talking roots » Hunt Surname

The Times of My Life – Part I – WWII

netexas — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 01:26:26 +0000

I’ve always wondered. Did Great, Great Grandfather Thomas Hunt look up in the sky from Blount County, Tennessee in 1835 and see that momentous passage, so ballyhooed in that year, of Halley’s Comet? What were his memories of the second war with Britain, the War of 1812, and where was he and what did he think in 1826 when he heard that both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams had died on July 4th of that year?

Of course, I’ll never know, but I determined that at least for one generation my descendants will have such information — just in case some unknown grandchild or great-plus grandchild is interested someday.

I (Deason Hunt) was born in 1943 during the Second World War of the 2oth Century. It was over about the time I turned two years old, so I obviously don’t remember it as a contemporary. I spent lots of time hearing about it as I grew up, and along with playing cowboys and Indians, my friends and I played lots of WWII make-believe. I carried wooden M-1 rifles with fake bayonets, BAR’s, and we sat in foxholes, also make-believe, fired at the Nazis and Japs with our 50-caliber machine guns and tossed an occasional hand grenade. There were army surplus stores where we could walk around and look at all kinds of army gear, and war movies were as popular with young boys as shoot-em-up western movies. There were lots of on-screen war heroes who we tried to imitate, but the greatest of these was John Wayne. Most of our dads served during the war, but, at least in our family, that service was never mentioned. I found most of the details of my Dad’s (Deason Hunt, Sr.) service after his death by papers I inherited and some additional research.

I also was not aware of the dropping of the two atomic bombs on Japan to end the war in the Pacific. I was, however, aware later that it had happened because we lived under the threat that the Soviet Communists would attack us with their atomic weapons. These were felt as real threats to end civilization, and we had duck and cover drills in school (get under the desks and cover your head/neck with your clasped hands). These were also handy for the weather scourge of the areas where I grew up in Texas — tornadoes. People bought and buried and otherwise built underground fallout shelters in their yards, (We were too poor to afford one.) and radio/television had signal tests in case of enemy attack — the test of the emergency alert system. After the fall of the Communist state in the Soviet Union in 1989, we learned they were as worried that we would do the same to them so that we had a world-saving standoff. It turned out that the play-like enemies of our youth, the Japanese and the Germans, became our allies during the cold war, and we actually spent all those years hating/fearing our WWII ally, the Soviet Union. To be continued…. Next, The 1950′s

Memories too precious to lose

netexas — Tue, 19 May 2009 15:33:35 +0000

Following a local genealogical society meeting last night, I have been thinking about what is lost forever when another person dies. I feel fine, but I wanted to get down some things of which I am the last keeper. Otherwise, when I go, they go.

The first was a memory of my Dad and namesake, Deason Hunt. As we walked among the tombstones of Hunt Cemetery in eastern Rusk County, Texas, he was telling some of his memories. At the stone of his Aunt Lou Vicey Hunt Ables (1846-1922), Dad recalled her funeral. He was 12-years-old at the time. At the cemetery, the coffin was opened for viewing before burial. It was snowing that cold December day, the 17th of December. It is likely my granddaddy Joseph Lafayette Hunt was there unaware that in an odd circumstance, he would die exactly 27 years later on December 17, 1939. My Daddy remembers as he looked into the coffin, a snow flake fell upon his Aunt’s cheek appearing as if a tear.

Years earlier, Daddy recalled, that, as a child, he was allowed to feel the bullets still carried in his leg from the Civil War by his grandfather, Thomas Edmond “Buck” Fears. This would have happened no later than when Daddy was 5-years-old because that was his age when Buck died in 1915 in the Hunt home. Daddy’s sister, Gladys Jewel Hunt Stewart, remembered in 1978 that Daddy woke up that night and asked “what’s happening.” When told what had happened by his mother, he said that “old Buck wasn’t dead.”

More memories will appear on this blog as time goes by.

My Heroes

netexas — Fri, 15 May 2009 16:54:34 +0000

I don’t guess it would surprise many people that among the top ten heroes of my life several were teachers.

Like everyone, I suppose, the nature of my heroes changed as I got older. In the 1940′s there was Roy Rogers. That hero worship would later turn to admiration as I followed his life while I was an adult. The “King of the Cowboys” first fascinated us in the movie theater and then on early television. Since I was a child during the last years of WWII and the post-war years, I guess it would also be no surprise that John Wayne playing WWII and old Western (especially U. S. cavalry) roles was a great favorite. We were children of a war era.

In the 1950′s like most kids, “I Like(d) Ike,” first WWII Allied Europe commander and General Dwight D. Eisenhower and then U. S. President. I remember going downtown in Longview to the Republican headquarters and getting “I Like Ike” buttons and wearing to Foster Junior High and passing out extras to friends. Also, in the 1950′s there was Mickey Mantle. In an era before Texas major league baseball teams and even before the Dallas Cowboys, for most kids, the New York Yankees were America’s team. Mickey was the young, talented player most of us could identify with and look up to.

I had a number of teachers in school who I thought were the “bees knees,” but they three I most looked up to and, in many ways, took traits and procedures for my own teaching career were Mr. Glover, Mrs. Bourne, and Mrs. Prejean. To this day I think of them like that, and I would be very uncomfortable calling them by their first names.

Mr. Robert “Bob” Glover was my Tyler, Texas John Tyler High School American history teacher. His class was fascinating. His teaching style separated him from all my other teachers. It was like we were hearing stories and not studying history. After class was over, his students would often talk about what we had learned in class that day. I joined the high school history club mainly because Mr. Glover was sponsor.

Mrs. Mary Bourne was a bit scary. While I was in high school, I dreaded going to her Senior English class. She expected you to be prepared, to participate, and to get it right. She was tough, and I had to step up to the plate in that class. We studied English literature and related English history. For that reason, she was nicknamed “Bloody Mary,” but I know of no one who ever called her that in her presence. When I got to college (and in later years), I was better prepared for college English than many who not had her as a teacher. To this day, I appreciate her as a dedicated teacher who had our best interests at heart.

Mrs. Blanche Prejean was my journalism teacher at Tyler Junior College. She was also tough and a bit scary. She demanded your best preparation and effort. You knew better than to not deliver it. Work habits, diligence in research and writing, accepting that rewriting would be a way of life and path to excellence, and a love for traditional journalism were learned in her classes and labs and as student sports editor.

As a teacher, I never thought of myself as on the same level as these three, but trying to get to that level made me better than I would have been on my own and has kept me trying to improve even to this day. You never saw them on the silver screen or television, but they are forever among those (including my wife and parents) on the pedestals reserved for the special people who have guided me to where I am today. My heroes.

Remembering great grandpa’s firearm

netexas — Fri, 01 May 2009 23:28:14 +0000

I’m not a hunter. I’ve never fired anything more serious than a BB-gun at any living creature (and I never hit anything alive). One of my prized possessions, however, is a 19th Century black powder rifle.
I came into possession of this firearm sometime after my Dad, also Deason Hunt, died back in the early 1980′s. Mother saw that I got it because it is a Hunt family relic. It belonged to my great grandfather, William “Billy” Marshall Hunt and has been in the family from the time he acquired it.
One of the special family stories about the gun occurred in the late 1930′s when my grandfather, Joseph “Joe” Lafayette Hunt, was terminally ill with cancer. One of his worries (or requests) concerned recovering the gun which he had loaned out to an acquaintance. My Dad took it upon himself to go out and find the individual and recover the gun and return it to his Dad to ease his mind in the matter. I am sure my words do not do justice to the anquish they all felt at that time concerning Granddad Joe Hunt and his condition and the small role the weapon played in their peace of mind.
I know the gun came in the family either during or before the Civil War but not the exact time or manner. Perhaps it was carried when the family moved from Tennessee around 1850. Family tradition in the Joseph Hunt family was that the gun was carried by William when he served as a militia guard form Union prisoners at Camp Ford during the Civil War. This story came most recently from my Dad and his brother William Thomas Hunt, my Uncle Willie. Uncle Willie was old enough before William “Billy” Hunt died to have heard him talk about the weapon and his role in the war. Uncle Willie in correspondence in the 1960′s of hearing the fact of his grandfather serving at Camp Ford spoken many times in his childhood home.
I am a member of the Camp Ford Association in nearby Tyler, Texas as a way to commemorate William Hunt’s service there during the Civil War. A future museum on land on which the prison camp sat is in the planning stages.

Riding to school

netexas — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 18:36:49 +0000

I never rode a school bus to school. I know as this is written, most children (and even parents) might wonder why. The rule was school buses only ran outside of the city limits. The rest of us got to school the best way we could. No excuses were accepted for lack of ride, rain, etc. My own children (Michael and Emily) also never rode a school bus to school. Where we lived in Lake Jackson, Texas was within two miles of their schools: A. P. Beutel Elementary, Lake Jackson Intermediate School, and Brazoswood High School (actually across the city limits in neighboring Clute, Texas but still within two miles of our house on Carnation Street. The rule there was busing only beyond two miles from the school.
I don’t know what the rules were in the early 1900′s when my mother, Ozie Mae Moody, also known as Koko to all her grandchildren, was in school. However, much to my surprise when I asked one day about her experiences in school, she recalled that once she was carried to school each day in a covered wagon. You never know what you might miss if you don’t ask.
She describes her wagon experience in this excerpt from my family history, Out of Mississippi, The John Robert Wingate Family of Nacogdoches County, Texasfrom an interview I conducted with her October 19, 1991. Mother at the time of this event was living with her parents , Fred D. Moody and Pamilia Mae Wingate Moody in a logging camp in East Texas.
“Ozie Mae was sent to school even when they lived in the tent camps and outside of towns such as happened at Tucker Lake. ‘Well,

Ozie Mae Moody (Koko) in front and brother Oca Robert in cap in a school group picture perhaps at Caro School, Nacogdoches County, Texas.

now when we lived in that river bottom (Oca was still going to school then), the camp hired somebody to drive a wagon, and we went to school at Ashton. That’s down there about eight or ten miles below where Oca and Dena lived (note: near Joaquin, Shelby County, Texas). There’s not a building there now. It’s just woods.
‘We had a hoodlum wagon. They never took the cover off. If it was a pretty day, the cover stayed on. It was covered all the way down. It had hooks on little things on each side of the wagon, those hooks fit down in there, but they never took those hooks off. We never went open. That was what made them call it a hoodlum wagon. It was just a wagon and mules. It was just that group of kids that lived in that bottom, but that hoodlum wagon was full. It had a bow top on it, seats on each side of the wagon that ran the length of the wagon, and a seat down through the middle. That’s way we rode to school, knees to knees. It had two mules. Oca rode his horse, and there was another boy who rode his horse. They didn’t ride them every day. But if the weather was pretty, they rode their horses. If they rode their horses, and it rained, they’d tie their horses to the back of the wagon, and they would ride inside going home.
‘We were our little bunch at school. We were the Tucker Lake bunch. At lunch time, we all went to the wagon and ate together. Oca played basketball. We may have been there a full year. We had three little girls about my age. Most of the kids were older. I was in about the third or the fourth grade because we moved over there from Sandy Creek.’ ”

Rolling out of the car

netexas — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 19:49:11 +0000

Lots of things make me uncomfortable. These include driving on freeways with cars and big, big trucks tailgating then whizzing by me (Deason L. Hunt) and/or blocking me in and going over tall bridges like the one over the harbor at Corpus Christi or the high rise freeways of Dallas and Houston. I don’t ride roller coasters or tilta-a-whirls. As a child I remember feeling nauseous playing in the playground merry-go-round (whatever those round push with you foot and then jump on things were called). In later life, my dizziness and those early experiences have made me wonder if maybe I inherited a tendency toward those things. My Aunt Gladys (Gladys Jewel Hunt Stewart) would have small panic attacks whenever she rode as a passenger in a car over long bridges. She also had dizziness and/or fainting spells. My Daddy (Deason Lafayette Hunt) would avoid driving Houston freeways by going through Winnie, High Island, Galveston, and Surfside to visit us in Freeport. However, I also think that those motion and phobia things might also possibly be related to the incident known in our family as “the time I fell out of the car.” I was a toddler riding in the back seat of our sedan in the mid to late 1940′s. We were returning from Dallas to Longview in East Texas after having Aunt Gladys and her husband Uncle Bill (William Arthur Stewart II) up to see our house in the southern part of Dallas county. Somewhere on Highway 80, riding in the middle of the back seat between my mother (Ozie Mae Moody Hunt) and Aunt Gladys, I reached across Aunt Gladys and opened the door handle.Something (wind, speed, fate?) jerked me across Aunt Glady’s lap and past her startled hands which went up in the air rather than grab me, and I tumbled out on the hard concrete of Highway 80 and behind our car. I think I remember this and thinking, “I wonder what will happen if I open the handle right now.” Now, I probably don’t. That’s possibly something I heard and or thought up later. I don’t remember anything on the road surface, but Mother said a man driving a car behind us saw what happened and stopped his car blocking other traffic from running over me. Knowing my Mother I figure she was paniced as she dashed from the now stopped car back to where I was laying in the road. (Was I conscious? I don’t remember it.) I was picked up, placed in the car, and taken on to Big Sandy where there was a clinic on Highway 80. I supposedly fussed and cried so much at the examination that the doctor said that I couldn’t be hurt too badly and the trip continued. Aunt Gladys and Uncle Bill were dropped off in Longview, and we went on to Henderson and Mamaw’s (Anne “Annie” Elizabeth Fears Hunt) house. It was when we tried to go to bed there that night, and I was unable to lay my head on the pillow due to soreness that we really understood how badly I was going to feel from the road burn. Obviously, I lived, but for 15 years whenever we would take a road trip in the car, I would be nauseous and would only find relief by riding down in the back floorboard where I couldn’t see out of the car? Heredity or incident trauma? I really can’t say. Perhaps it was a little of both.

Those new-fangled devices

netexas — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 02:25:14 +0000

Sometimes after fiddling with new technology, I am reminded of a story about my grandmother Hunt (Anne “Annie” Elizabeth Fears “Mamaw” Hunt). I have a new cell phone which not only lets me make and receive phone calls but send and receive text messages (a la my computer but a bit slower). And, if my way bigger than the buttons fingers happen to accidentally strike a certain key, I am logged on and can surf the web. (I think. I haven’t done anything yet but panic and turn off the phone.) Mamaw was born in the 19th Century before cars, electric lights, air conditioning, radio, and television. I guess you can say that she coped even though in the 1930′s and 1940′s she still could whip up a batch of home-made soap using the iron pot out in her backyard. We had a television in our home in Texarkana by the time I was 10 years old (ca 1953), but Mamaw didn’t. She had an old cabinet radio which sat in her living room. On one occasion when Mamaw was visiting us in Texarkana, she and my mother (Ozie Mae Moody Hunt) were changing clothes in the room with the television as a man was on screen talking. As mother changed her blouse, Mamaw warned, “Ozie Mae, that man can see you.” That’s the story mother told years later. Not too long after that, Daddy (Deason Lafayette Hunt) bought Mamaw a small portable TV set which sat in her living room. She could turn it on and off, but if something went wrong, she’d just let Daddy know. I know we thought it was humorous that she didn’t understand about television, but it’s likely that my own children have had such thought about my dealings with cell phones and the impossible-to-program VCR.