January 2023

Grace Missionary Baptist Church has a new first family, Bryan McDade, and his wife, Ester. McDade is a native of Malvern, Ark.

I have a Facebook page that I follow religiously. It is called ‘Traces of Texas’. The gentleman that runs the page posts old stories or photos of days gone past. Some of his historical posts overlap many different places besides Texas. One of his more recent ones was a picture of a man in overalls standing beside an old Model “A” Ford. He explained how during the depression era and dustbowl period of the thirties, men would go about, finding old broken down abandoned autos and take them apart and sell them for parts and or scrap. It was a meager living, to say the least, as well as dirty, sweaty, hard labor. I can swear to that, as I was all my life, a rather shade tree mechanic of sorts, as well as growing up on a small farm in Clay County Arkansas. And with that begins my tale. My earliest memories are of my dad and grandfather working on some piece of equipment around the farm. Tractors were becoming more common, but we still used horses as well, and sometimes we used horse equipment with tractors. It began with wagons, of course. Then planters and mowing machines and harrows and discs. I was lucky enough to be born in that grand transition, between the smell of horse and leather to gear oil and tractor fuel. These men were the ones who bridged that gap, their skills evolved as they did. Then, in 1941, bombs began to fall and bullets began to fly, and they doffed their denim overalls and their long-sleeved cotton shirts, their fedoras or straw hats, and donned a uniform of the United States military and went away to defend the small farms and businesses at home. They became the men who kept the war machines working and moving toward the enemy. They went from tractors and cultivators to tanks and artillery. They won and they came home and went back and changed clothes. And America moved forward again, with huge leaps and bounds. And then we had an Interstate Highway system and tracts of new homes. Automobiles became bigger and better and faster and just pl

.