In those Depression Era days, people didn't have entertainment budgets. Many folks couldn't even afford the luxury of a budget. Most of their money went out as fast as it came in, for such things as food, clothing and housing. Our family was no different.
One Sunday, when I was about five or six years old, my parents, my younger brother, David, and I went on a picnic.
Picnicing was (and still is) a cheap form of diversion, since all that is required was a few sandwiches or fried chicken or some wieners to roast, some potato salad, iced tea or lemonade, and transportation.
Mom always fixed some deviled eggs, and sometimes we'd take our little hand-cranked freezer containing home-made ice cream.
Dad always seemed to know of good places for a picnic. This time he drove us to a favorite spot, a pasture south of Keller, Texas.
To get there we drove up Highway 377 and turned west on a little road that today, crosses just north of Affiliated Foods' Warehouse. The little road wasn't paved then, it wasn't even graveled.
After making the turn, we immediately crossed some railroad tracks that I later learned belonged to the Texas and Pacific Railway.
There were pieces of automobiles strewed up and down the tracks in both directions. Some of them were so rusted, that they appeared to have been there for years. Dad explained that times were so bad, that people who owed money on their car and lost their jobs, sometimes left them on the tracks to be hit by the train, so that their insurance would pay off their note. (Does this sound like the 1990's?)
After we crossed the railroad tracks, we made a right turn, through a gate and into a pasture. I'm sure now, that it was private property, but landowners were more tolerant in the "olden days" and the public wasn't as trashy.
I remember the primitive pasture trail had ruts so deep that the axles of our 1936 Ford dragged bottom. Mom was worried that the car would get stuck, but Dad's driving skill got us through Alright.
The rutted trail went near the fence line on the east side, next to the railroad track. It continued through a wooded area and into an open field.
Dad picked a spot at the edge of the woods. It was shady there and we could watch the trains go by. While he cleared a place on the ground and spread a quilt for us to sit on, Mom unpacked the lunch, and my brother and I searched for sticks with which to build a fire.
After the fire was burning, we explored the woods and the field. At that young age we were still fascinated by horny frogs and grass snakes, and of course we always ran to the fence to wave at the engineer and the fireman on the great steam engines, as they roared passed and at the friendly men in the red caboose on the end of the trains.
That was in the heyday of steam superpower. Fort Worth's restored Texas and Pacific Engine, Number 610, could well have been one of those wonderful, exciting machines that thundered by us that Summer day, the engineers announcing their arrival at the crossing with a series of blast on the hair-raising, but melodious steam whistle.
I remember one train went by and Dad said, "He's running extra." To a five-year-old, "extra" means "spare" or "left over." I wondered how anything that big could be spare or left over. He noticed my questioning look, and added, "He's carrying white flags!"
Although we were too young to read yet, We recognized the M-K-T emblem on the side of the tender.
"Hey! Look! It's Uncle Les's train." exclaimed my brother. Uncle Lester Nowlin was a Katy carman, but to us kids, he might as well have been the president of the railroad.
When the train passed, Dad beckoned us to where he was standing a short distance away. At the same time, he gestured for us to be quiet with a finger to his lips. We looked down and there in a hole in a fence post was a bluebird's nest with four chicks. Their beaks were open wide, begging for worms or whatever the parent birds might bring them. He cautioned us to look quickly and then to stay away lest the adult birds might abandon them.
Time passed quickly that day. It seemed that in no time at all, the Sun was dropping over the little hill to the west. Mom and Dad agreed that it was time to start home, as they wanted to be able to see to drive through the deep ruts in the trail. They didn't want to get the car stuck after dark. We drove out of the field and closed the gate behind us . . .
Oddly enough, we never returned to this spot for a picnic again.
In 1952, I enrolled at North Texas State Teachers College in Denton. When I drove near Keller on my trips up there, I often thought about the picnic we enjoyed that Summer day. Once, as I neared Keller, I felt compelled to turn off on the little road. It had been graveled by then.
I stopped at the gate and got out of the car. I climbed the fence and walked through the pasture. The woods were the same. So were the deep ruts in the trail where Mom worried that the car might get stuck.
In 1958, I returned from the Air Force and went back to continue my education at what had become North Texas State College. Again, on one of my trips, I turned on the little road. It had been hot-topped, but the field, the woods and the rutted trail had not changed.
Today, I am a locomotive engineer on the Union Pacific Railroad, the successor to the old Texas and Pacific and the M-K-T. In 1983, I exercised my seniority to take a job called "the Whitesboro Turn", which ran out of Fort Worth each day.
When an engineer goes to work on territory on with which he is not familiar, He is required to take a "student trip" with another engineer, who has recent experience on that portion of the railroad.
I found out on my student trip, that the first stop out of Fort Worth is the Affiliated Foods Warehouse, one mile south of Keller. Affiliated's switch is just past that now familiar road crossing, about even with where the fence post containing the bluebird's nest was some fifty or so years ago.
It's a different fence now. The little road is now a city street.
On my first day off, I took my father, who was then 92, back to the field, with the woods and the rutted trail. Where the farmer's gate had been, a new street had been cut, but it did not go down the fence line. Instead, it veered to the northwest and through the woods.
The developer had avoided the trail. The deep ruts that caused Mom so much concern that day were were still there, in a triangle of land too narrow to build on.
In our conversation, I asked Dad just why he brought us there, and how he knew about that spot.
Dad was Chester Cy Martin. He had been an aviator during the 1920's. He had been the Chief Mechanical Officer for Fort Smith Aircraft and Transportation Company up until the 1929 Market Crash. He explained that he occasionally flew into Fort Worth from his home base of Fort Smith, Arkansas, and navigated using the "iron compass."
He said that "before the F.A.A., airways, radio, radar and aircraft controllers, and such, you didn't fly at night or in bad weather. You flew in daylight and low enough to see the ground. You followed the railroads to get from one place to another. "Iron Compass" was the aviator's slang for "railroad."
"In following the railroads," he added, "You got a little history lesson if you were observant. The railroads followed the old trails. In the 1920's you could still see them from the air. Many of them were still in use, since paved roads were few and far between.
The trails followed the shortest practical distance between two points, or at least the easiest grades. It didn't make any sense to wear out your ox team or your saddle horse going over a hill when you could go around it!"
He then pointed out that the railroad south of Keller passes through a low place between two hills, as does the present Highway 377. The rutted trail does too.
Then, he retold me one of our family's stories about how his grandfather, Henry Brandenburg, was a stonemason, and how in 1880, he walked from the end of the railroad at Denton to Fort Worth, to work on the first courthouse, and how just south of Keller, he was charged by a buffalo bull, and how he threw down a Union Army overcoat he was carrying, and how the bull went after the overcoat and he got away by running into the woods.
Dad went on to say, "When I first flew over the area, I knew instinctively, that this was the place Granddad had told me and my brothers and sisters about, where he was chased by the buffalo. I wanted to see it from the ground."
I looked at the new street sign and felt a strange sensation. It read, "Chisholm Trail."
September 7, 1992
Chester Cy Martin passed away December 30, 1990, 14 months short of having lived a complete century. Prior to his death, he was the oldest surving member of the 20th Aero Squadron of World War I, what is today the 20th Bomb Squadron.
I went by the picnic place today. The ruts are still there. Like the people who wore those ruts in this piece of the Chisholm Trail, Dad too was a pioneer.
Jay Cy Martin and his Nephew, Michael Martin stand on the trail, in October 1994. Note that the ruts have been filled in with sand, probably to facilitate mowing.
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