Here Rests Ike Towell

We moved from the ranch in Bernardo into Columbus, Texas, when I was ten and Lorette was four.  I spent much of my free time exploring and otherwise entertaining myself on my bicycle. 

In a small town in the 1950s, no one worried about kids running away from home or being kidnapped.  No one locked their doors and people often left the keys in their cars, permanently.  Lost keys were not a problem.  Theft was not a problem.  The rule for children was to be home by dark.  Gram had an extra rule which was not to go down by the river because there were bums camping there, but I never could find one.

One of my favorite haunts was the Columbus City Cemetery where Gram and my father are now buried.  Under the live oak trees were civil war veterans, families with a row of infant headstones, familiar local names with graves going back a century or more, and the one most fascinating to me was the headstone of Ike Towell who wrote his own epitaph before he died in 1934.

I have since wondered if Ike Towell's influence helped shape my own religious and political beliefs.  I certainly didn't get these notions from the textbooks approved by the Texas Board of Education which populated not only Texas schools but most of the schools in the country, books which were deadly dull and free of anything even remotely thought-provoking, and in the recent past have completely rewritten American history.