Dr. Stephen Sloan from Baylor University Oral History Institute, Waco, Texas demonstrates interview procedures for Live Oak County Historical Commission workshop hosted by Glynis Holm Strause, LOCHC Oral History Chair, and supported by Ross Harris, Humanities Texas from whom Glynis received a grant, Dobie West Performing Arts Theatre, and Storyfest. George West, Texas, June 9, 2018. Thanks also go to the LOCHC Hospitality Committe for refreshements, Kirsten Gerth for videography, and Mary Margaret Campbell for photos. 

Dale Burell #1 Army Rifle Marksmanship Trophy.

But, uh.  I have one thing here that I attribute to my granddad.  When I was in the army, I placed first in battalion in basic rifle marksmanship.  As I remember, there were about 500 men.  Five companies of 100 men in each company.  I placed number one. 

     Well, that is not to my credit.  I would have never got this it had not been for my grandfather teaching me how to shoot.  I didn’t learn how to shoot like that from the Army. Some people were amazed at how I could knock down those 300-yard targets and not miss, and I was amazed how they could shoot a man-sized silhouette at 50 yards and miss it.  (Laughter.) 

     But that, I attribute this to my granddad, and I want to be the kind of granddad that my granddad was to me. I want to work with my grandsons and teach my grandsons things like my granddad taught me.  

     What he taught me - how to swim. I was still pretty young teen ager and many of ya’ll know Pat Clifton.  She got off in a tank and got over her head and was floundering and going under, and I was able to go in and get her out.  If my grandfather had not [taught me] how to swim I wouldn’t be able to help her, you know.  Maybe somebody else would have got her out, I don’t know, but something that I remember. 

     I attribute so many things in my life to my grandparents because they taught me so much.

Sloan: I gotta ask you, but I can assume I know how he taught you, but I will ask about shooting. His approach with teaching you how to shoot? Can you tell me some memories? Can you tell me some memories about that?

Dale: He taught me gun safety first. Always keep the gun pointed, not up in the air but down toward the ground.  The bullet had to come down somewhere, so always keep It pointed down at the ground and to be real calm. Never get excited with a gun, but always think about what you are doing. 

     Taught me how to take the good aim and always squeeze the trigger, and don’t get in a hurry to shoot.  Always squeeze the trigger slowly until the gun goes off.  Don’t look up to see what you hit, because if you aimed right and you squeezed the trigger right, the bullet is going to hit where it supposed to. You don’t have to jerk your head up to and look and see where it hit. It may be pulled off.  Take your time, be calm but mainly be careful. 

Sloan:  He gave you confidence with a gun.

Dale:  Absolutely. I killed lots of rats under the house, and rats in the barn, and woodpeckers and mocking birds out of the orchard.  He had a nice peach orchard, and I had a good time. I had a good time learning how to shoot with my granddad.  He was a great teacher.

Sloan:  You mentioned when he would take you guys out. It was about always finding something that everyone could do to contribute to the task. Are there some things that you remember when you were younger, some first assignments that you got, that some jobs that were yours that you got to accomplish?

Dale:  Well, picking cotton was one of them. That is one of the hardest things that I have ever done is to pick cotton.  Now, not too many people around still that have picked or pulled cotton.  Either one is lots of hard work.   That sun gets hot dragging that big sack down between those rows. 

Sloan: Particularly for a young boy.

Dale:  I was young then. 

Sloan:  So, you were very involved through your teen years with the farm too?  How old were you?

Dale:  I was 12 when they left from there to Belmont. I think I was 12.

Sloan: Ok.  I gotta ask. He taught you how to swim? Cause I am imagining how he taught you how to swim, but I want to know.

Dale:  There were people that lived between us and town named Norris and Katzfey’s had a nice big tank up on the hill with real pretty clear water. Sometimes we would go, and Johnny Norris’s tank and swim. He would hold me, teach me how to paddle and dip, and you know, and all that. Sometimes we would go up to Katzfey’s big tank up on the hill, irrigation tank, and swim up at Katzfey's. 

Sloan:  When you talk about your grandfather, I imagine he was tough, but it sounds like he was tender as well.

Dale:  He was known to be a fighter when need be.  But his generation, if you didn’t know someone good, you just kinda stood back and respected people for who they were.  But for one incident - him and my dad were traveling from Houston to Belmont to visit my Aunt Martha, and they stopped at a place called Adamek’s Café.

      They had all kids of funny things in there like shot guns with long barrels that turned around and came back and all that. He and my dad stopped for coffee, and my granddad would always pour his coffee in his saucer. He would blow it and drink the coffee out of the saucer. To cool it. A lot of the old times did that. 

     They don’t do it anymore, but anyway he was doing that, and the owner of the place was an old fellow too. He came by and put a little sign on the table. That sign said, “If you are so smart, why ain’t your rich?”   Well, my dad knew it was joke, and my granddad didn’t.  He took it as an insult, and he walked over and hit the old man and knocked him down.  (Laughter. ) Then my dad got mad at my granddad and vice versa. (Laughter. )

     But in those days, it was a different culture and a different time.  You just had more respect for each other, than today.

Sloan:  That is great, that is really interesting. Now you got another artifact over there.

Bowl made by Dale Burell from limb that fell off tree his father was born under.

Dale:  I want to show a picture here. In fact, I will pass it. It is a picture of a tombstone. It is my grandparent’s tombstone.

     All the grandkids got together and bought a nice tombstone for my grandparents. They just had little fat markers on the ground.  We all thought enough of them that we wanted to do that for them, so we did.  On the tombstone, is my grandmother gave birth 14 times and each time she did, she wrote in down in the family Bible.  So, on the back of her tombstone we put down there what she had written in her Bible about the names and days that she gave birth.

     Under the old oak trees, they built a house first up on top of the hill. The horses had a real hard time pulling carts up that sand hill. So they put the house on logs and rolled it down the hills under some Live Oak trees where it stayed until Celia blew it down in Hurricane Celia. My dad would lean on an oak tree there and say, "Don’t ever forget that I was born under this tree.”  My grandmother gave birth nine times under that Live Oak tree.   

     The tree eventually died and rotted and fell off.  I make bowls, and I took that limb. You can see that lots of holes and cracks.  It was a rotten limb. I made the bowl to remember what my dad told me about "don’t ever forget that I was born under this tree", and a bunch of my uncles and one of my aunts was born under that tree. I made several of these out of that and passed them around.  It is a reminder of what my dad told me not to forget. 

Sloan:  What is it like to still have that with you?  That piece with you?

Dale:  Well, I really enjoy it, but I think I enjoy more the ones I give away to my first cousins.  (Laughter.)

Sloan:  Is that tree still standing? 

Dale:  Oh yes, it is alive and healthy. It is doing great.

Sloan: That is great.  Now do you have some other things you have to show over there?

Dale:  I have some pictures that goes with some stories. One thing, another thing that my grandfather and Mr. West had in common - one of the letters goes into that. That was education. Both of them believed in education. 

     Mr. West encouraged my granddad to educate his children, but it was a bunch of Germans that settled out there. A bunch of them from Castroville where my grandparents came from.  But they built a school called Oak Ridge School which is on the place that I own now.  Little place. They hired a teacher to teach their German speaking kids how to speak English. 

     So, my grandfather, he spoke German and some French.  He came from Alsace Lorraine. Sometimes it was part of Germany, and sometimes it was part of France, depends on between which war.  You know, anyway, he spoke German. When he came here, he got to learn Spanish right off because Spanish was spoken more than English when he first came here.  Then he learned English last. It was his last language.  

     But they built a school; the German community pitched in and built Oak Ridge School. They hired a teacher to teach their kids English, and the school was open until 1943.  I asked my Uncle Hugo, in the nursing home already, I asked him about the school, about how it was at the school and all. 

     He said that when he went there, that they had between 30-40 students.  It was a pretty nice little school.  But my grandfather donated 10 acres of land for the school and wrote in the school, that if the school ever went under, he got his land back; which he did in ’43.  But it was there for a good long time. I got a few little stories about the school.  (Laughter.) Maybe I should not tell them all.

Sloan: Start with the ones you are not sure you [should] tell!  (Laughter.)

Dale:  Many of you know who Leroy Geffert was.  He went to school out there. If they did good on a test, they got to bring their dogs to school.  They boys would get to go on a rabbit hunt as a reward for doing good on their test, so Leroy come to school and brought his dog with him.  The dog got to fighting outside so he got to bring it in and tied it to his chair.  Well, Leroy was sitting next to a window, and the other dogs started making a ruckus outside.  Well, his dog jumped out the window.  When he did, it broke his neck and killed it.  (Laughter/Groans.) They whooped on him some.

     We had an old man that I really admired.  Many of ya’ll knew Ray Mussman.  You knew who Ray Mussman was – a local carpenter for years he was a carpenter here, and I have a picture with of Ray with his mother, my Aunt Minnie.  My Great Aunt Minnie and her brother in front of her house on what now is the Middle Road.  Now, it is a six-mile-long road, and it has three names on it – Middle Road coming out of George West, then it turns into 3336 and 136 on the other end. 

      But here it is just a dirt road and hardly graded right in front of Aunt Minnie’s house.  The little baby here is Ray Mussman. He was a bully control. Whenever anybody would mess with one of the younger, smaller kids and that then Ray would whoop it. Ray was a fighter too.  In the old days, people fought a lot more than they do now.  But he was the Oak Ridge Bully Control.   All the little kids loved Ray Mussman.   (Laughter.)

     My grandfather took three of his granddaughters and my grandma raised them until they made adulthood. When Francis was little, she had to take a bathroom break. So, the teacher let her out to take a bathroom break. She was always mischievous, and she still is. She is in her 80s, and she is still pretty mischievous. 

     She had to go to the bathroom and didn’t want to go to the stinky outhouse so just went out there and found her a place to go.  Well, recess time came. Well the boys played washers. They would take their washers and throw them in their hole.  They noticed somebody had peed in their washer hole. (Laughter.) They were wanting to whup whoever it was. They were trying really hard to find out who it was, and nobody suspected sweet little Francis did that. (Laughter.) So, she did not get caught.

Sloan: That is fantastic! I think that speaks also of the community as well for his desire for there to be a school there.   

Dale: Yes, it does. He believed in the education.  I have one cousin, you [Sloan] remind me of him. You are built just like him, my cousin William, tall lanky fellow. He was raised on a ranch working cows, and all. He got an awful lot of education and became a professional student for a while and just stayed in college. Then he taught as a professor in college, and then he became a city planner for Houston. 

     I asked him one time. His dad was always real proud of him for his education and used his head to make his living with his head instead of working and sweating for it.   I asked him one time, “You were raised on the ranch and your brothers loved ranching and farming, but you were different. You took to the education field. What made you do that?” 

     He said he was out working cows one real hot summer day with his two brothers and his dad, and they had screw worms in those days. He had a cow down, and they roped it and got it down doctoring it for screw worms. They took a knife and scrapped it to get the pus out of it and get the screw worms out of it. He said he had blood all over him and pus all over him, and he had worms crawling on him. Those screw worms and the heat was just awful, and the smell was even worse.  He said there has got to be a better way to make a living. (Laughter.)  So, he started using his head and got his education and a bunch of it. 

Sloan:  I could go on for hours, but they can’t. They are getting hungry. So, you need to agree that you will do some more interviews for the project?   You got more stories to tell?

Dale:  I have a bunch more stories to tell if people are interested in hearing them.

Sloan: They are! They are interested in hearing them.  So, I am going to say, "Thank you for this first interview today. We are going to close it off there. You have to agree to do some more interviews for the project.  Will you agree to do that?"

Dale: If they want me.

Sloan: They want you to.  (Clapping.)  Thank you so much. 

Transcribed by Glynis Holm Strause on July 6, 2018. Edit, Janis Hudson.