The Life And Times
Of
Guice Wilbur Johnson
A product of the marriage of
Anna Wilson Kingsted and Guice Winfield Johnson
"I
was born in Houston, Texas, on 24 October, 1920. At the time my parents lived on Tulane
Street. In a short time we moved to
534 West 19th Street. I was very
fortunate that my mother taught me to read and write before I was five years of
age. My father worked as a chef and
chief baker at a downtown restaurant.
When
I was a little kid in Houston one member of my family's small circle of friends
worked as an executive at a company that made oil drill bits. We were included in on company picnics
and some parties that were attended by the company owner. He had a tall, skinny, teenaged boy who
also attended some of the functions.
The kid's name was Howard and the company our friend worked for was
Hughes Oil Tool Company.
After
a few years my father went to work for the Fleishman Yeast Company as a sort of
a trouble shooter for bakeries that were experiencing operational
difficulties. As a result, we spent
several months moving from town to town. One day my father met a gentleman
named Ernest Alexander who was in the process of building one of the first
supermarkets in Ft. Worth, Texas.
This was the break we were waiting for. The first store was at the
intersection of Camp Bowie Boulevard and West Seventh Street. It was truly a super market. It had a
bakery, bakery sales, produce, groceries, fresh meat, cafeteria and a Renfrow
drug store. My father managed the
bakery and my mother managed the bakery sales.
About
a year later they opened another identical store at the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and Henderson
Boulevard, also in Ft. Worth.
Things went great for a while until the famous depression worked its way
to Texas. The company went
bankrupt, my mother and father lost their jobs. They opened a small bakery and that
lasted a few months and it sunk into oblivion.
This
is a story, maybe not about my favorite car, but one I will never forget. In Fort Worth, Texas, in 1929, three
little boys bought a car. I was
eight years old and the other two were each nine. I happened on to a man who had a Model T
Ford that he wanted to sell. I was
able to talk him down to $7.50.
That's right, seven dollars and fifty cents. I thought it sounded like a real
bargain, so I looked up my buddies and we gathered all the money we had and
bought the car. Never mind that
none of us knew how to drive. You
must remember that back then $7.50 was a lot of money, particularly to a little
kid.
In
those days there was no drivers' license required in Texas. We managed to get the car to a gasoline
station where we had a friend.
Friend installed some old tires over the tires already on the car,
making them flat proof. This was a
beautiful car, a cloth-top coupe.
We removed the turtle back and built a rumble seat, removed the ragged top,
and filled the tank with eleven-cent-a-gallon gas.
In
the City of Fort Worth, Trinity Park is near the Trinity River. Trinity Park had dirt roads that would
frequently be spread with used oil to keep the dust down. The three of us would drive that car to
the park and look for freshly oiled roads.
This was where we would practice sliding and spinning. We drove that Ford all over Fort Worth,
but especially in the section of Trinity Park opening off 7th.
The
summer went by fast with our new toy.
None of our parents had an inkling of what we were up to. We really had a lot of fun with that old
car. As everything must end, so did
our association with our car. It
was almost time to start back to school.
We were stopped at a traffic light on Henderson Boulevard and a truck
load of farm workers stopped beside us.
Some smart guy on the truck yelled, "Hey, kid. I'll give you $10.00 for that
car." I immediately answered,
"You got $10.00?" Well,
he took up a collection and gave me the ten and we went happily on our
way. We three kids had a great
summer with our toy. Nothing bad
happened, only good. Things could
have been different, but they weren't.
We made $2.50, not bad for a first business deal.
Modern
day kids sit around complaining about having nothing to do. There was a time
when kids showed a little initiative.
There was a vacant half block in our neighborhood in Ft. Worth with only
one house. I thought this would be
a great place for me and my friends to play and keep out of trouble. It turned out that this huge vacant lot
belonged to an elderly lady who lived in the house. I asked her if we could use her property
as our playground. She immediately
said yes if we would be very careful not to get hurt, no digging of caves etc,.
We
got very busy and cleared off an area for a ball diamond (on Summit Avenue just
a couple of blocks north of Pennsylvania.)
Oh! I forgot to tell you that the whole area except for the lady's yard
was covered with tall grass and weeds.
One day I got a really wild idea.
Why not get a couple of burros for us to ride? We had plenty of free feed. I phoned the City Pound and explained
our idea to the man who answered and asked if we could borrow some burros for
the summer. Surprisingly, he
thought it was a good idea. He said
they only had five homeless burros and we could have any or all of them. They would deliver them for twenty-five
cents each and pick them up later for twenty-five cents each.
We
decided to take them all. We had a
great time with our new friends. One day I got another wild idea, why not
include them in our ball games? We
didn't have enough animals for every position, but we could have enough to
cover the runners and have a couple
of spares. That was the day that I think I invented donkey baseball.
The
next spring when I call the pound to get some burros, the director told me that
they didn't have any, but to try Forest Park Zoo because they raised burros to
feed the big cats. We had more
burros for that summer.
Before
we left Fort Worth, I attended my first year of junior high at Jennings Avenue
Junior High. My best friend was a
guy named Charley Tandy. Charley's
parents owned Hinckley Tandy Leather Goods Company on Commerce Street in
downtown Fort Worth in partnership with a gentleman named Hinckley, whom I
assumed was Charley's grandfather because he called him Pops.
Charley
and I became tired of making footstools, smoking stands, etc. in shop
class. I suggested to Charley that
we get some leather scraps from his dad and make some wallets or belts in
shop. We spoke to the shop teacher
and he gave his approval. The next
step was to approach Charley's dad.
Dad didn't think much of the
idea, so we talked to Pops. He
thought it was a great idea. He cut
out the pieces that we needed. He
cut leather laces and even cut little rectangles of eisenglass--before
plastic--for the windows in the wallets.
We
took these kits to shop class and made us each a wallet. You should have seen the kids. Everyone wanted a wallet kit. We went back to the store and told Pops,
and he made a bunch more kits that we sold to the other kids for thirty-five
cents each. I firmly believe that
we invented the first kit Tandy Corporation/Radio Shack ever sold. I still remember the hand lettered sign
in the window of the store.
"Wallet Kits 35 cents."
Below the sign in order of assembly were listed the parts of the kit.
Several
years ago I wrote to the President of Tandy and he wrote me back thanking me
for the story and sent me a book about the history of the company. It was then that I learned that Hinckley
was a partner, not a grandfather.
My
folks and I moved back to Houston and again we went into business, and were
doing pretty well until we received word that my grandmother--mother's mother--
had broken her hip and was in very serious condition. My mother and father immediately sold
their business and moved to the farm near Beeville, Texas. I stayed with my mother's sister and continued
school. When school was out, I
moved to the farm. My grandmother
had since died, but grandfather was old and feeble and died not too long after
I arrived. When grandmother died,
the 360 acre farm was divided into half and each of the five children shared
equally in one half. When my
grandfather died he willed the remaining 180 acres, including the house and
barns and his gold pocket watch to me.
(The farm is a sad story.
Even though I was the owner, mother was later able to sell it without my
knowledge and keep the money for herself.)
After
graduating from Beeville High School in 1936 we rented the farm to a young
couple and moved to Bryan, Texas, where I enrolled at Texas A & M. Again my mother and father opened a
café. While I was
working one day a stranger came into the café looking for my
father. "My name is Lyndon
Johnson, and I am your cousin. Your father and my father were cousins from the
same part of Georgia."
[Research reveals that LBJ's grandfather and Thomas Vestal Johnson's
father could have been related, but not that closely.] I told him that I didn't count beyond
first cousin.
We
had been at Bryan for almost a year when my father went down the street to have
coffee with a friend and never returned.
Mother and I gave up the house and set up house keeping in the back part
of the café. Mother and my
father were divorced. At court the
judge asked who I would rather live with and I told him neither one (with an
explanation). The judge declared me
an adult and my own person.
Life
plays strange tricks when you are not paying attention. After a period of time I came home from
school one day and my mother was gone, never to return. Here I am, a seventeen-year-old kid,
stuck with a café and no money.
I
was able to keep things going for a while by getting up at 5:00 a.m. to open
the café and working until time to go to school. After class, it was
back to work in the café until 9:00 p.m. I was able to hold out for quite
awhile until I could take it no more.
Finally, one day I followed my parent's lead and I also disappeared.
Everyone
suffers setbacks and disappointments in their life. One of my first was during my second
summer at A&M. I had
applied to the Texas Rangers and was invited to Camp Mabrey near Austin for an
interview. I passed my physical and
was ready to start training when someone woke up and discovered that I was only
seventeen. They required applicants
be twenty-one, so I did not become a Texas Ranger. They have regretted it ever since.
I
went to Houston where I worked as stock boy in a grocery store for a couple of
months and decided there must be a better way. I moved to Dallas and went to work at an
advertising agency. I stayed there
until I received a better offer from Lone Star Olds Cadillac Company as the
courtesy car driver. This was a
great job because I was practically my own boss. I met many different people, one of whom
was Lawrence Welk. He was
incredibly cheap. I had many job
offers while at Lone Star, but it was only after being recruited by the general
manager of Montgomery Ward mail order house in Ft. Worth that I made a
move. I joined their Executive
Training Program.
World
War Two arrived and, still being too young to enlist, I took a job as a flight
dispatcher at a RAF flying school.
When I became old enough, I enlisted in the U.S. Air Corps. I completed my training and
finally went to the island of Tinian as a B-29 Bombardier. I forgot to mention that I took a cocker
spaniel puppy named Whisky with me, but that's another story. I served a full combat tour and returned
stateside. I didn't like it very
much. Finally, after a little
devious maneuvering I returned to Tinian.
By now the war is over and the bomb group was moved to Clark Field in
the Philippines. One day I had an
opportunity to come home, and I did.
I
was out almost a year and got back into the Air Corps. I was stationed at Turner Air Base
at Albany, Ga. There on 28 March
1948 I married Margie Virginia McManeus.
From Albany, we were transferred to the island of Trinidad for a couple
of years and then to Puerto Rico for about a year. We were next transferred to MacDill AFB
at Tampa, Florida, where I was again lucky enough to become a B-29 Bombardier
headed for Korea. While on the island of Okinawa, I broke my neck in three
places. It took a while before
doctors figured out my neck was broken.
That didn't cause any problems because I had almost finished my tour.
After
my neck healed, we made the route of several bases and schools and I became an
Electronic Warfare Officer on a B-52 crew--first at Altus, Oklahoma, and then Wright
Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, where I retired and moved to Punta Gorda,
Florida, in June, 1964. We are
still in Punta Gorda.
While
all of this was going on my father had settled in Hereford, Texas. Sometime during World War II, he married
a woman named Fern. My father
died in 1961. We were living in
Dayton, Ohio, when Fern called and said Dad had died. We immediately took off for
Hereford. Unfortunately, there was
no money for a funeral. We took
care of that. I got to thinking
that he had worked his tail off all those years and had nothing to show for
it. I went to the bank and they
were able to get me a $5.00 gold piece.
Before he was buried, I slipped it into his pocket. He never had anything here, but maybe he
had something to get started when he got to wherever he went. You can take it with you.
In
1964, my mother moved to Port Charlotte near Marge and me. Mother died 14 August 1986 in a care
center in Port Charlotte, Florida."