Talking with an Internet friend this morning about the old days, I was reminded again of my late dad and how he took to computers like a duck to water back in the early 1980s. He was about my current age back then, retired, but still full of energy for something to do. I bought him one of the early Apple IIe computers because I thought he might enjoy the banking and writing features. We didn’t have the Internet in 1983, but anything we did get from these early specimens of the coming high tech age were so far far ahead of typewriters and calculators it wasn’t funny.
Somewhat to my surprise, it was the word processor that really lit my dad’s fire. Unencumbered by his barely legible handwriting or the plethora of errors that always plagued dad about typewriters, the word processor freed him to write his memoirs about growing up in a small Texas town in the early 20th century.
Dad’s “book” derived its title from an expression he picked up from former major leaguer and fellow Beeville native Curt Walker. Walker was like an older brother or surrogate father to my dad while he was growing up fatherless back in the early 20th century. In addition to being an off-season undertaker in Beeville, Curt Walker was a man with little time and patience for those among the living who would take up a morning from others just to share personal stories that were so concretely wrapped in uninteresting material that they rivaled paint-drying as an opportunity for stimulation.
Whenever one of these old codgers would get started with a “back in 1915” tale, Curt would simply interject the following as the earliest opportunity: “Wasn’t that the year the owls were so bad?”
According to Dad, that question always worked with the Beeville crowd. Instead of waiting for the deadly story, they would embark upon the newer question: What’s this about an owl invasion? Was 1915 the year it really it happened, or was it some other time and place?. Meanwhile, Curt Walker would be making his way out of the conversation circle and heading elsewhere. Mission accomplished. If the subject ever did return to whatever the old geezer wanted to say, Curt Walker would be long gone from the scene.
“Wasn’t That the Year The Owls Were So Bad?” became the title to my dad’s book of memoirs about life in a small town.
The Pecan Park Eagle 
November 12, 2013 at 2:10 am |
my grandfather who was from Illinois and was born in 1899 used to use that expression “the year the owls were so bad ..”