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On Monday of this week, my mother’s sister passed away, Wanda Lee (Dougherty) McClure of Electra, Texas. She was 83 years old. Her husband, Henry Edward McClure, asked that I perform the eulogy at her funeral. While my blog is neither about eulogies or family, every life is precious. Genealogists will appreciate my divergence so they might find the information if they search. Below is what I presented at her funeral.
I visited with my aunt in 2007 and asked questions about her childhood. As she answered the questions, I busily typed away recording her comments. I took her responses and put them in textual form so here, so that, in her own words you can hear about her childhood.
I, Wanda Lee Dougherty, was born in Quanah Texas, June 28, 1928. My parents were Lillian Love (Hamrick) Dougherty, 24 years old, and John Presley Dougherty, 28 years old. I was the third child. My brother, Johnny Ray, was three years old at the time and my sister, Janice, was two years old. Six years later, my younger brother, Harold, would be born. We lived on 13th street in Quanah.
In Quanah, my father worked at a drug store and then later at Wey’s Hardware and Furniture store. At the top of the main store was a second-hand store where he repaired the furniture. He did it all by hand. I started to school at Quanah’s Reagan Elementary School. We were living on 6th street, then, in that little house by the Norris’s, our neighbors. There was a hill near us and we slid down the hill on paper boxes we would find. I went to Travis School until the sixth grade and then went to High School in the seventh grade. We only had eleven grades at that time.
On a typical day in Quanah, mother and dad got up early. Dad would light the fire in the pot-bellied, wood-burning stove in the dining room. He would gather up the wood around the area; we were not really downtown so there were houses, but lots of trees and brush. The stove in the kitchen was a coal-oil cooking stove. Daddy had a cow. I was afraid of the cow. At one time, we also had a goat. When Mother got up, she had Harold to take care of and she had to cook for all of us. She mostly made biscuits and gravy for breakfast. Much of the time it was water-gravy, instead of milk-gravy. Sometimes we had oatmeal. I wouldn’t eat the oatmeal because I said it had “stickers” in it. Mother tried to make me eat it because I was so skinny.
Because of my ways, Mother said I was “nicer than clean.” She called me “Wanda Lee” most of the time.
My grandparents on my father’s side were James Alfred Dougherty and Tempie Ophelia (Brazil) Dougherty. They lived in Dougherty, Texas, about six miles northwest of Emory.
My grandparents on my mother’s side were Charlie Love Hamrick and Lula Bell Hamrick. All I know about them is that they came from Tennessee to East Texas and settled in Emory. That is where my mother said she met daddy, in Emory. He worked in a drug store when they met. We stayed with our Hamrick grandparents a lot. They were good people. Grandma had a bathtub we could slide in it. It was a big old bathtub. Because water was expensive, Janice, my sister, and I usually took a bath together. Charlie preached some and had a little farm. Grandma Hamrick did a lot of canning. She dipped snuff. She had little glasses of snuff. She and grandpa both dipped. They would take a stick and keep their teeth clean to keep the snuff from staining them. We got to keep the snuff glasses. Grandpa chewed tobacco with a little tin mule about a half-inch long stuck on his tobacco tin. We got to keep the little mule. My dad always chewed tobacco, too, Brown Mule tobacco. I knew dad’s brothers, Uncle Jim and Uncle Henry and his step brothers.
We usually played outside. As we grew up, we started washing the dishes, standing up on something. We helped set the table. When we got older we helped take care of the house. I remember seeing our sheets hanging on the line, but I don’t remember changing them.
When we were at Quanah and I was in about the third grade, my oldest brother, John, played a prank on us. He and a bunch of boys were outside and we always bothered them. He had this big old wash tub and he put some trinkets under it. He said, “Girls, all gather around. I’m putting trinkets under this, now, you see me? Now, when I lift the tub you grab those trinkets as fast as you can.” He did that and when we grabbed at it, there was a fresh pile of cow manure under it. One of the little boys went home crying. Johnny played mumble-pet and we had to get the knife with our teeth. We played outside a lot and played under the house with doodle-bugs. We sang, “Doodle-bug, doodle-bug, come out of your hole. Your house is on fire and your children’s at home.” While we sang this we wiggled a stick around his hole. We caught horned toads and called them our cattle.
One day they brought Bonnie and Clyde’s car to Quanah and we got to see it. I was scared to death of that car. The Quanah sheriff, Sheriff Wheat, lived kitty-corner from us. He parked Bonnie and Clyde’s car on a vacant lot next to his house. It was on a trailer. I don’t know why it was there. We had a big old street light on that corner and at night we would play under the light.
Since our birthdays were only two days apart, Janice and I had one big birthday party together. We usually got clothes for presents. Mother’s youngest sister, Aunt Gladys, would usually bring us clothes because she worked at Perkins and Timberlake there in Quanah. On about my sixth birthday, I got a new dress with a little cape on it. Later, when I had to go to the toilet outside, I ripped that new dress on the toilet.
One year, the Elk’s Hall gave Christmas presents to the whole town, well, for the poor people. A man came out to the house and talked to mother about how many girls she had, how many boys, etc. We went to the Elk’s Hall and we got a stocking with candy, fruit, and other things. The stocking was ribbed and thick and Janice and I wore the stockings to school. Janice rolled hers down at school because she was embarrassed since most of the kids didn’t wear stockings. I didn’t roll mine down because I was afraid to. My mother told me not to because I was so sickly. I almost died of pneumonia when I was in the first grade. Another year, the Elk’s brought us a big Christmas basket for Christmas with fruit and presents; Janice got a glass doll and I got a baby doll.
When we were children we got chicken pox, scarlet fever, and measles. We didn’t have scars from the pox because mother kept us greased down with Vaseline. They put a quarantine sign on our door and we thought it would never come off. We got to sleep on mother’s lap because we hurt so bad. I got pneumonia from the dust storms. We hung dry sheets over the doors to try and keep out the dust. Uncle Marshall was the only drinker in the family and he went to Oklahoma to get me some liquor because this was thought to help me sweat the fever out.
We moved to Childress when I was in the second grade. We moved into a store and lived in the back. We always did that, lived in the back of daddy’s store. We almost starved to death there. One time they were giving away groceries and mother had the winning ticket. Sometimes, the man with the fruit stand would give us some fruit. When we were at Childress I found a candy bar on the way to school that already had a bite out of it. I was so hungry I ate it all – which was a big deal for me since I was so picky. There was a fruit stand behind us. I believe we moved to Childress because Uncle Jim recommended it as a good place for furniture repair. That didn’t turn out well. I don’t remember Uncle Jim, himself, ever being there. He lived at Dougherty.
Then, we sold out everything, piled everything in our car and moved from Childress to Lone Oak, about 15 miles northwest of Emory. Our trip to Lone Oak was full of flat tires. We ran out of gas outside Greenville. Money too. We’d have to stop at water holes and get water for the steaming engine. We must have run out of money, too, because dad had to get work and earn some money for awhile. We lived in a tent outside Greenville for several weeks. It was during the time school was out. There were other people there also living in tents. We, kids, just played, so we thought it was lots of fun. All we had to eat was black-eyed peas and when we got to Lone Oak that’s all they had to eat, too. I remember putting mustard greens in the peas to try to make them taste better. We were poor, but we had lots of fun in Lone Oak.
I remember being in the fourth grade at Lone Oak. Daddy worked in the furniture store at Lone Oak. Uncle Jim made rockers in his front yard and daddy would put chairs on the rockers. Again, we lived behind a shop daddy had in front of the building. I remember we all got a nickel for Christmas. We thought this was a great gift. We could buy an entire bag of candy for a nickel. We made a merry-go-round on a wagon wheel we found and I got deathly sick there. Where we stayed was just one big room so mama hung sheets up for room partitions and privacy.
One year, aunt Gladys had to send us some shoes so we could start to school.
Mother was sickly all her life. We were always told it was “female problems.” She finally had a hysterectomy and she got much better. I think she had several miscarriages.
We left Lone Oak and went back to Quanah. I remember going to the 6th and 7th grade in Quanah. Uncle Jim was selling rockers and came to the Darter Furniture Store in Electra and the Darter’s said they were looking for a good repairman. Uncle Jim told them about my father. Willie Lee and Ed Darter came to Quanah and asked Daddy if he would work for them in the furniture store because good repairmen were hard to find. We moved from Quanah to Electra using the Darter Furniture truck.
We came to Electra in 1942. I was 13 years old. I was behind a year in school because I failed the second half of seventh grade and had to take the whole grade over. I went to Waggoner Junior High, three stories, where the Catholic church is now off Highway 25. Then, I transferred to High School.
We went to the Church of God on Electra street. We went there because daddy worked for Darter Furniture Store and that is where the Darters went to church. I met Henry Edward McClure at church. It was December, 1945. I remember being on the church steps and he took us out to get something to drink at the White Rose Cafe. Donald Givens and Charles Pannell were there also. We all sat at the same booth. Henry had hot chocolate. Charles always got buttermilk. I always got a cherry coke or cherry milk. I ate almost nothing but pimento cheese sandwiches and cherry milk because I needed to gain weight. I wouldn’t eat breakfast. If someone had touched any of the food, I wouldn’t eat it. Sometimes I saw mother taste the food and then I wouldn’t eat it. I could never eat a piece of water melon that someone had taken a bit of and mother would never cut me off a piece by myself.
Henry and I started dating. We mostly went to church to date. When I was a girl, church was our main activity, and people getting together at the house. At the Assembly of God in Quanah, mother had played the piano so we had to sit on the front seat and listen. Aunt Norah Richardson led the choir. Janice and I sang all the time. Mother would sing with us at home. Janice and I sang some in church. Mostly, we sang church songs, but I don’t remember any specific ones. Daddy didn’t sing, but he would play the violin while we sang
Daddy worked very hard. When he was repairing furniture he would also go and pick fruit and then sell it. Janice and I went to sell it. I always stood back and made Janice go to the door
I weighed only 95 pounds when Henry and I married. I was 5’5” and was 17-and- a-half years old. I was taking finals and Henry came about 2:30 in the afternoon. He asked if I would wait for him while he went to Bible School at Cleveland. I told him I wouldn’t wait, so he asked me to marry him them. Henry was 24 years old. We got married about three hours later at 7:00 PM. We went to Vernon to get the marriage license. My mother had to sign for me. Henry didn’t have the two dollars for the license so my mother paid for it. (Henry never paid her back.) Mother then took a suit I had just bought and we fixed that up for a wedding dress. I had paid it out at $1.98 a week. We got married at Willie Lee Darter’s house over on Ida Street; she was Henry’s oldest sister. She helped Mother to fix the dinner – although, we had the actual dinner at the house of Henry’s grandmother, Fannie and H.B. Scales. Janice and Donald married two weeks later. We spent the first night at Willie Lee Darter’s house. Henry and his brother Avril Jay took off to Tennessee Bible Training School and College in Sevierville, Tennessee to be an accountant and I followed two weeks later after Janice and Donald were married.
When I went to Tennessee, Henry and I lived in one room we rented in the attic of a house. We had to come downstairs to go to the bathroom. I finished High School there. I was really homesick because I had never been away from home. We got to travel to the Smokies. It was really enjoyable. We would get on the bus on the weekend and travel. We later on moved downstairs in the same house with one bedroom and a kitchen and we shared the bathroom with the rest of the house.
Henry had saved $3,000 – $4,000 while he was in service four years and had sent it to Willie Lee, his sister, to keep for him. She put it in savings so Henry and I lived off that while he went to college. Money was not really a problem. We stayed where we were because that was all we could get. It was a tiny town. Henry had gone one whole year there already at the college before he went into the service. Willie Lee had sent him up there and paid for it so after the naval service, he wanted to continue. We stayed a half term from January to May. I graduated from High School there and Henry doubled up and got credit for a whole year of bookkeeping.
After school was out, we had to come home because there was no summer school. I was pregnant with Hugh Edward. We came and stayed a week or so with Mother and Dad in Wichita Falls, the house Daddy built on 30th street in the Hillcrest addition with 7-foot ceilings. Daddy drove back and forth from Electra to build it. We then went to Olney and Henry worked as bookkeeper for Chriswell and Duggan, a construction company. First, we lived in some apartments that were once barrack buildings. They built a section of houses in Olney. You couldn’t get wood so they made block houses with the blocks the construction company made. We were there until 1955.
Chriswell and Duggan folded and Henry took a bookkeeping job with Shamburger Lumber, Co. He was manager at the Mergargel store. Mergarel is halfway between Olney and Seymour. He did this for several years and then came back to the Olney store doing the same job. When the old man Shamburger died, his wife began to sell out the business, so Henry went back into the service.
… At this point, Aunt Wanda grew tired and the conversation shifted to something else…
But their lives went on. Another child was born, Rusty McClure. They lived in Norfork, Virginia and San Diego, California. Henry retired from the Navy and they came back to Olney to work for awhile managing a motel. Finally, they moved back to Electra to their current house on South Main Street.
Wanda Lee (Dougherty) McClure passed away, Monday, January 2, 2012 at the age of 83. She lived her life as a homemaker. She was the last of the children in her immediate family, being preceded in death several years ago by younger brother Harold Gene Dougherty, and only within the last two years by sister, Lillian Janice (Dougherty) Givens, and older brother Johnny Ray Dougherty.
She is preceded in death by her youngest son, Ira Andrew (Rusty) McClure. She is survived by her husband of almost 66 years, Henry McClure of Electra.
She is also survived by her oldest son, Hugh McClure of Coalinga, California; four grandchildren, Clifford, Tiffany, Harold, and Eddie; four great-grandchildren; and one great-great-grandchild.