My Extraordinary Ordinary Life Read Online Free Page B

town, but after the stock market crashed in 1929, people lost confidence in the banking system and started pulling out their money. This was before FDIC insurance, and if a bank went bust, you could lose everything. Two Granger banks were wiped out after the farmers demanded to withdraw their savings in cash, on the spot. When AA heard a rumor that there would be a similar run on the National Bank, he decided to take matters into his own hands. The story goes that he rode the train to the federal bank in Houston to withdraw his bank’s cash reserves, returning overnight with armed guards and a carload of money.
    The next morning, the bank managers set a long table behind the teller windows and piled it high with stacks of bills. As the townspeople came in to withdraw their money they could see that the bank had plenty of cash. The run was averted, and the bank was saved.
    My grandfather was an unusual banker. When farmers couldn’t qualify for credit, AA would often loan them the money from his own funds. After his death, papers were found in his personal effects showing that he had forgiven the loans of those who couldn’t pay, saving farms all over the county from foreclosure. AA was elected mayor of Granger, served as postmaster, was active in the Granger fire department and the Odd Fellows. My grandfather became a big wheel in the Texas Democratic Party, as did his brother, Rudolph, who was elected to the state legislature. AA used to take my dad to all kinds of political events. I still have two tiny lead donkeys Daddy passed down to me—souvenirs from the 1928 Democratic national convention in Houston.
    AA was a friend of the future president Lyndon Baines Johnson, who gave him the nickname “Double A.” Whenever Johnson was campaigning around Granger, he would spend the night at my grandparents’ home. LBJ would call and say, “Double A, I want to put my shoes under your bed.” He was a colorful houseguest. My grandmother surprised him one night while he was walking around the house wearing only boxer shorts—white with red polka dots. Johnson was a tireless campaigner who used to fly all over Texas in a helicopter while he was running for the Senate in the forties and fifties. Even towns like Granger and Quitman weren’t too small for Johnson. In Quitman he would land in the square, right downtown. The whole city would come out, mainly to gawk at the helicopter. Everywhere he flew, LBJ would throw his Stetson out the door of the helicopter, sailing it into the waiting crowd. Usually some small boy would end up with it, and during his stump speech, LBJ would ask, “Has anybody seen my hat?” The boy would run up to hand it to him, and Johnson would give him a silver dollar. I’m told my brother Robbie caught the hat one time, but I was too little to remember.
    In 1921, my grandparents built a Craftsman-style bungalow in Granger. I loved that house, with its clean lines and breezy hallways; I still visit it in my dreams. There was a deep front porch covered by an arched portico, perfect for sipping Dr Peppers in the shade on hot afternoons. The front door opened into a spacious sitting room and a winding staircase with a wooden bannister rising up to the second floor. All through the house I could hear the clock ticking away from the stairwell. My brothers and I would slide down that bannister, or play school on the stairs with our cousins, blocking anyone trying to make it up to the second floor. The house was near the train tracks—everything in Granger was—and I would fall asleep in an upstairs bedroom, listening to the freight trains loaded with cotton rumble through town, blowing their horns.
    The farm where I live in Virginia is near a set of tracks, and in the cool months when we open the windows and listen to the sound of the trains rolling by, it triggers those wonderful dreams of my grandparents’ house.
    We called our grandfather “Pops” and our grandmother “Momsy.” She was a petite,