I was born in Big Spring, Texas, a small city halfway between El Paso and Dallas, in the Depression-era years. Big Spring is cotton, oil and cattle ranch country. My mother was one of eight children born to a Catholic immigrant from the Black Forest region of Germany. She came alone to work for a family in San Antonio.
My mother’s father was from Alsace and sailed to America “to escape the kaiser’s wars,” I was told. My father’s father had immigrated from Bavaria and his Scotch/Irish mother was from Pennsylvania. His parents moved to Big Spring, where Papa worked as an engineer on the Texas and Pacific Railroad. They were devout Methodists.
My brother and I were thus brought up in a Catholic/Methodist household. We went to Methodist Sunday school, but we joined all the relatives to go to midnight Mass on Christmas Eve with my mother. In those days Texas was solidly Democratic and my father was a great admirer of FDR and the New Deal.
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