I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN A BLESSED MAN, AND THE FIRST WAY I was blessed on this earth was by having wonderful parents. My father was John Byron Nelson. His family was from Virginia originally, but he was born in Texas in 1889. He was a quiet, gentle man, shorter than me, but his hands were even larger than mine. He was a hard worker, but not particularly ambitious, and my mother always felt he was too kindhearted to be a good businessman.
My mother, Madge Allen Nelson, was born in 1893. Her family came to Texas from Tennessee when she was a small child. She loved Texas, and lived here all her life till her death in 1992 at the age of ninety-eight. She was smart, spirited, ambitious, and full of energy. She taught school some before she married my father, who was five years older than she was. They were married on February 8, 1911, and I was born four days shy of a year later, on February 4, 1912.
I was born at home, out in the country, on our 160-acre cotton farm in Long Branch, in Ellis County outside of Waxahachie, Texas. I was named John Byron Nelson Jr. after my father. My father had inherited the farm when he was just six years old after his father died of tuberculosis. His mother had died of consumption—what we now call TB—when he was just six months old. My father had it too, before he got married, and it ruined one lung, but fortunately it never spread to the other one. My father was raised by two maiden aunts, and he was a fine, hardworking man, so I guess those two aunts did a pretty good job.
Back then, you know, no one ever went to the hospital to have a baby—mostly only if they were about to die. So there was nothing unusual about my being born at home, except for my size.
I’m told I weighed twelve pounds, eight ounces at birth. My mother had just turned eighteen two months before, and she was in labor such a long time that the doctor figured I couldn’t have survived it. In fact, he had given up on me and was just trying to save my mother’s life at that point. He finally had to use forceps to deliver me, and broke my nose doing so. I still have a few dents in my skull from it. After I was delivered, he just placed me on a table near the bed, thinking I was dead.
After a few minutes, though, my Grandmother Allen, my mother’s mother, shouted, “Doctor, this child is alive!” Then my grandmother started working with me, and the doctor did too, and to everyone’s surprise I did make it, thanks to an abundance of my mother’s milk. It was such an ordeal for my mother, though, it took her quite a long time to recover; in that day and time, there was no medication. I don’t know whether my size and the difficult labor had anything to do with it, but she had only two more children, at seven-year intervals. Both my sister Ellen and my brother Charles, though, were of normal size, fortunately.
Our house was very close to the dirt road we lived on, and we stayed there till I was five. The soil in that area was heavy black clay, and having a cotton farm always meant a lot of hard work. I can still remember seeing folks in their horse and buggy going down that road in wet weather, when it would be all the horse could do to pull the load, the road was that slow and sticky.
I guess from the time I could walk, I woke up when my parents did, and my mother had to make breakfast holding me on her hip. I walked when I was about ten months old, which is early, but then, I was about half grown when I was born.
I was always an outdoor child. I hated being in the house, and I never really played much—I “worked.” I had a little old wagon, and I’d take it out and fill it with rocks or dirt and haul it someplace and empty it, then go back for more. That was my idea of play.
Not only did I not like to be inside, but I hated shoes, and went barefoot all the time. I remember when I was about five my mother bought me one pair, for wearing on Sunday. When we came home after church the first time I wore them, though, I took them off as soon as I got in the house. My mother had gone to the kitchen to cook dinner, and there was a fireplace in our living room, and I took those shoes and threw them on the fire.
After a little bit, my mother smelled that leather burning, and came in to see what I’d done. She scolded me and said, “All right, if you don’t want to wear shoes, I just won’t buy you any more. You can just go barefoot everywhere, winter and summer alike.” And that was just fine with me.
I was fair-skinned with blond hair, and because I spent so much time outdoors, I sunburned easily. One time when I’d gotten burned, my mother put a sunbonnet on me, and tied it so I couldn’t get it undone. I went out to play in the front yard of our house, which was very close to the road, even though we were out in the country. I tried every which way to get that bonnet off, but I couldn’t, and I was getting pretty hot out under that Texas sun. So first I took off my shirt, then I took off my pants, and pretty soon I had everything off but that bonnet.
My mother was back of the house, and every once in a while she’d notice folks driving by and laughing their heads off, so she got curious and came around to see what was going on. There I stood, naked as the day I was born, with that bonnet still on my head. I can’t remember whether I got a licking for that, but I probably should have.
It was along about this time that I had the first serious injury of my life. My father had bought a fine team of horses, and while he was busy doing something else, I was feeding an ear of corn to one of the horses. Well, I let my fingers get too close to the horse’s mouth, and it bit the tip of my forefinger on my left hand. My father and mother used kerosene, or coal oil, to keep it protected and it healed up pretty soon, but that finger is still shorter than the one on my right hand. And I’ve always been mighty careful of how I feed horses since then.
When I was six, we moved to San Saba County in southwest Texas, to a 240-acre cotton farm on the San Saba River. The cotton grew well there, and you could see the fields from our house above the river. Only problem was, there were an awful lot of rattlesnakes in that country. One summer, we killed sixty-five of them, just around our house. By this time I’d gotten used to wearing shoes, fortunately.
By the time I was eight, I’d become a pretty good field worker. I’d weed the cotton in the summer, and pick it in the fall. I’d pick it and put it in a canvas sack, and I was so little then that the sack would just drag in the dirt behind me. I can’t say I ever liked picking cotton much, because it made your hands bleed and it was powerful hot, hard work. But my parents encouraged me to work hard, because they knew that our field hands would work harder when they saw a child my size working like I did. And their strategy worked.
My father was drafted for World War I, but because he had one punctured eardrum and one collapsed lung from having had TB as a youngster, he was turned down. Then in 1919 my sister, Margaret Ellen, was born. I asked my mother, “Are you going to love her more than you love me?” I guess I kind of liked being the only child.
Because we lived way out in the country, there was never any kind of school within reach till I was eight. In San Saba, the nearest school was fourteen miles away. My mother had been a schoolteacher before she married my father, so she taught me all the basics at home.
But finally they built a schoolhouse three miles away, and I rode a coal-black horse we had across the fields bareback to school. My grandmother used to tell my mother, “You’re going to get that child killed.” But my mother would tell her, “You couldn’t pull Byron off that horse!”
I hated school about as much as wearing shoes. I guess it was because I was used to getting all the attention from my mother at home; at least, that’s what my brother Charles told me later. But another thing was, the schoolhouse was too warm to suit me. I was always opening the windows and getting in trouble for it. But because I’d get too hot, then go outside in the cold air, I got a lot of bad colds.
They started me off in the first grade, of course. But since I already knew how to read and write, and knew my geography and history, plus my multiplication tables up to 12, I was quickly promoted to the third grade. I still didn’t like it, though.
I was always brought up to be honest, and of course everyone back then had to be mighty careful with the material things they did have. I remember one time I was playing over at the house of my friend, J. T. Whitt, and I brought home a nearly empty spool of thread to play with. It was only the spool I wanted, and it just had about eighteen rounds of white thread left on it. But when my mother saw it, she asked if Mrs. Whitt had given it to me. When I said no, she told me I had to take it back, right then. Now, my friend’s house was a mile away, and it was already getting on toward dark. I guess I was about five years old at the time, so I was afraid of having to walk all that way and come home in the dark. But my mother wouldn’t hear of waiting till the next morning, so off I went. I got there and back as fast as my legs would carry me. And it taught me never to take anything that didn’t really belong to me.
The house we lived in when I was very young, like a lot of the houses of country folk back then, was just one-walled. There wasn’t any insulation or wallpaper—they were really more like cabins, in a way. And even though it was down in south Texas, it could get pretty cold of a winter. I remember one time it got so cold that when we came in the kitchen one morning, the fire had gone out, and a one-gallon milk can we had sitting in the kitchen had frozen solid during the night.
When I was nine, we moved to San Angelo. Ellen—that’s what we called Margaret Ellen—was about two. Our grandfather and grandmother Allen lived there, because their son, our Uncle Benton, had TB, and was staying in the sanitorium. Uncle Benton died, and it turned out later that my sister had a light case of TB herself, probably due to exposure to Uncle Benton, who’d always pick her up and kiss her. Of course, that was before he knew he was sick, and besides, back then people didn’t realize how contagious the disease was.
In San Angelo, my father worked for a mohair warehouse that was the largest in the country, and it was right on the Santa Fe railroad line. Santa Fe was one of the largest producers of mohair wool. He loaded and unloaded the wool, but could only work part-time, because jobs were so hard to find then.
I remember the warehouse caught fire one time, and everyone came running to see it and help put out the fire. My mother saw my Daddy up on top of the warehouse, trying to get the fire under control, and she started screaming, “He’s going to be burnt up!” Fortunately, they did get the fire put out and my father was all right. But the smell from that mohair burning was awful, and it hung around for days.
We had a wonderful team of horses and a wagon, and part of the time Daddy hauled gravel for a highway that was being built quite a ways away. It was too far for him to come home except weekends, so he found an old wooden crate someone had shipped a piano in and slept in that when he couldn’t come home. Our family knew what “poor” really meant.
Next, we moved to Alvarado, south of Fort Worth. Our neighbors, the Majorses, who lived one-quarter of a mile away, had thirteen children living with them. Some of them were Mrs. Majors’ sister’s kids. Her sister had died some time before we moved there. I played with one of the children quite a lot.
Our place backed up to my Grandfather Allen’s. It’s from Grandfather Allen that I inherited my woodworking ability, but fortunately I didn’t inherit his disposition. Gran didn’t like children much, though he and Gram had six of their own. Maybe that’s why he didn’t like them. Anyway, I was always such an active little child that he would offer me a nickel if I could sit still for five minutes, but I was such a wiggler, I never got that nickel. My mother used to tell him, “Gran, if Byron needs a licking, you tell me and I’ll give it to him. But I don’t want you to touch him.”
One day we were over at their house and the grownups were all sitting inside talking and I went outside looking for something to do. I guess I was about five or six. Gran had a few turkeys he raised, and he’d just fed them, so they were out in the yard pecking at their food. I wanted to see if I could catch one, so I sneaked up behind this old turkey hen and grabbed her by the tailfeathers. She started jumping and flopping around, but I held on, and first thing you know, all her tailfeathers came out in my hands.
I was in trouble, and I knew it. I looked around for a place to hide the evidence, and saw Gram’s washtubs sitting on a bench, turned upside down waiting for washday. I hid the feathers under them and went inside, never saying a word. Not too much later, Gran went outside and came back in with this puzzled look on his face and said, “That’s the strangest thing—I just went out and checked on the turkeys, and there’s one that doesn’t have any tailfeathers. She’s all right, not sick or anything, but there’s not one feather in her tail!” Naturally, I kept real quiet, and no one suspected anything.
Well, it came washday, and Gram went to turn over those washtubs and found all those feathers, and told my mother. Mother came to me and said, “Byron, did you pull the feathers out of Gran’s turkey’s tail?” I knew I had to come up with something good, so I said, “No, ma’am, I didn’t. I just grabbed hold of her and she pulled them out herself!” For some reason, this got my mother to laughing, and I never did get the licking I deserved, fortunately.
We’re so used to all our shopping centers and supermarkets now, but I can still clearly recall when we’d go to town in our horse and wagon for supplies once a week. We’d get flour, beans, shortening, and so forth. If you ran out, you did without till the next Saturday. Of course, the Majorses had so many children, they’d run out of something every once in a while, and they’d come to us for oh, some flour, maybe. Mrs. Majors had to get up awful early of a morning to start her cooking, so most of the time the kids would come over before daylight. They’d stand out in the yard and holler “Hello!” until Mother or Daddy answered, then tell us what it was their mother needed.
But they’d always pay us for it, or bring back the amount they’d borrowed next time they went to town. People were like that back then.
It was in Alvarado that my mother developed mastoiditis—an infection in the mastoid bone behind the ear. I was just ten, and I was out plowing the fields with our team of horses and the cultivator. My father came and told me they were going to Fort Worth to see the doctor, and I had to take care of the place while they were gone. When they came back, it turned out Mother had to go back four days later for surgery, and so I was the “man of the house” again, taking care of the house, plowing the cotton fields and all.
A little later, we moved to Fort Worth from our place south of the city. We lived in a town called Stop Six, so-called because it was on the way to Dallas on the interurban bus line, and right near our place was the sixth stop—the interurban was sort of like a streetcar line.
My father got a job as a truck driver and a deliverer for White Swan Foods. I was surprised he even got the job, because he’d had no experience like that. Pretty soon the economy caught up with us and he was laid off. Then he went to work delivering feed for Dyer’s Feed Store on 15th Street in Fort Worth. Mr. Dyer was a good boss, but he drank and used bad language, and my father didn’t do either one. My father never said a word to Mr. Dyer about it, but pretty soon, Mr. Dyer stopped drinking, and then he stopped swearing, too. Mr. Dyer liked my daddy a lot, just like everyone else who knew him.
That fall, I started school, and pretty soon, I noticed quite a few of my friends would have an extra nickel or dime or quarter to spend. Doesn’t seem like much now, I know, but back then, it was very unusual for a child to have any spending money. So I asked them where they got it, and they said, “Caddying at Glen Garden Country Club.” I had no idea what caddying was, so I asked more questions, and when they started explaining about golf and what they did to earn that extra money, I decided I’d like to learn more about it. But before I could learn much, I had to learn about something else—rabies.
I have to back up a bit to tell this story. When we had lived at Stop Six, right across the street from us was a family named Wells, with six children. We’d occasionally go back to visit them and I’d play with the Wells children, and one time, they’d just gotten a puppy, so we’d all play with that puppy. The puppy was sniffing us and nipping at us a bit, just playing, and pretty soon we all had a scratch or bite here or there. Well, in a few days, the puppy got sick and started foaming at the mouth. Back then, rabies was rampant because there wasn’t any vaccination done like there is now.
When they had the dog examined, he did have rabies, which meant all of us children had to get rabies shots. You don’t see much about it now, but back then it meant you had to take one shot a day, in your abdomen, for twenty-one straight days. But if the place you were bitten was above your shoulders, you’d have to have two shots a day.
Mr. and Mrs. Wells decided it was too expensive to get the shots done in Fort Worth, so they took their children and me to Austin, where the state would do the inoculations free. They had gotten permission from my mother and father, naturally, and it was very nice of them to include me.
They rented a house with quite a few bedrooms, which they were lucky to find, because times were really tough then in 1922. Then, every day, we’d all go to get our shots at the insane asylum. You weren’t in there with the residents, but that was where we had to go to get the shots. They used quite a large needle, and after a few days, you didn’t feel very good, but you had to keep taking the shots so you wouldn’t get rabies.
Along about the fifteenth day, I began to feel really bad, and was getting a lot of headaches, which I was not accustomed to. Mrs. Wells gave me some aspirin to keep my head from hurting so much, but she wasn’t as alert to signs of sickness as my mother was. She didn’t think there was anything else wrong except my reaction to the shots.
When the twenty-one days were up, we headed back to Fort Worth. We got back late in the afternoon, and both my parents were there to greet us. But when my mother put her arms around me—I’ll never forget it—she right away held me back from her with her hands on my shoulders, and said to my father, “This child’s got typhoid fever.”
Of course, in that day and time, typhoid was very prevalent, too, because they didn’t have plumbing and water systems like they do now, and I guess down in Austin they just got the water right out of the river. The reason my mother recognized mine was that my father had gotten typhoid right after they were married, and she recognized the odor from when he’d had it. Typhoid basically is an intestinal disease, and creates its own peculiar smell.
So they put me to bed right away and called the doctor, and he agreed with mother’s diagnosis: typhoid fever. I weighed 124 pounds when I got it, and over the next few weeks I dropped to 65. They even wrapped me in a sheet one time and weighed me on a cotton scale, and it was true—I’d lost half my weight. I was about eleven at the time, and about 5′8″ or so, so you know I was awful thin. I can remember lying in bed and seeing my hipbones sticking straight up so plain.
I also remember that I gave myself a relapse. You weren’t allowed to eat anything, just take the small amounts of liquids and things that the doctor authorized, and I didn’t realize how serious it was. But there was a bottle of Horlick’s malted milk tablets on the windowsill near my bed, and I’d get so hungry, I just kept eating those, and no one ever saw me, so they didn’t know what I was doing. It wasn’t very much, but it was enough to make me even sicker. My temperature soared to 104, 105, even over 106. They were packing me in ice, and said I’d never live.
By now, the doctors had pretty well given up on me, and it was a Mrs. Keeter, a chiropractor and a member of the Church of Christ we attended, who saved my life. This may sound strange, but she was an expert on giving enemas—I guess they’d call it colon-cleansing now. She told my mother, “I can help that child. It will take quite a while, but I can cure him.” So she treated me once or twice a day, very gently and carefully, and after about ten days, I began to improve. It took me quite a while to regain my strength and get back to my normal weight, but I did. The high fever I ran, however, apparently caused some memory loss, because I have very little recollection of my childhood, other than what my family and friends have told me.
So by the time I got well, I was just barely twelve years old, and had twice been given up on by the doctors—once when I was born, and again when I had typhoid. The fact that I survived both experiences is one of the reasons why I feel I’ve always been a blessed man.