Along with Joan and Sue, my two older sisters, I spent my early growing up years in the West End, an old blue collar neighborhood situated just outside downtown Houston and settled mostly by German immigrants before 1900. Witness the names: Reinerman, Reineke, Sandman, Detering. Our mother grew to adulthood in the West End, first at 806 Sandman, later at 102 Arnold. A photograph dated 1924 shows Mother, then seven, seated in a little cart hitched to a goat. This picture was taken in front of their family home, located next to the grandparents’ corner house, a home I owned for a few years in the 1990s at 803 Sandman.
In the early 1920s, the Fuchs family moved deeper into the West End, into a part of the neighborhood where the street markers today read NO OUTLET. From the beginning the streets were dead-ends, houses on these streets landlocked by wooded property that held cattle and horses. Some of this property is still in families bearing the same names as the original owners…Dickson. There are cattle and horses, virtually in the shadow of downtown Houston skyscrapers. Fox Hill is what some people call this deep part of the West End—really Fuchs Hill, although the residents who know the name don’t know the correct spelling. (Fox. From the Middle High German "vuhs" meaning fox. Sometimes used to describe someone with red hair, or someone considered crafty or clever - characteristics attributed to the fox. FOX is the English version of this surname, which is also spelled FUHS, FUX. From About.Inc., a part of the New York Times Company).
As young children we were surrounded by Fuchs history. The street where Mother grew up, and where my sisters and I spent our early years, is named Arnold, for Arnold Prause, who married a Fuchs daughter, great Aunt Tena, our mother’s namesake. Our great grandfather Will, along with his son Frank, ran cattle in this area that included what became Memorial Drive, the parkway separating toney River Oaks from the West End. Our cousin, C. W. Poe, related on both the Fuchs and Hollis side—Fuchs through his mother, Ida Bell Heinrich and Hollis through his daddy, Carl Poe—was one of our playmates. C. W. shares a blood mix with my middle sister and me.
Today, C. W. continues to live on West End land descended from Will and Betty Fuchs through their granddaughter Ida Bell, though this inherited home was built in the 1960s, to take the place of the old Will Fuchs homestead of the 1920s. The house I remember, that I see in my mind’s eye, was not destroyed, simply relocated and rented out. The same people, first a mother and daughter, and now just the daughter, have occupied this rent house for 40-plus years. In some ways, this little niche of the West End hasn’t changed much.
The Will Fuchs homestead was not dissimilar to my grandparents’ house, typical clapboard design of the 1920s—distinctively solid like the Germans who built it. Oddly, in my mind’s eye, I see the Will Fuchs house just as distinctly as our own house. Will and Betty were gone, of course. Ida Bell continued to practice rural German traditions—raising laying hens, milking a cow, and making clabber. I can see the sturdy stoneware clabber bowl covered with unbleached muslin resting on a table in what had been a porch, now enclosed to be her sewing room. My mother reminded me some time before her death that Ida Bell would gather the curds from the soured milk into the muslin and hang it on the clothesline to allow the excess liquid to drip out. The curds were eaten like cottage cheese and the milk in the stoneware bowl became buttermilk. This is what I recall.
Traditions, treasures, and wonder characterized our life there in the West End of the late 1940s. We had our own kid treasures as well. The Our Gang Comedy bunch had a film crew to record their Hollywood version of treasure hunting. My memory holds the vision of West End treasures, perhaps gathered as we roamed the gulley behind C. W.’s house, digging out discarded bottles and tins, one of which eventually held booty buried in a grove directly across from the front of the Will Fuchs house, at the top of the rise that looked down on Memorial Drive. I don’t remember the contents of that tin box, but I do remember digging away the carpet of leaves and the smell of damp dirt when we buried it. Did we ever retrieve that tin? I’ve dreamed about it now and again into adulthood.
With the help of my sister Sue and our neighbor Charlene, I learned to ride my bicycle on the long Dickson driveway. Our neighbor Judy Robertson hit me over the head with a piece of two by four. I don’t remember why. On a Halloween night as dark and windy as the scene in “To Kill a Mockingbird” where Scout almost loses her life to the drunken racist Bob Ewell, Joan, Sue, and I, joined by other neighborhood kids, went trick or treating at the old Dickson homestead. Set back in the trees, on a dirt lot bare of grass, the two-story house was right out of the movies. We waited anxiously at the front door, lit by a single bulb, “Trick or treat, trick or treat,” and then scattered like banshees when the Dickson’s grown son Joe came flying down the stairway, draped in a sheet.
Daughters of the Black family that had worked for our grandparents, Frank and Lizzie Fuchs, babysat us sometimes. Once, Sugar Loaf told us ghost stories and had us all so frightened that we all, including Sugar Loaf, were found hiding under the bed when Mother and Daddy came home. Somewhere we have a photograph and a tear out from the Houston newspaper showing the Hollis children, along with Mother and our family friend Jim Hulme, and the family collie, Lassie, and 13 fluffy puppies. While sitting with Sue and me one time, our grandmother Lizzie discovered that we had been nipping from the decanter of Mogen David stored on top of the dining room buffet. I had on a plaid, short-sleeve shirt the time Joan grabbed me by the collar to keep me from winning a race down the side of the house. Tingling with the feel of cool concrete against our bare feet, Sue and I danced on top of the brick and concrete pillars that supported the railing of the Frank and Lizzie Fuchs front porch, our home for a few years before the Hollises moved to the country in the summer of 1951.
Fortunately, time and distance haven’t diminished the treasure of the 1940s, those years where we were imprinted with our sense of family. In this year where our personal connection to the previous generation came to a close with the death of our mother, more and more we remember. We will celebrate our first Thanksgiving and Christmas, and I hope that we will remember well where our treasure lies. It isn’t a table, or a photograph, and not a patch of land, including the site in Hopewell Cemetery where the earthly remains of Tena Elizabeth Fuchs and Russell Hollis repose. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.
Old Treasure—Santa Fe, New Mexico (November 13, 2007)
R. Harold Hollis
In the early 1920s, the Fuchs family moved deeper into the West End, into a part of the neighborhood where the street markers today read NO OUTLET. From the beginning the streets were dead-ends, houses on these streets landlocked by wooded property that held cattle and horses. Some of this property is still in families bearing the same names as the original owners…Dickson. There are cattle and horses, virtually in the shadow of downtown Houston skyscrapers. Fox Hill is what some people call this deep part of the West End—really Fuchs Hill, although the residents who know the name don’t know the correct spelling. (Fox. From the Middle High German "vuhs" meaning fox. Sometimes used to describe someone with red hair, or someone considered crafty or clever - characteristics attributed to the fox. FOX is the English version of this surname, which is also spelled FUHS, FUX. From About.Inc., a part of the New York Times Company).
As young children we were surrounded by Fuchs history. The street where Mother grew up, and where my sisters and I spent our early years, is named Arnold, for Arnold Prause, who married a Fuchs daughter, great Aunt Tena, our mother’s namesake. Our great grandfather Will, along with his son Frank, ran cattle in this area that included what became Memorial Drive, the parkway separating toney River Oaks from the West End. Our cousin, C. W. Poe, related on both the Fuchs and Hollis side—Fuchs through his mother, Ida Bell Heinrich and Hollis through his daddy, Carl Poe—was one of our playmates. C. W. shares a blood mix with my middle sister and me.
Today, C. W. continues to live on West End land descended from Will and Betty Fuchs through their granddaughter Ida Bell, though this inherited home was built in the 1960s, to take the place of the old Will Fuchs homestead of the 1920s. The house I remember, that I see in my mind’s eye, was not destroyed, simply relocated and rented out. The same people, first a mother and daughter, and now just the daughter, have occupied this rent house for 40-plus years. In some ways, this little niche of the West End hasn’t changed much.
The Will Fuchs homestead was not dissimilar to my grandparents’ house, typical clapboard design of the 1920s—distinctively solid like the Germans who built it. Oddly, in my mind’s eye, I see the Will Fuchs house just as distinctly as our own house. Will and Betty were gone, of course. Ida Bell continued to practice rural German traditions—raising laying hens, milking a cow, and making clabber. I can see the sturdy stoneware clabber bowl covered with unbleached muslin resting on a table in what had been a porch, now enclosed to be her sewing room. My mother reminded me some time before her death that Ida Bell would gather the curds from the soured milk into the muslin and hang it on the clothesline to allow the excess liquid to drip out. The curds were eaten like cottage cheese and the milk in the stoneware bowl became buttermilk. This is what I recall.
Traditions, treasures, and wonder characterized our life there in the West End of the late 1940s. We had our own kid treasures as well. The Our Gang Comedy bunch had a film crew to record their Hollywood version of treasure hunting. My memory holds the vision of West End treasures, perhaps gathered as we roamed the gulley behind C. W.’s house, digging out discarded bottles and tins, one of which eventually held booty buried in a grove directly across from the front of the Will Fuchs house, at the top of the rise that looked down on Memorial Drive. I don’t remember the contents of that tin box, but I do remember digging away the carpet of leaves and the smell of damp dirt when we buried it. Did we ever retrieve that tin? I’ve dreamed about it now and again into adulthood.
With the help of my sister Sue and our neighbor Charlene, I learned to ride my bicycle on the long Dickson driveway. Our neighbor Judy Robertson hit me over the head with a piece of two by four. I don’t remember why. On a Halloween night as dark and windy as the scene in “To Kill a Mockingbird” where Scout almost loses her life to the drunken racist Bob Ewell, Joan, Sue, and I, joined by other neighborhood kids, went trick or treating at the old Dickson homestead. Set back in the trees, on a dirt lot bare of grass, the two-story house was right out of the movies. We waited anxiously at the front door, lit by a single bulb, “Trick or treat, trick or treat,” and then scattered like banshees when the Dickson’s grown son Joe came flying down the stairway, draped in a sheet.
Daughters of the Black family that had worked for our grandparents, Frank and Lizzie Fuchs, babysat us sometimes. Once, Sugar Loaf told us ghost stories and had us all so frightened that we all, including Sugar Loaf, were found hiding under the bed when Mother and Daddy came home. Somewhere we have a photograph and a tear out from the Houston newspaper showing the Hollis children, along with Mother and our family friend Jim Hulme, and the family collie, Lassie, and 13 fluffy puppies. While sitting with Sue and me one time, our grandmother Lizzie discovered that we had been nipping from the decanter of Mogen David stored on top of the dining room buffet. I had on a plaid, short-sleeve shirt the time Joan grabbed me by the collar to keep me from winning a race down the side of the house. Tingling with the feel of cool concrete against our bare feet, Sue and I danced on top of the brick and concrete pillars that supported the railing of the Frank and Lizzie Fuchs front porch, our home for a few years before the Hollises moved to the country in the summer of 1951.
Fortunately, time and distance haven’t diminished the treasure of the 1940s, those years where we were imprinted with our sense of family. In this year where our personal connection to the previous generation came to a close with the death of our mother, more and more we remember. We will celebrate our first Thanksgiving and Christmas, and I hope that we will remember well where our treasure lies. It isn’t a table, or a photograph, and not a patch of land, including the site in Hopewell Cemetery where the earthly remains of Tena Elizabeth Fuchs and Russell Hollis repose. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.
Old Treasure—Santa Fe, New Mexico (November 13, 2007)
R. Harold Hollis
1 comment:
I recall Carl Poe's wood working shop out in the back yard of that beautiful rambling brick home. I think it was on Ida bell street.I have a beautiful knotty pine gun case made by him which belonged to my father. There was a big chicken coop that also had squirrels as part of the inhabitants. Ida bell once got all over me for spitting in her fireplace. She was going to use those ashes for hominy.Uncle Carl baught a real fancy pickup at about the time he retired from the gas company. I think it was a 1958 GMC fleetside with a Pontiac 389 motor. He was sure proud of that truck.
His little brother Coy Poe was my daddy. I was named after their first cousin Billy Hollis who was killed in WW2. My name is William Hollis Poe. I recall my father taking ma all around that neighborhood in the late 60s and showing me where he survived as a dark complected short legged boy with dark curly hair.
I vaguely recall at age 8 in 1955, the old house and how C.W. and I and maby you were playing out on that brushy hill side and we found a grave stone of white marble.I remember Grandpa Poe and his last wife Edith. How on his front parch there was a nickel imbeded in the concrete and he would say, "You can have that nickel boy if you can pick it up."My daddy was partly raised by his uncle Walter Hollis who gave me my first hair cut and as a Baptist preacher, blessed me and told my father that his son would serve the Lord some day.We weren't much regarded by the clans so in 1955 we moved to Washington State but those folks didn't care much for us eather so we settled is Sun Valley Idaho where my daddy spent his best years and I stayed as close to him as I could till he left us to be with his mother in glory. I have ended up in Hamilton Montana and my great Uncle Walter Hollis was correct when he told my father that his son would serve the Lord some day. I am a pastor.
In 1962 during a visit Uncle Carl took me aside and told me things about the Hollis clan that I don't think any one else knows.
Post a Comment