leaving progress: the lawyers and the bankers behind

And go west, hoping to stay free
Even if it meant a harder life
Go west, hanging on to liberty
Life ain’t worth living otherwise

Homer and Virgil were John Henry’s sons
They were dyed-in-the-wool true Hardins, them two
Stuck there in Big Spring, standing at the tracks
Staring and waiting for the coal train to blow through

Each had a nickel in his pocket
Earned that mornin’ from chopping two cords of wood
When they were younger they’d put ’em on the track
But they been saving their nickels to get out for good

And go west, hoping to stay free
Even if it meant a harder life
Go west, hanging on to liberty
Life ain’t worth living otherwise

© 2019 Frank David Leone, Jr./Highway 80 Music (ASCAP). The songs and stories on the Highway 80 Stories website are works of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

“Butterfly of Tyler”

LOCATION: Tyler, Texas
PERIOD: 1916-1986
DRAMATIS PERSONAE: Lillian Cobb (1894-1986); Walter Murphy (1889-1966); Peter Cobb Murphy (1917-1999); Helen Haynes Murphy (1947)

In the early decades of the twentieth century, upper class Southern families, in many ways, still lived by a code of behavior that reflected antebellum values.  Young men and women socialized at the frequent balls and dinners held at the large homes among the wealthy Southern families. Lillian Cobb was often the prettiest girl there and enjoyed the attention of most of the eligible young men, who would crowd around her, filling her dance card. She was described by some as a butterfly, flitting from partner to partner.

A vestige of what was a 19th century value system, fathers controlled whom their daughters saw socially and ultimately married.  It was unusual for a daughter in her early twenties, or more likely eighteen or nineteen, to defy her father in her choice for a husband.  Lillian Cobb’s father was no different, and she was a product of a culture which strictly prohibited her from choosing a romantic partner from outside her family’s social strata or someone whose reputation had been seriously tarnished.

In the 1910s and 1920s, prior to the Great Depression, this society was peopled by men who did not inherit their wealth but had grown rich in industry or one of the professions, doctor or lawyer.  This was especially true for East Texas towns such as Tyler, where much of the new wealth came from oil and gas production. But there were still the old money families, and these two classes, the newly rich and the old guard, made up one upper social class.

In the case of Lillian Cobb, she fell in love with the irresponsible but dashing son of a Texas family whose roots went deep, back before statehood.

William MacLachlan was the second oldest son of Andrew MacLachlan, patriarch of an old family whose money derived from huge land holdings and cattle.  Andrew had never allowed drilling on any of his land, considering it a blight on the landscape.  Cattle were living things, warm bodies which you raised from birth and fed and took care of for several years.

Andrew’s son William, Willy his friends called him, was a Romantic youth, whose mind was filled with the poetry of John Keats and Robert Browning, and ideas about manhood coming out of novels of Walter Scott.  He had aspirations to write, himself, and filled composition books with his poetry.  A couple of times Willy bound these poems into folios, adding some ink and watercolor drawings, which he then gave to Lillian as his form of courtship.

Willy had dropped out the University of Texas, living off his family without any clear direction for earning his own way, or plans for the future other than bumming around Europe.  Willy was known to drink copious amounts of whiskey, something else which would not endear him to any of the Tyler aristocracy.

William MacLachlan was just the kind of boy Randolph Cobb, Lillian’s father, would never approve of for his daughter. And he did every thing in his power to thwart any ideas of marriage between his daughter and Willy MacLachlan.

By contrast Walter Murphy was in his final year at University of Texas law school, with a promising future assured.  Lillian might have been in love with the dreamy Willy, but her father knew to whom he was going place his daughter’s hand in marriage.

Lillian Cobb (1894-1986) married Walter Murphy (1889-1966) in 1916, gave birth to Peter Cobb Murphy (1917-1999). Peter C. Murphy was father to Helen Haynes Murphy (1947), Louann Bowden’s mother.

BUTTERFLY OF TYLER
(F. D. Leone, Jr.)

There had been a round of parties
For Lillian Cobb’s upcoming wedding day
She spent the night before crying in her room
That 1916 Saturday in May

A great-aunt on her daddy’s side
Sat with her, they talked the night away
“I’ll tell your father to call this wedding off”
“You mustn’t do that; it’s too late.”

The butterfly of Tyler
Flitting on her careless wings
Young men would crowd beside her
A vision fading into a dream
A vision fading into a dream

Any other girl would have been thrilled
Walter Murphy was the catch of the year
But he was not who Lillian had set her eye
Her father refused the one she held dear

So she cried for the good times that would be no more
For the names that had filled her dance card
For all the twilight parties and the one
Who lives still in her heart

The butterfly of Tyler
Flitting on her careless wings
Young men would crowd beside her
A vision fading into a dream
A vision fading into a dream

© 2020 Frank David Leone, Jr./Highway 80 Music (ASCAP). The songs and stories on the Highway 80 Stories website are works of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

“I Didn’t Know What Else To Do”

LOCATION: Texas
PERIOD: 1856-1888
DRAMATIS PERSONAE: Jedadiah Phelps (1856-1888?); Nellie Phelps (1855-1922)

Jed Phelps was the younger brother of Nellie Phelps, the grandmother of Earl Bowden’s maternal grandmother.  Earl Bowden was Louanne Bowden’s father, which makes Jed Phelps her great-great-great-granduncle.

By the time Jed was six he’d lost his older brother Burch and his mother.  Ten years later his father died leaving his sister and him alone on the family farm in Tennessee.  Nellie married Robert Dorsey the son of a wealthy Texas rancher when she was 17, in 1873.  Dorsey brought Nellie and Jed with him back to his family’s Texas ranch, which was rather large.  Dorsey land stretched between what would become the future cities of Monahans and Abilene.

Abilene was established by cattlemen such as Charles Dorsey, Bob’s father, as a stock shipping point on the Texas and Pacific Railway in 1881. Monahans grew up around a deep water well dug a few years later when the railroad surveyors discovered that the lack of water for the laying crew and their animals would slow down construction of the rail.  Monahans’ digging of a water well produced an abundance of good water and the town would thrive.

Jed was a disgruntled young man, at sixteen he didn’t much like being bossed around by Bob Dorsey.  Having an active imagination Jed dreamed of joining the Texas Rangers whose fame of heroic deeds fighting the Indians and Mexicans he’d heard all about in the bunkhouse.  And so, that’s what he did as soon as he turned nineteen.

But by then the Indians had been run off and the Mexicans no longer posed much of a threat.  Mainly the Rangers were a mercenary band supporting the ranchers whose barbed wire fences were an obstacle for the old cattle drovers accustomed to driving their herds north unobstructed.

There had been a fence war raging between the cattlemen taking large herds across Texas to places like Kansas City and the ranchers who tried to preserve the integrity of their ranches.  This conflict eventually petered out when the railroad was completed since it made no sense to drive the herds north when they could much easier be loaded onto a train.

Disenchanted with this life, in 1888 Jed decided to return to Tennessee and the family  farm to see what was there.  More disappointment awaited him, and so he rode off again, never to be heard from again (see song “A Rusted Plow“).

I DIDN’T KNOW WHAT ELSE TO DO
(F. D. Leone, Jr.)

Got the lantern, walked out to the barn
Raised the axe, split a log in two
Much as I hated splitin’ wood
I didn’t know what else to do
 
Wasn’t that long ago that Pa could lift
Hunderd pound sack under each arm
He looked tiny now under all those quilts
Still, Nellie couldn’t keep him warm
 
Was about six when we lost Burch
Can’t hardly see his face at all
Ma went to bed and never got back up
Now ten years later, looks like it’s Pa
 
The torn wood smelled green and sour
I started feelin’ pretty loose and relaxed
I’m sixteen and figure it’ll fall to me
Even if he got better Pa won’t ever be back
 
I looked up, Nellie was on the porch
Asked her, “How’s he?” She said, “Pa’s dead.”
We buried Pa next to Ma and Burch
I found a field stone and set it at th’ head
 
I swung the axe it stuck in the wood
Raised it again split that log in two
We had plenty wood already in the shed
I didn’t know what else to do

© 2018 Frank David Leone, Jr./Highway 80 Music (ASCAP). The songs and stories on the Highway 80 Stories website are works of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

“A Rusted Plow”

LOCATION: Texas
PERIOD: 1872-1888
DRAMATIS PERSONAE: Jethro “Jed” Phelps (1856-1888, 32); Nellie Phelps (1855-1922, 67); William Phelps (1834-1872); Martha Massey (1835-1862)

Jed Phelps describes life after his Pa died: His sister Nellie marries a Texas rancher who brings them all to his ranch and puts sixteen year old Jed to work. However, after a few years Jed doesn’t take to ranchin’. He’d heard heroic stories about the Texas Rangers and joins up. When that isn’t all he dreamed it’d be, he decides to go back to their farm in Tennessee only to find something less than he expected.

His family never jnew what happened to Jed, whether he died, or just never came home or even contacted them.

A RUSTED PLOW
(F. D. Leone, Jr.)

After Pa died Nellie married Bob Dorsey
Brought us to Texas to the biggest ranch I seen
Had me punchin’ cows and breakin’ horses
So I joined the Rangers when I turned nineteen
I’d heard about the Indian Wars
But by then the Kiowa were off the plains
We were so good they don’t need us no more
‘Cept to chase off a few fence cuttin’ gangs

Things ain’t how I want to remember
The truth ain’ what I want to hear
I gotta leave the past behind, it’s better
Than seein’ what’s waitin’ for me there

1888 I went back to Tennessee
Wondered how the ol’ homestead looked now
Rode for a week and what greeted me
Was a crow sittin’ on a rusted plow
I found the block where I split wood
The barn was all but fallin’ down
Squattin’ on my heels, chewin’ a cheroot
Thinkin’ how Pa had been so proud

Things ain’t how I want to remember
The truth ain’ what I want to hear
I gotta leave the past behind, it’s better
Than seein’ what’s waitin’ for me there

Went around back, found those graves
Cleaned them up straightened the stones
A part of me kinda wished we had stayed
But I can’t get back what’s long gone
Spose I got what I came for
It’s sure all that’s here to be found
I’ll ride away come back no more
Not for any crow sittin’ on a rusted plow
I’ll ride away come back no more
Not for no crow sittin’ on a rusted plow

© 2018 Frank David Leone, Jr./Highway 80 Music (ASCAP). The songs and stories on the Highway 80 Stories website are works of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

“Oil City”

Charles Taylor McLemore (1921-2001), Jacob “Jake” Tyler McLemore’s (1959) father, talks about growing up in his hometown of Oil City, Louisiana. During the first decades of the 20th century oil was discovered in Texas and Louisiana and until the Depression forced the speculation to pause, fortunes were made and lost. Oil City and the McLemore family were a small part of that history.

Jacob “Mac” McLemore (1879-1977) made and lost more money than any of the McLemore men. When he was fifteen he heard about the 1894 oil strike in East Texas. He started at the bottom working any job he could get, eventually learning enough to strike out on his own.

Jacob Mac McLemore never knew his father, who had been an outlaw-gunslinger who died a few months before he was born.  Sam Summers McLemore (1852-1878) never even knew the 16-year old whore, Sally McCune, he was living with was pregnant when he went out in the street to face a younger and what turned out to be faster boy.  Jacob was raised by Sally, who eventually was able to quit the life and lived out her days running a boarding house in Fort Worth.   There’s some who say it was more than a boarding house, but others deny those rumors.

Indians found oil seeping from the soils of Texas long before the first Europeans arrived. They told explorers that the fluid had medicinal values. The first record of Europeans using crude oil, however, was for the caulking of boats in 1543 by survivors of the DeSoto expedition near Sabine Pass.

Melrose, in Nacogdoches County, was the site in 1866 of the first drilled well to produce oil in Texas. Other oil was found in crudely dug wells in Bexar County in 1889 and in Hardin County in 1893. But it was not until June 9, 1894, that Texas had a major discovery. This occurred in the drilling of a water well for the city of Corsicana. Oil caused that well to be abandoned, but a company formed in 1895 drilled several producing oil wells.

Jacob Mac was 15 when the Corsicana oil came in, and for the next sixty years he chased strikes all over Texas and Louisiana. He might make some money here, then invest it somewhere else only to see his investment evaporate in the dusty Texas wind.

Jacob was married and divorced four times, the last near the end of his life and the one which really broke him. Of the four marriages, only the first produced any children, one boy, Lee Allen (1903-1989), and a girl, Aurelia.  Lee Allen was Jake McLemore’s grandfather.

If you were to ask those who knew him, what they would tell you about Jacob Mac McLemore was that, first and foremost, he was a decent man whose word was his bond. No one ever knew him to brag or lie and that he never made a deal that he did not keep, and usually made his partners money.

He died at the age of 98, dying peacefully in his sleep in an Odessa, Texas hospital room with his great-grandson, Jake, by his side. You might say that Jacob Mac lived an interesting life, but despite not enjoying consistent good luck he was always in good humor and very good company.

OIL CITY
(F. D. Leone, Jr.)

Oil City is my home
Ain’ pretty but I belong
Grey and gritty, right or wrong
Oil City is my home

Aught-five oil came from the ground
Oil City was a wildcat town
Wooden sidewalks and hitching posts
Boom towns ain’ got no ghosts

Aught-six grandpa McLemore
Had a little money but wanted more
Oil City was where grandpa came
Gamblin’ on the big oil game

Oil City is my home
Ain’ pretty but I belong
Grey and gritty, right or wrong
Oil City is my home
Oil City is my home …

Few years pass and the fever died
Were other towns, other strikes
1917 it almost burned down
The whores all left town

Dad went to work at J.M Guffey
We stayed in Oil City
Grandpa went broke in the Depression
Kept chasin’ oil, died in Odessa

© 2018 Frank David Leone, Jr./Highway 80 Music (ASCAP). The songs and stories on the Highway 80 Stories website are works of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

“My Pocketknife”

It took a couple of years longer than in other towns, but The Great Depression finally hit Oil City, Louisiana in 1932. The price of oil plummeted and work ground to a stop. They capped the wells and hauled the rigs away, to wait for better times. In 1934, out of all other options, Lee Allen McLemore and his thirteen year old son Charlie hit the road looking for work, and like many others head west to California.

Jake McLemore’s father was Charles Taylor “Charlie” McLemore.

Charlie grew up during the depression, traveling with his father, Lee Allen, on trains, with other hobos, with the putative goal of finding work. When the crash hit the oil industry, it took longer than for most other industries, but eventually the bottom fell out of the oil business in 1932. The wells were capped and the rigs hauled away, leaving the men who had depended upon the work stranded in small oil patch towns with no other opportunities for work. Many of them joined the large numbers of itinerant men riding the rails. Some looked for work but many had given up and made do as best they could.

But when we think of hobos riding in boxcars we don’t usually think of children doing the same thing. But when families had no money, little food and nothing on the horizon, they simply sent their children away to fend for themselves, as best they could.

“At the height of the Depression, as many as a million teenagers traveled the rails looking for work and community, moving in vagabond packs and living in hobo jungles, finding both charity and brutality in the broken-back cities of America. They crowded the cars and hid down in the tenders where the coal and water were stored; they squeezed between cars and clung atop their bucking roofs. In 1932, about 75 percent of the nearly six hundred thousand transients on the Southern Pacific line through Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona were under the age of twenty-five.”

“Fathers, and sometimes sons, stayed in the network of “jungles” along the route, tucked amid the timber and hidden from view. Each camp had its own division of labor—one person went into town to find a potato for soup while another brought salt or an extra spoon. Pots and pans hung from tree branches; crude shelters were made from cardboard or tin scrap and sometimes built up in the trees. Pocketknives were like gold in the jungles. Blades were “hired out” in exchange for soap or a bowl of stew. In a pinch, a knife could be traded for a pair of shoes or sold for cash. Men cooked possums and jackrabbits caught in snares along the brush lines and traded their hides for food.” (Mealer, Bryan. The Kings of Big Spring: God, Oil, and One Family’s Search for the American Dream. 2018.)

This was the kind of life Charlie McLemore lived during his childhood.

Charlie and his father worked picking cotton in California for a few weeks and also fruit when they could. They managed to work just enough to feed themselves, as well as, put a little aside. Eventually they got back to Oil City just as things were starting to come back.

By the time World War II started, and a need for oil exploded, Charlie was in his late teens. His father got work immediately at a refinery and from then on, the Lee McLemore family did okay.

Charlie went into the oil business as well, but oil was not the only resource product that supported the Oil City economy. Natural gas was even more abundant and Charlie got a job at United Gas Corporation, headquartered in Shreveport, Louisiana, and moved his family there in 1960 a year after Jake was born.

Charlie worked at United Gas and survived the hostile takeover by Pennzoil in 1968, and became part of the management of Pennzoil United, Inc. He did pretty well, well enough to send his son Jake to Vanderbilt University in Nashville.

Retiring at the age of 70 in 1991, Charlie lived long enough to see Jake get married and have children. Charles Taylor McLemore died in 2001 at the age of 80 from a heart attack a few months before 9/11, and several years before his grandson Lee’s death in 2004 in Iraq.

Despite surviving the Great Depression by riding the rails with his father, he was among the generation that experienced the economic boom after WWII. Charlie McLemore saw nothing in his lifetime that undermined his faith in the American Dream. A dream he lived out to the fullest.

MY POCKETKNIFE
(F. D. Leone, Jr.)

Charlie and his father crawl up the embankment
Hidden by the bend they crouch and wait
The train’ll have to slow down maybe just enough
With any luck they’ll grab that freight

Charlie and his father left Oil City at dawn
Somethin’ called The Depression had arrived
Work was for the takin’ out in California
Pickin’ cotton under sunny skies

Long as I have my pocketknife
I’ll be alright, be alright
I can make it through the coldest night
Long as I have my pocketknife

Charlie and his father join a migrant army
Ride the rails with tramps an’ hoboes
Tent camps were jungles, danger everywhere
Do your best to hang on to your coat

Charlie and his father dodge a railroad bull
Hidin’ in the tender ’til he’s gone
A man was crumpled in the corner, frozen overnight
It’s a damp and cold L.A. dawn

Long as I have my pocketknife
I’ll be alright, be alright
I can make it through the coldest night
Long as I have my pocketknife

© 2018 Frank David Leone, Jr./Highway 80 Music (ASCAP). The songs and stories on the Highway 80 Stories website are works of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

“Levi, Ruby, and Cole”

LOCATION: Northwest Louisiana
PERIOD: 1860s
DRAMATIS PERSONAE: Levi Motts (1843-1864); Ruby Robison (1845-1933 ); Coleman Broussard (1842-1910)

Levi Motts and Coleman Broussard were cousins, and each one loved Ruby Robison and she loved them both, as well. Levi and Cole were Confederates, and fought at Mansfield. But Levi died that afternoon, leaving Ruby and Cole to carry on together.

LEVI, RUBY, AND COLE
(F. D. Leone, Jr.)

Cole was strong and steady
Straight as a rail
Levi was born ready
Always raisin’ hell
Ruby loved Levi all the way
But Cole was who she chose
Levi might grow up some day
But, who knows

Ruby knew Cole loved her
But Levi charmed her heart
Cole was down to earth
Levi sparkled like a star

The War broke this trio up
Only one came back home
Ruby had two loves
Levi and Cole

Cole knew he and Ruby
Would never have
The kind of magic love
She and Levi had
Just taking care of her
For Cole, it was enough
He ain’ the apple of her youth
But theirs was also love

Ruby knew Cole loved her
But Levi charmed her heart
Cole was down to earth
Levi sparkled like a star

© 2018 Frank David Leone, Jr./Highway 80 Music (ASCAP). The songs and stories on the Highway 80 Stories website are works of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.