As I grew up in Dallas, I had an acute awareness that my family was neither rich nor poor. The mansion of oil tycoon H.L. Hunt (then one of the wealthiest men in the world) on the shore of White Rock Lake was not too many miles away. And from the opposite end of the spectrum, when we went in the vicinity of the State Fairgrounds, to the Cotton Bowl, for example, we witnessed grinding poverty. For better or worse, we were middle class—maybe a somewhat struggling middle class—getting by on the salary earned by my father at Ford Motor Company.
Since 1963, we had lived in a one-story house at 9853 Champa Drive in the Lake Highlands neighborhood. My parents shared one bedroom, and the other was given over to me and my two brothers. Three boys in one room. Even before my youngest brother was born in January 1967, it became clear that something would have to change. Oh, the decisions parents have to make. Ours now had to provide for four kids. I hope we were sufficiently appreciative of their efforts and sacrifices.
A construction project commenced in which our house was expanded; two bedrooms and a bathroom were added onto the back. One of those new rooms would be mine, and the other would be for Randy. The younger brothers would share our former bedroom in the main part of the house. It was a better situation all around—I, for one, was delighted to have my own room—except that our parents had to find ways to pay for the whole thing. This may have been when our mother took a part-time job driving a bus for a private school.
When the builders finished their work, they left a significant pile of bricks in the backyard. They came from the old section of the house, which had been re-done. Our father informed me and Randy that the bricks were our responsibility. They would evidently be of some value if the mortar surrounding them could be removed. Our job, for which we were to be modestly paid, was to chip off all that mortar and render the bricks almost as good as new. Both of us got a hammer and a chisel, and were told to go to it.
I think it took us most of the summer of 1966 to do this work. We got no help from our father—he had done his part, after all—or our friends. In sessions of one, two or three hours, Randy and I would sit there chipping mortar off the bricks. It was a slow, tedious and disagreeable process. More than once, we suffered busted fingers. We probably moaned and felt sorry for ourselves, but you know the old saying about how misery loves company.
When a brick had been adequately cleaned—Dad sometimes looked, shook his head and said, "Not good enough"—it was carefully stacked in an adjacent spot. Little by little, we could see the pile of mortar-covered bricks getting smaller and the other one growing. I took considerable satisfaction in seeing this change. Brick after brick, we kept chipping away on them. Finally, the last brick was cleaned and set on a very neat stack. I doubt we had a ceremony of any kind, but that would have been appropriate in light of our efforts.
Chipping mortar off bricks in the hot sun day after day was a rather bad memory for me and Randy since we often referred back to it over the next few years. I learned about perseverance with a capital P, and that rhymes with E, and that stands for excellence! (Shamelessly stolen from The Music Man by Meredith Willson, which debuted on Broadway in 1957.) Just as I persevered with my brother throughout that miserable project, I again did so in muddling through college, in researching my book on the history of UT basketball, in running the 1995 Boston Marathon and in several other difficult, long-term tasks. The lesson was well learned.
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