Carmela and Marc

SheriffSy Bradford, Thurber Old Photos

The Last Blacks in Thurber

Thurber's Ghost

Thurber’s Ghost

By Leo S. Bielinski, Ph. D

Many cities have some sort of a ghost story. Thurber was called a “Ghost Town” after it was abandoned in the early 1930’s. But “Ghost Town” is a misnomer, for there have always been several residents living in Thurber. Some of these residents added to the legend of a ghost seen in this “Ghost Town.” While the later residents speak of a lady ghost seen and heard in downtown Thurber, the Thurber Ghost seems to have originated in the Thurber Cemetery back about 1920.

Frank Tolbert of the Dallas Morning News resurrected the ghost story in a May 15, 1983 story. At that time, the owner of the restaurant in Thurber was irritated because three of his employees had just quit because they claimed that Thurber had ghosts “in residence…Two of the employees were a married pair of Cuban refugees, and the other was a 65-year-old maintenance man.” These employees lived in apartments above the restaurant. The restaurant was in the bottom floor of the old two-storied Thurber Drug Store.

Tolbert also related that he had first heard of the ghost story in 1955 from Mrs. Eliza Whitehead, one of the “old-timers” who had seen and heard a singing ghost. “I been here 40 years…I was just walkin’ in downtown one night and here come this pretty woman singin’ in some funny way. Then she just went away right in front of my eyes.”

Thurber had an opera house and Thurber, with its large opera-loving Italian population, was a regular stop for touring opera companies. And Albert Whitehead, Eliza’s husband, corroborated Eliza’s story. “You don’t catch me passin’ through town after dark.” The Whiteheads remained in Thurber as caretakers of the remaining houses and buildings, particularly the “Guest House” (W. K. Gordon’s Home), where company “Big Shots” stayed when they came to Thurber for hunting and fishing.

Walter Kostiha and his brother Frank claimed to have seen the ghost. This was about 1925 when Thurber was beginning to shut down. The Kostihas lived near the old jail house, which was just north of downtown Thurber.

Walter: “I don’t care whether you believe me or not. I know what I saw, even if I was about five or six years old. I was with my brother Frank behind the old grocery store just about dark. We saw this woman in a white gown and she was singing or saying something out loud. We took off running.”

The Fort Worth Star Telegram (Oct 26, 1997) in a weekend Halloween edition did not help matters when they wrote “The Thurber Cemetery is one of the biggest Texas historical cemeteries. It is also one of the scariest places to be on a dark night. The trees bend over the graves as if in mourning for the 700 (sic) or more children buried there. The epidemics of scarlet fever and whooping cough…definitely left their mark on this Texas Ghost Town.”

Raymond Bridier had a plausible explanation for the origin of the Thurber Ghost. When Raymond was about ten years old (say, around 1920), on moonlit nights a bunch of kids would meet at the ball park, which at this time was on top of Grave Yard Hill next to the cemetery. They would smoke cedar bark, play games like “kick the can” or just talk.

One night as they were going home, they noticed a lady in a white gown sitting on the top step of the sty (steps over the fence) in the southeast corner of the cemetery. She was crying or praying loudly, perhaps for a loved one she had recently buried in the cemetery. The kids thought this behavior odd but this quickened their pace toward home.

The following night the same scene, but this time they took off running; something had spooked them. Now, they were afraid to play in the ball park after dark. But several weeks later courage returned and they went back up the hill. Nobody there. They smoked, played their games, but as they exited the ball park and headed for home, she was there! She stood up on the steps and started toward them! They panicked and went tearing down the hill. They never went back to the ball park, and shortly thereafter, the ball park was moved to the east side of Thurber.

After the ball park episode, which seemed a plausible happening, all the alleged sightings have been in downtown Thurber. Some have said the singing is caused by the wind whistling through the old buildings. But Eliza Whitehead or Walter Kostiha would never believe that because they saw her with their own eyes and heard her.

The Thurber Cemetery was savagely vandalized recently. Decades of work were destroyed in a single evening. The Thurber Cemetery Restoration Project relies on donations of time or financial help. Contributions may be made to the Thurber Cemetery Association, Box 115, Mingus, Texas 76463.

Thurber Hill, Ranger Hill

Bankhead Highway’s Thurber Hill

Begins and Ends Many Lives

By Jeff Clark

Roads have memories, just like people.

Last week I retraced the abandoned Bankhead Highway as it climbed steep Thurber Hill, just west of Highway 16 in Eastland County. I used to call this uprising “Ranger Hill”, but that occurs farther west, where Loop 254 leaves Interstate 20. I’m parallel and north of Interstate 20, its big hill still hassling heavily-laden trucks as they head toward West Texas. Migrating west, 1930’s travelers received their first heaping spoonful of the bitter medicine up ahead.

Thurber Hill rises 200 feet in a little over a mile. Model T’s attempted this incline backwards, sucking every available ounce of horsepower from their feeble engines. Folks were often driving rattle trap old vehicles that were one strand of bailing wire away from disaster. Gas tanks were rarely full. You didn’t stop until (not unless) you ran out of gas, broke down, or Nature called.

Thurber Hill remains miserly with her secrets. Elders remember the roar of the Thurber-bricked roadway beneath thin tires, before Highway 80 asphalt replaced it. Like so much that’s happened here, this high-pitched ascent seems so unnecessary. I wonder what possessed planners to carve their road here and not along the more gently ascending Gone-to-California wagon road a mile to our south.

During Ranger’s too-brief oil boom, twenty horsepower Tin Lizzies had two speeds – low and high. Gravity-fed gas tanks lurked beneath their driver’s seat in early models. Facing an uphill climb with a half-empty tank, fuel couldn’t reach the engine. That sputtering noise under your hood told riders that life was about to get exciting. The early Fords had three pedals (low, reverse and brake). When the high speed clutch band became worn, the reverse pedal was used to back up the hill.

Today, the road narrows quickly from the bottom, the ground falling away to a deep gorge on the right. Tall hillside, then boulders soar above one’s sightline to the left. High grass and trees reach out to reclaim this black and white striped road. You can go forward. You can roll backward. There ain’t no turning back.

Given the tightness of this road, 12 feet wide in places, and the dramatic stay-away-from-the-edge curves, surely Pacific-bound Tin Lizzies loaded with their family’s worldly belongings were followed on foot by their kin. Today, mesquites and cedar line the ledge once punctuated by guard rails (more for show, if hit very hard). Trucks that couldn’t make the climb backed down. If you blew a hydraulic brake line coming down, you’d need to go home and replace your shorts.

This first climb is the steepest. When a heavy truck had to stop under strain of its load or a wobbly car broke down, there were no shoulders. No place to turn around. There’s no changing direction – unless you can fly. Coming down you’d have to stand on friction brakes, your Model T a little too anxious to achieve supersonic speed. This 1920s path struggles to peel itself away from the edge.

The road whispers sadly, “it happened here, back in 1941.”

A stopped-in-the-road truck loaded down with lumber blocked its lane, its broken axle not an easy fix. A nice car stopped to help, pulling up beside. This is a blind corner, until the next car coming along is almost upon you. Up at the top of Thurber Hill we see a second truck begin its descent, full to the sideboards with happy workers heading to East Texas cotton fields.

When the lumber truck and the Good Samaritan car come shockingly into sight, the farm workers’ truck driver knows he has to stop. Pushing steel pedal hard to the floorboard, the doomed truck’s brakes fail, its speed faster and faster falling down the runaway road toward the star-crossed car and lumber truck. The careening truck’s driver aims heroically for the space between the two vehicles, to avoid taking his passengers through the rails and into mid-air.

Whatever horror this poor truck driver imagines pales beside what happens next.

The big truck crashes full speed into both lumber truck and car. Many were injured. Many needed help.

The Ervins stop to help, to take the injured to Ranger’s hospital. The lumber truck driver lights flares to warn off further catastrophe. People busy themselves helping the wounded. The call goes in to Ranger – send help. Send everything you’ve got…

The Ranger Fire Department had a siren mounted on top of their building that could be heard all over town. Its wail announced fires, tornado warnings, world war black outs and other emergencies. “Most of the young people who had access to cars would follow the fire trucks to the scene,” Dorothy Elrod told me. Fire trucks, ambulances, and “all of Ranger” left the little town, racing toward destiny.

They say the fire probably started in the lumber, maybe a spark from the flares beneath its wheels. It might have smoldered unnoticed in all the chaos. Two loaded Greyhound buses stopped behind the accident. Their passengers piled off to get a better look. Cars from the surrounding countryside pulled to a stop, blocking more of the road. Some say four hundred souls watched as that lumber truck burst into flames.

The fire quickly spread, igniting a saddle gas tank under the truck. A monstrous explosion erupted across the panicked hillside, spewing burning gasoline across hundreds of onlookers like high tide slamming into a seawall. James L. Ervin was blown off the cliff by the blast. Faceless shapes ran in every direction across the hellish scene ablaze. The few who’d remained in their cars were uninjured, reports later confirmed.

Whatever happened next, panic has erased from the record. There wouldn’t have been enough firemen to go around. There’s no water at the site. Time must have stopped, as shocked minds struggled to take in the end-of-the-world tableau. The injured, the dead and dying were taken to Ranger’s West Texas Hospital, whose rooms filled, whose hallway floors were quickly littered with occupied mattresses. Others were taken to the City-County Hospital in town, and a few to Eastland. Then as now, burn injuries are grotesque, among the most agonizing to ever be inflicted upon a suffering victim.

Seven died that night. Thirty to forty more are said to have perished later from burns or other injuries. Several more were maimed for life. No one left unchanged.

“It was a very sad time since some of our classmates were injured in the blast,” remembers Dorothy Elrod. Today the road is eerily silent. “Nothing to see here,” this stretch seems to have learned the hard way. A quick prayer, then back in the truck. I need to escape this place.

Ironically, the paved road widens to seventy feet not too much farther up the path, a place designed for ascending cars and trucks to pull off and add water to overheating radiators, to let descending car brakes cool. To marshal one’s courage for another attempt at the summit.

Just up the hill on the north side of the road, a long northern curve to the right is lined with two WPA-looking brown stone gateways, marking the entrances to Scenic Point, a roadside park. People could’ve walked here from the wide place in the road. There are at least three barbeque pits built out of the same stone hiding in the brush. A rusted set of bedsprings pulled up to one fire for warmth.

Once you enter the gateways, the pavement stops. Vintage photos show this to be a scenic hillside for picnics. There’s still a beautiful thigh-high rock wall lining the curving Bankhead out front.

            Easter sunrise services were held here. “I remember we were on high ground,” Dorothy told me. “The scene looking east was breathtaking, especially when the sun started rising. We had a sermon and sang gospel songs.”

            Back in the truck, the road finally reaches the crest of Thurber Hill. What takes a few minutes on Interstate 20, takes much longer here. But this road’s not through talking. As the pavement flattens, you notice concrete and brick ruins to the south. This was the original hilltop gas station, before the complex moved west to Ranger Hill when Highway 80 blew through. There’s a flat concrete slab observation deck hanging off the hillside, from which you can see Thurber’s Italian Hill many miles to the east.

Rejoining the interstate’s service road up ahead, a cinder block building marks the location of Offield’s Truck Stop and Café. Not too much farther and the real Ranger Hill awaits. Like so much along this old highway, “what used to be” holds center stage.

Today I don’t much care what came next – Highway 80 then I-20. Too much has been uncovered, too many wounds unsealed. The gray asphalt reaches west finally toward Ranger, cutting a slightly wider path through the cedar. Tens of thousands passed by this spot heading toward, or away from something as our young nation reached adolescence. A few souls never made it.

            Interstate 20 caused the death of many Bankhead Highway towns, I’m often told. But after today, I think that’s a symptom, not a life sentence. I invite those folks to travel Route 66, much less historically-important than the Bankhead brick and asphalt remnants still snaking through their towns. Route 66 is raking in the cash.

Shorty Fox tells about when he and Mutt Lee were traveling to Ranger in 1939. They’d been to Fort Worth to pick up lumber for a National Youth Camp cabin or three, across from where the Ranger Library now sits. They were driving a packed-full Chevy truck. It popped a spark plug, hitting the inside of the hood like a snub nose bullet. The two men stopped, climbed out, scotched the wheels with rocks, and made their repair (most of Shorty’s stories involve duct tape or chewing gum, seems like). They got the truck running and started up the hill.

I asked him about what he saw, as they rode that old truck up the too-steep road. “Listen,” he told me, as serious as he ever gets. “We’d just repaired a truck, we were loaded down with lumber, and we were struggling straight up this big hill in first gear – a huge drop off to the right. We were just happy to get to the top.”

I’ve always heard about the “big hill” east of Ranger. Now I’ve driven it. I’ve listened to it speak. Thousands of long-ago echoes can be heard, if this hillside road’s memory is to be believed. I look back along the narrow road, its words softly speaking one last time. “I was just happy to get to the top.”

Some of this story occurs on private property, entered with permission. A full recounting of the 1941 tragedy and its heroic aftermath may be read at www.angelfire.com/tx/rangerexes/1939a.htm (used with permission). Special thanks to Barry Franklin, Ken Falls, Shanon Hunt, Tommy Parks, Dorothy Elrod, Leo Bielinski, Rae Wooten, Shorty Fox, Mac Jacoby, Jack Blackwell, Mike Herrington, and Harlon Perrin.

The Louis White Drowning

Soda Pop Offer Tints

Louis White’s Memory

By Jeff Clark

“Life was cheap back then.”

            Butter Bridier is 85. He spent his first decade of life in coal mining Thurber. The Bridiers lived in House 1269. That’s eight-year-old Butter in the photo telling this story.

“One day Louis White knocked on our front door. I didn’t even know his name.” Louis was 14. After knocking, Louis stepped back off the Bridiers’ porch. He was black. Times were different.

“He wore no shirt or shoes, his hands in his pockets.”

             “Miss Polly Boo,” Louis said to Butter’s mom, “Charlie said I could ride old Mary.” Charlie is Butter’s older brother.

“Are you sure Charlie said you could ride his donkey?”

“Yes m’am. If he hadn’t, I wouldn’t be here.”

Butter’s dad was French, his Polly Boo nickname derived from “Parlez vous Francais. Louis gets the donkey bridled. He dives halfway across her back so he can straddle her to ride. But when Louis jumped, his pants slipped down around his ankles. “My mom laughed so hard snuff ran down her face.”

Another time Butter and his mom drove their A model Ford to Thurber’s service station for two gallons of gas. “That was all you could afford, even at 15 cents a gallon.” Louis is there, leaning against an iced soft drink cooler.

“Hey Louis.”

Louis looked at Butter, not lifting up from the cooler box.  “You want a soda pop?” he asked Butter.

“I don’t have any money.”

“I’ll buy you one. I got money.”

“You won’t pay for it.” Butter doesn’t know if Louis had a nickel, dime or what. Grown people in Thurber didn’t have 10 cents in their pockets back then.

“I don’t remember seeing Louis alive after that.”

            The White family is living with Louis and Isabella Walters inside House 208, according to the 1920 census. A 40-year-old “Louis” Walter and a four-month-old “Louis” White. Father Ed White is 65 and wife Lucy’s 37. By 1930, Louis is 11, his father 75, mom Lucy 49. They’re living in House 102, in “Colored Town” notes the census taker. Lucy is a laundress. Ed isn’t working. He listed “coal mines” as his job in 1920. Perhaps he became disabled.

The census shows the most money any of 50 names on the page possessed was $20 (all races). Ed and Lucy had “none”. Though Thurber had no black school, Louis was able to read and write.

Thurber’s Little Lake still sits just west of New York Hill. You could swim or fish there. There was a homemade flat-bottom row boat anyone could use, made of 1 x 12’s, tar and pitch keeping water out. Two boys about 16 joined Louis in the boat that day.

He could’ve fallen overboard accidentally. His shipmates could’ve wanted to see if Louis really couldn’t swim. Louis disappeared beneath the surface.

Johnny Elwood brought his metal boat. He and Ted Botts went back and forth looking for Louis’ body with a grappling hook. Fifteen to twenty people watched from shore.

“I came around our house the day of the drowning. Diagonal across the street Miss Crane had a grandson Charles Sanders, playing with a yo-yo. “Hey Butter, you know N___ Lewis drowned?” He just kept yo-yo’ing. “I told momma and she hurried to Little Lake to see.”

When Louis was brought to shore, he wore no shirt or shoes. A stretcher carried him up on the dam. He’d been in the water over an hour. No effort was made to resuscitate.

“Dr. Baldridge was standing by Louis’ feet. He said, ‘I pronounce him dead.” The crowd dispersed.

            There wasn’t an inquest, it doesn’t appear. The family cared, perhaps few others. “It was hard to stay alive back then.” Louis was buried in an unmarked grave in Thurber Cemetery.

Blacks had church below New York Hill. Though all races mined together, there was little associating around town.

            There was a black preacher once, preaching real loud. “I got scared and started crying,” Butter told me. “They once passed the plate. One guy didn’t pay the plate any mind as it went past. The preacher asked, “How ‘bout you sir? You got something you can give to the Lord?”

“Yeah, I might give Him a dollar.”

“Very good, put it in the plate there.”

“Well, if you don’t mind, I’ll give it to Him when I see Him.”

            Louis White was willing to share a soda, Butter told me these 76 years later. “I always remembered that.”

            Louis’ mother Lucy died two months later to the day of a broken heart. We don’t know if his then 79-year-old father had died or moved away. Lucy was getting up in age, in bad health, poorly fed, facing the world’s worries without that 14-year-old boy’s smile to keep her going.

“Those were survival times. As bad as it was, Louis offered to buy me a soda pop.”

When the restoration of Thurber Cemetery began Butter told wife Faye, “If we ever discover where Louis’ grave is, I want to put up a tombstone.” Butter’s grandmother is buried at Thurber.

After he retired, he talked to Flogene Boston who lived on Park Row. She told him, yes, she went to Louis’ funeral. His grave’s right there by the fence. The Bridiers found two plots that “fit” her memory.

Butter and wife Faye gave Louis his tombstone. Leo Bielinski gave Lucy hers.

“I can always remember that little guy,” Butter told me, “leaning against the soda cooler. If I could put flowers on only one grave at Thurber, it would be his.”

Lucy White’s headstone reads “A Mother Grieves No More.”

Little Louis White drowned, after teaching one important lesson.

            “You want a soda pop?”

SUGGESTED CAPTIONS

1.         The story teller, eight-year-old Butter Bridier in front of House 1269 in Thurber.

2.         The grappling hook used to find Louis White’s body in Little Lake.

3.         Mother and son’s headstones.

Latin Mass at Thurber

St. Barbara’s Church Walls Hear Echoes from its Past

The Latin Mass in Thurber

By Jeff Clark

            It’s black dark here in the long-deserted Thurber Cemetery, a mere hint of orange sunset visible to the west. Tonight is New Year’s Eve – the beginning and hopefully the end. Forty-seven pilgrims, good people ranging from pre-teen to senior citizen kneel in a circle around their priest, in the flat dead winter grass beside one lonely grave.

            I won’t water this down. The presence of the Lord is tangibly inside this forgotten place tonight, among and around these people. They are in communion with Thurber’s departed fathers, mothers and children at rest beneath and around us, their souls or their memories or their tragedies as present to me this night as my own distant heartbeat – perhaps more so. Father Kenneth Novak’s words waft skyward:

            “Requiem aeternam dona ei, Domine,

                        et lux perpetua luceat ei.”

            “Eternal rest, grant unto him, O Lord.

                        And let perpetual light, shine upon him.”

This is a prayer for the repose of this mining town’s lost, buried for eternity within these tombstone-speckled nine acres, spreading like a flickering Easter candle into the darkness around us. If there are ghosts within this place, tonight they welcome this throng to their table.

The circled parish quietly answers their shepherd: “Amen”.

The priest lifts his strong voice into the night: “In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost.” Hands touch foreheads, heart, left then right across their chests. These new friends to Thurber Cemetery rise. The cold wind turns warm in celebration. We return quietly to our cars, headlights come on in the darkness, a slow procession of 14 vehicles snakes slowly along the cemetery’s serpentine center road, then along the fence, leaving this hallowed ground to its peaceful night.

            I’m beginning to wonder if there’s such a thing as chance encounter. Last week, my friend Leo was tending to this cemetery, as he has for many years. Father Novak of El Paso shows up, completely at random Leo tells me later, a priest from the Pius X Society.

            The Pius X Society is a conservative Catholic group that believes the Catholic Church departed from its true path after Vatican II (1962-1965). Father Novak is excited about Thurber’s story, Leo tells me. Wants to bring his parishioners out here, hold a Tridentine Mass in Latin that dates back to 1570, inside Thurber’s 1892 St. Barbara’s church, resting peacefully at the foot of New York Hill. Leo agrees.

            I was baptized into the Catholic Church when I was thirty-eight-years-old, following a year much like this last one. Never baptized or saved or any of that before one dark fateful Easter Vigil evening, back in the big city. I’ve attended Masses all over the South – in pre-dawn Spanish at San Antonio’s San Fernando Cathedral, at a sprawling Jesuit monastery beside the lumbering Mississippi River, and with a couple of once-ordained friends nearing the end of their own personal crises. I’ve never seen the Latin Mass performed, at least not in person.

            Friday morning, I met Leo at St. Barbara’s. Father Novak’s flock began arriving soon after. It was clear from the cardboard boxes, the number of altar boys, the stream of cars pulling up outside this church that history was about to make itself visible inside this little wooden church.

            Weekly Mass has not been said at St. Barbara’s in many, many years. This proud white building originally sat below Graveyard Hill until it was moved to Mingus in the 1930s, until it returned here to Thurber in 1995.

            Father Novak swept into the old church building, wearing a traditional black cassock. He is a force, a sparking current of energy that can take the unprepared aback. His exuberance would give my seven-year-old a run for her money. He shakes Leo’s hand, then begins issuing orders – candles go here, reliquaries there – a throng follow him down the wood plank floored aisle to make ready. His followers love their charismatic leader. St. Barbara’s stirs to life.

            Four altar boys light the candles, six white tapers lining the space behind St. Barbara’s front altar. Two statues are delicately lifted into place, atop empty white perches where St. Barbara’s own sculpted saints once stood. The red Gospel is placed lightly on the altar. The golden chalice moves into view. Men bow to their Lord when stepping in front of the front altar, turn and bow again upon leaving.

Father Novak is a teaching priest, explaining to the assembled that because there’s no altar stone in St. Barbara’s, that linens containing holy relics sealed within wax will help consecrate their communion rite, that clean linens atop these will be in place as tradition demands.

The Latin Mass is celebrated with the priest facing away from the congregation. Father Novak’s words were sometimes too quiet to hear, though God undoubtedly received the prayers heading His way. One of the prayers was sung, the haunting Gregorian chant rising to the ceiling like sweet-smelling incense. St. Barbara’s communion rail has been put back in place, restoring authenticity to its pre-Vatican II legacy.

The men led the rosary before Mass began, gleaming beads in hands as confessions were received by the priest in the confessional along St. Barbara’s back wall. Four ornate golden reliquaries graced the altar. St. Barbara’s white wooden tabernacle against the front wall is original. The tops of women’s heads are graced with delicate lace veils. These worshippers in the Latin rite have traveled here from all over North Texas. The lights are on. The bathroom door is unlocked. The floor is swept. This church, at least for today, is back in business.

            My eyes were fixed forward, sitting in the back pew with Leo. Edging majestically into the silence, the sound of St. Barbara’s original foot-pumped organ announced the opening words of Mass. “I haven’t heard that organ play in over 60 years,” Leo whispered to me. You have to pump both your feet at the same time, while playing the keyboard to make the thing sing – not a common skill in this post-modern age.

This organ was heard by coal miners coming here for Mass over ninety years ago. Leo’s Big Ciocia (Polish, “Big Aunt”) played this same organ. His mother Lottie sang in the choir. Today the organ’s tone was again strong, was haunting in its beauty. Leo was baptized in this building, married here, and served as an altar boy here.

            Father Novak preached of the history of this town – about the fleeting cities of man, about the eternal City of God. His masculine last words stayed with me: “Lord, we’re coming. We’re on our way.”

            I believe him.

            Toward the end of Mass the church’s steeple bell began to peel, each strike carefully timed to fit the choreography within Father Novak’s traditional liturgy. That long-silent historic bell could be heard all the way north to Mingus back in the day – its first toll to get dressed (church starts in 30 minutes), then to head for the church (15 minutes left), and then to take a seat in your pew (five minutes til kickoff).

            I sat there wondering if New York Hill Restaurant diners up the hill knew that the St. Barbara’s bell they were hearing from their tables was singing its part this last day of 2010 in a centuries-old celebration. That Thurber’s heart had come back to life.

            After Mass ended, the worshippers left the church and climbed the steep Thurber-brick steps to New York Hill’s scenic overlook, bringing to mind Christ’s last sorrowful journey on this earth. A catfish dinner was served by New York Hill Restaurant, being Friday and all. Leo gives a talk about Thurber, about scanning for graves. The room warms to his stories.

The group adjourned for a short tour of the museum down the hill, then drove across I-20 to the Thurber Cemetery. Kids and adults were taught to scan – new graves were located. Stories were told among new family –about the Spanish influenza mass graves, about the two Marys, about our sleeping friend Vincenzo. We talked about the past, about the holy duty of handing our stories forward to their futures, through kids and grandkids – through ink onto paper. Someday those descendents will need to know who they are. We told one short ghost story, then moved away.

            There is a concept in Catholicism known as ecumenicalism – the simplified definition explains that though there are important differences between the various denominations, we should all reach out in fellowship and love one another as Jesus did, as Jesus does. People of good will should join hands, the thinking goes, no matter what the sign says on the front of their church building, on the front of their cardboard box home beneath that lonely freeway bridge.

            I meet many new people each week. After “I live in Weatherford”, I often get asked which church I attend. The answer is complicated, as I feel connected to the Holy Roman Catholic Church (Mother Church versus some of her recent drivers), the Church of Christ (special friends and ancestors), the Baptists (my two daughters and grandparents), the Buddhists (Catholic friend Thomas Merton saw the same bridge here, I believe), to the Native whispers I’ve begun to hear from this part of Texas and to the many other “unseen churches” that I happen upon in senior citizens’ homes around the state. God is not just an inside-some-church-building deity. The gleaming megawatt cathedral of worship these kind folks brought to life this night in Thurber Cemetery proves this, at least to me.

            Thurber Cemetery contains believers’ graves of many stripes, probably some non-believers too. In this quiet darkness, I prayed as rarely before for 2010 to be finally over. I prayed that conflict would end its too-long stay outside our doorsteps. And I listened for the future.

These kind people who I now consider friends remind me of the earliest Christians, holding their assemblies below the streets in dark catacombs. They knew what they believed. Their parents or grandparents has seen Jesus in the flesh, had known the sacrifice that their faith might extract from their too-fragile lives. Those catacomb warriors joined these new friends worshipping in the dark last night – they knew that One was more powerful than many. I respect these people’s return to their tradition, their fidelity to what they know is right.

            There are no chance meetings. Let us leave it at that. May this New Year bring us back to that knowledge. May we all see what God puts before us. And act. Amen.

The “lonely grave” mentioned above is that of Barbara and John Lorenz, its perimeter “fenced” with vertical oil field pipes. When first discovered, only the date “January 31, 1931” was visible. Research into 1931 church records restored their names to the roll call of this physical place. 

Anthony Bascilli

Anthony Bascilli

What’s Next is Coming

Thurber miner Anthony Bascilli’s rugged wooden cross has fallen to the ground at Thurber Cemetery, a victim of old age. It stood over six feet, one of the more notable landmarks on Graveyard Hill. By the time you read this, God-willing, it will have been repaired. It will again be standing.

Bascilli may have worked the mines as late as 1926. After that, he probably did odd jobs around Thurber while the place was shutting down. He was Hungarian.

Anthony Bascilli was a man who thought things through. Four mortared brick walls line the six foot deep insides of his grave, from ground level to buried floor of casket. Like an elevator shaft. These Thurber bricks were laid by Luigi “Gi Gi” Biondini and his son Johnny. Bascilli’s casket was also made by Gi Gi. Mr. Bascilli slept alive in the wooden coffin before being buried in it later. Eternity is a long time. One wants to be comfortable.

Bascilli instructed that two steel doors be placed over his casket with several feet of dirt separating the two. This was carried out. He then wanted a key to the casket to be dropped down a vent or air pipe to his casket. This pipe was also indeed installed at his request. The key is available to him.

The year 1927 is etched into the front of the wooden cross, though this is thought to be the year of construction, not the later 1932 year of his death from pneumonia at age 77 according to Church records. The large square piece of sheet metal visible on the cross was to frame the photograph of Bascilli’s friend Louis Piontek. A practical joke, one has to believe.

Gino Solignanni says Bascilli sometimes got drunk and would walk down the Back Road to Thurber (going north to 108 out of Thurber, first road east) and every couple hundred yards set off a half stick of dynamite. There couldn’t have been more than two or three blasts. There’s only about a half mile stretch where no houses then were.

Ka-boom.

Palo Pinto County backroads guard many stories of strange burial practices – phone lines to coffins, glass-topped see-into caskets and some other richer stories best not told in polite society. Though life was said to be cheap back then, apparently what happened next was very much on these folks’ minds.

Bascilli left directions that a new suit and new shoes be folded inside the foot of his casket. When it was time to rise from his grave as the Bible promised, he wanted to look good. With the doors and keys and brick-lined hole, the man wanted a head start.

Anthony Bascilli’s grave makes me smile when I walk past. He believed certain things a little outside the norm and he had the courage to act. Visibly, out loud, the hell with what people might think. More importantly, it appears the man kept his sense of humor in a time when life was hard.

And getting harder by the day.

He was waiting for something. Or someone. But he was ready to make the first three moves. He wasn’t afraid to give the destiny he hoped for a little nudge to move it along. Whether he was born like that or first circled around life or books or whatever, I don’t know. But he got there by the end.

Words from the past, for the future.

Visiting Grant Town Grandparents,

The 1930s Road from Seguin to Mingus

(This story was written by Louis Scopel, recalling childhood trips to Grant Town. Grant Town was a “suburb” of Thurber, located just to the west, northwest. Many structures remain.)

“Travel from Seguin to Mingus was a trip attempted usually not more than twice a year for reasons mentioned below. The distance was 245 miles on primarily on US 281, usually a highway in good condition. The trip usually took from five to eight hours depending on stops etc. Most of our trips were in a 1936 Plymouth 4 door. US 281, was wide enough for two cars and was pretty mundane on most occasions. Plenty wide as you seldom met another vehicle every thirty minutes, or at least, so it seemed. Once we left New Braunfels, the next stop light was in Stephenville. The 1936 Plymouth diligently purred along with an under dash radio keeping dad aware of the latest baseball scores. 

We normally left when dad closed down the poultry processing plant for the weekend and he took a quick bath – he smelled better then. By then Mom had items packed and ready to go. Mom knew how long these trips were as she packed plenty of provisions! There was the thermos of coffee but containers of cookies, several cakes for Gi Gi and John Franks. And there would be another bag of fruit and sandwiches. She seemed to believe we might get stranded somewhere sometime. Anyway we would soon be purring along after leaving civilization in New Braunfels or so it seemed with our head lights piercing the darkness. In later years I compared them to two candles! 

When traveling in colder weather our heating system worked great—three of us in the front seat with a blanket amply dusted with crumbs, tucked across our laps. On one trip, as we approached Marble Falls, our headlights started getting dimmer. When we arrived in Marble Falls we located a lonely street light and dad opened the hood – immediate diagnosis was a loose generator belt but that did not seem to be the problem. A quick consensus convinced us to continue on to Burnet as it seemed larger and the county seat.

So we continued and as luck would have it, there was a Texaco station open, and the young man was accommodating enough. Yes, they did have a part time mechanic but he had went home for the week end, however, with a bit of prodding he agreed to come in and look at the Plymouth’s charging system. We agreed this was better than on the side of the highway – we had food and a rest room. After arriving, the mechanic determined it was the generator but questioned where do you locate one at this time of the night on a weekend? Amazingly our mechanic located one, left and came back with it under his arm. In short order the generator was ‘ginning’ again and the lights were comparable to two candles once more.

Our trusty Plymouth would usually rattle across the cattle guard in Grant Town between 10 and midnight waking everyone and announcing our arrival – and time to eat and catch up on news.  If my aunt Pauline was there, there would be dishes and bowls of fudge and divinity etc.

{When Thurber shut down many people moved out to Grant Town. "My mother and grandparents came to Thurber from Italy to work in the coal mines,” Scopel said. “When they shut down, my mother's folks moved to Grant Town and my dad's, along with many others, moved to Manvel south of Houston.”}

            Noted historian Leo Bielinski has written about Grant Town, and shares:

“Jimmy Grant opened a saloon just outside the city limits of the Texas & Pacific Coal and Oil Company-owned Thurber. His saloon was frequented by miners who could talk freely about unionization without fear of company intimidation. Some immigrant Thurber miners moved out of Thurber to Grant Town to own homes and small businesses. The area became known as Grant's Town, shortened to Grant Town.”

"Today it is part of Mingus, but the locals still refer to it as Grant Town. During Prohibition, there was bootlegging in Grant Town, and after the repeal of Prohibition in 1933, several honky tonks opened up.”

"Johnny Biondini, Louis Scopel's uncle, summed up the family's move from Thurber to Grant Town after the coal mines shut down in Thurber: 'In Thurber we had all the modern conveniences like running water, gas heat and electricity. But when we moved to Grant Town, just a quarter mile away, we had to adjust to coal oil lamps, well water and wood stoves. There are just a few left who lived in Grant Town before WWII."

“Thurber had a barbed wire fence around it to keep Thurberites buying in the company store. Jimmy Grant's saloon was just outside this fence. The immigrant Italians made up a fourth of Thurber's population, but the company store did not stock the different salamis, cheeses, olive oils etc. (which the Italians wanted). So in addition to Grant's saloon, there were several Italians who set up small combination grocery store/saloons in Grant's Town, just outside of the barbed wire fence to cater to the Italians on Thurber's nearby Italian Hill: Sealfi, Ronchetti, Mezzano, Corona, Castaldo and Raffaele [and others].”

"There were several prominent bootleggers in Grant Town during the Prohibition era. Not just Italians, but all nationalities were involved in bootlegging. When the mines began shutting down in the 1920s, bootlegging was a way of surviving and had none of the Chicago style gangsterism. There was little stigma if you bootlegged. The nearby Ranger Oil Boom was profitable for the bootleggers."