08/03/2026
Today is the 131st birthday of my grandfather.
Oscar David WHITE was born on 3 Aug 1895 in Hopkins, Texas. He died after an auto wreck when his pickup ran into the rear of a road grader. He was thrown forward into the steering wheel, and his neck was broken. He died in the ambulance en route to the hospital on 14 May 1974 in Abilene, Taylor, Texas, at age 78. He was buried on 17 May 1974 at the city cemetery in Rising Star, Eastland, Texas. He was the third son of John Beauregard White and Mary Ellen Crockett. When Oscar was eight, his grandfather, Isaac Anderson White, a Confederate cavalry veteran, died. In the 1900 Census, in addition to his own family, his father's younger brother, Buck, was living with them.
There are several stories I know that shaped him. I have heard the story of Lonnie, his older brother, Daniel Leon White. Lonnie was thrown from a horse and either dislocated or broke his hip. No one is really sure which. Their father, John B., made Lonnie get up, remount the horse, and ride it, without realizing how badly hurt his son was. I have heard Papa wonder how his father could have done such a thing or not realize how badly hurt his child was. John White was not an unkind father, from any of the stories I have heard about him. He simply did not believe that his boy was hurt as badly as he was.
His eldest sister contracted spinal meningitis and was severely crippled. Emma spent the rest of her life using a crutch to get around. One of her legs was drawn up and became much shorter than the other.
At the end of the first decade of the century, John and Mary White moved to Comanche County, Texas, with their family. They bought a farm and rented additional land near the Amity Church house, which is very close to where Brown, Comanche, and Eastland Counties meet at a single point. Oscar was between the ages of 10 and 15 when his family moved from East Texas.
Oscar attended high school in Blanket and graduated from there. In our family, he was the first to graduate from high school. That much formal education was not highly regarded for a young man who was going to become a farmer like his father before him.
Oscar, in high school, was quite an athlete. At one state track meet, he was the entire track team from Blanket High. At that meet, he placed among the schools with complete teams because he competed in so many events. I am told that he would have placed among the top five high schools in the state had they gotten his number on his jersey correct. At one point, according to family legend, he held the high school record for the 120-yard high hurdles, a record that stood until broken by his son, Oscar, Jr.! I doubt the veracity of the story, but it should be said that both Oscar Sr. and Oscar Jr. were outstanding athletes.
In 1918, when he was 23 years old, he entered the Army to serve in World War I. He was probably drafted. He was stationed in Waco, Texas, where he became a cook. His total time of enlistment was about eight months.
He spoke fondly of his service in the army. He spent his entire enlistment in a training regiment. He never left Waco. He once told me that while he was in the army, not one Hun crossed the Brazos River, which flows through Waco. I grew up thinking he probably whipped the German Army all by himself. He was always a hero to me. He still is.
While he was in the Army, he met the sixteen-year-old Ollie Popejoy at a photographer's studio in Waco. He came into the studio to have his photo taken in uniform as the war was winding down at the end of 1918.
After their short courtship, they were married in Waco on January 9, 1919. Within a month, Oscar was discharged from the army. It is stamped for a train trip from Waco to Rising Star with his "war bride."
He rented a farm near his parents' farm and began farming. Almost two years later, on December 16, 1920, their first child, Edythe Alma White, was born. She was named for Ollie's grandmother, Edith Ervine Fields.
26 months later, their second child and first son, Oscar McField White, Jr., was born on March 28, 1923. 26 months after Oscar's birth, Derrell Wade White was born on May 17, 1925, on their farm outside Rising Star. Ollie became pregnant again after a year and a half, and their fourth child and second daughter, Joy Geneva, was born on September 16, 1927.
I believe he and Ollie were very much in love. He deferred to her in many things, something he never did with anyone else. Once Oscar decided to sell a horse they owned, Oscar, Jr. claimed the horse and did not want his daddy to sell it. Oscar told his boy to hush. Oscar, Jr. ran into the house, where his Mom lay on a sick bed. (Could it be after Derrell was burned and skin was cut from her leg for a graft? We do not know.) Junior cried and told his mother what was going on. She told him to go get his Daddy. Oscar came, and they talked. The horse stayed.
After Joy was born, the family's first tragedy struck. Derrell, about four years old, got too close to the trash barrel where a fire was burning. He was carrying a can of kerosene, which ignited. His pants caught fire, and he was badly burned. They tried a new procedure there and performed a skin graft. They cut skin from his mother's leg and grafted it onto Derrell's leg.
In November 1930, Joy became sick with what was diagnosed as diphtheria. This was before the days of penicillin and other antibiotics. Joy was in bed with a high fever, slowly choking to death. In Rising Star, another child, a boy, also had diphtheria. They gave Joy a shot of a serum that was supposed to help her, and for the boy they tried a procedure called a tracheotomy to let air into the boy's lungs. He survived, and Joy did not. She died on November 25, 1930, just two months after her third birthday.
Oscar wanted to bury Joy in the family plot at Amity Cemetery, but Ollie wanted her buried closer so that she could walk to the grave to take care of it. Amity Cemetery was too far out in the country, and she did not drive at that time. Oscar again deferred to Ollie, and Joy was buried in the Rising Star City Cemetery.
A few months after Joy's death, Ollie became pregnant for the fifth time. It was the summer of 1931, and the baby was due in November. Shortly before the due date, Ollie fell. The circumstances of the fall are unknown to me. She was concerned because she could no longer feel the baby move.
A doctor was called, and he said there was nothing to worry about. Three days later, Ollie became very sick with a high fever. She delivered a septic baby and died on November 23, 1931. The doctor stated that he knew the baby had died in the fall, but that he thought she could go ahead and deliver it normally. Ollie was buried cradling the baby boy in the same coffin with her. Oscar buried his wife of twelve years next to Joy in the Rising Star City Cemetery.
Six months later, on May 26, 1932, he married Cora May Greenwood in the little town of May, Texas, halfway between Rising Star and Brownwood. Cora was nearly 30 years old when they married. Almost exactly two years later, on June 13, 1934, Cora gave birth to her first child, Larry James White. Oscar now had a wife and four surviving children, ages 13, 11, 9, and 1.
Once, when I was home from West Point (around 1973, when Papa was already 78), I went to Rising Star to see Papa and Cora. Papa had just purchased a large triple tombstone for Ollie, himself, and Cora. He was really proud of it and wanted me to see it. It is a mammoth monument.
While we were there, Papa started looking around. He was blind in one eye and had cataracts in the other. He had only tunnel vision in his one good eye. He looked at the grave next to his, and I could hear him spelling out, "F-O-S-T-E-R, Foster, Ky, come over here. Is that the grave of Virge Foster?" "Yes, Papa, it says Virgil Foster. Did you know him?" "Know him? Hell, that is the son of a bitch who knocked me in the head with a six-shooter."
I asked him why he had hit him over the head, and he told me, "Well, Ky, he was the sheriff!" That raised another question, of course. Papa told me it was during the Depression and Prohibition, and that he was "bootlegging a little." Sheriff Foster and some deputies came out to the farm to arrest him, and Papa ran to the barn to start breaking bottles to get rid of the evidence. They broke into the barn before he finished. He threw one bottle against the wall, and it did not break. He ran over to it to break it, and when he bent over the bottle, Virge Foster hit him over the head. That bottle was the evidence they used to arrest him. I really do not know what came of the charges, trial, legal issues, etc., but it makes for a good story.
Papa was still pi**ed. He did not want to be buried next to "that son of a bitch!" Cora said, “Oscar, I’ll feel safe lying between you on one side and the sheriff on the other.” Papa replied, “Well, if you feel that way, you can just scoot over closer to him!”
Another time, he and Cora were riding in their new Ford LTD, or "L*D," as Papa called it. They were heading from Rising Star to Brownwood, the big city, to do some shopping. Somewhere along the way, Papa had to slam on the brakes to avoid a collision. Cora slid off the seat and onto the floorboard. She got stuck between the dash and the seat and could not get up. She asked Papa to stop and come around to get her up. He did, but he said, "Dad-damn if your butt wasn't so round, you could stay on the car seat." Family history does not record her response.
During the summers of my early teen years, I stayed on the farm in Rising Star for weeks at a time. I did this for three or four years, from about age 11 to 15. I do know that I was too young to drive for the entire time I stayed with him. Papa was 58 years older than me, so he was in his early 70s during this time.
One day, while I was doing chores, he noticed that I was left-handed. He looked at me and said he had a project for me to help with. The next morning, after we milked the cows, he handed me steeple pullers and fence pliers, and off we walked to the south fence on the home place. Papa told me he had been looking for a lefty to help. He looked at the fence posts and picked one out. He said he would do that one and for me to do the one next to him, and then we would leapfrog down the fence line. We were pulling out the old fence staples and wire and replacing them with new staples and wire.
He said he needed a lefty to help because his father, John B. White, was left-handed. He told me to look at the fence posts and see that on the posts he had nailed, the staples were to the left of the center line, while on Papa's posts they were to the right of the center line. It was hard for Papa to pull out his Dad's staples. That was my job! I have always thought it very interesting that we were walking the same fence line that he and his father had worked on fifty years before. It is one of my sweetest memories.
One day I was riding with him on a tractor when we stopped. I hopped off the tractor. He started to climb down and slipped. I jumped onto the plow and caught him. I went down on one knee, but I did not let him hit the ground. At that time, he was still bigger than I was. He stood six feet tall and weighed about 175 pounds, with blue-gray eyes. He told me then how glad he was that I had come to stay with him and that it was like having his boys back. My chest swelled for hours and still does when I think of that. Praise did not come from him too often.
My uncle Derrell told me that once, while Papa was plowing in a field, he and my father, Oscar, were swimming in a stock tank. My father was drowning, and Derrell went to get his father. Papa jumped in and pulled him out of the water. Derrell said he "pumped him out" and got him breathing again. Once that was done, he went back to plowing. When there was work to be done, you don't quit until it is finished.
During one of my long summer visits, I was walking out the door when a yellow jacket wasp stung him on the jaw. He swatted it away and continued to the barn to milk the cows. I was terrified of wasps at that age and marveled at how tough he was. He was my hero, and I followed him around like a puppy.
Papa always kept a large coffee can of whole milk, straight from the cow, in the refrigerator. The "frij' was still called the "icebox" in the 1960s.
One day, when I was staying with them, my cousin Dick Morrow (Edythe's son) and his brother-in-law, Norman Vaughn, came by to pick me up. Dick had talked Papa into letting me have the day off to go skiing, boating, and swimming on Lake Brownwood. It was just the three of us, and Dick and Norman's sole mission was to make sure I had a good time. They did. They taught me to ski that day. It was a day I'll never forget. They spent the day with me at a time when I was crying silently every time. I loved being with my Papa, but I was homesick.
That night, when they dropped me off at Papa's, I came in wearing my wet bathing suit. I went to the bathroom to change into dry clothes. Cora was giving me fits about bringing wet stuff into the house. She said I would catch "the virus" and give it to them. Papa told her to leave me be, but she kept on about the virus. Finally, I asked her what virus she was talking about. Papa said, "She may call it the virus; I call it the sh*ts!!"
I would not take anything for the time I spent with him. He did not express his affections verbally or physically, but all of us knew he loved us. I still miss him.
At his funeral in May of 1974, Daddy sat in the front row at the Rising Star funeral home. He was the eldest son and was doing very well at keeping control. Suddenly, Daddy burst into tears, and I moved from the row behind him to sit next to him. Daddy said something then that has always stuck in my mind. He said, "He never told me that he loved me." Mom said, "You know that he did." Daddy said, "Of course, I know that he did, but he never told me!!" Up until that point, Daddy had not told me very often that he loved me. Like his father, I knew that he did, but he did not make a habit of saying it.
About the only times I can remember him formally coming out and saying it were the night I graduated from high school, and the night before I got on the airplane to go to West Point. From the day of his father's funeral, however, Daddy told us three boys that he loved us all the time. He was not going to make the same mistakes that his daddy had made. I think that is all that any of us want to do. Just be a little better parent than our own were.
Back to the funeral and the cemetery. Due to his service in the "Great War," as it was known, there was a flag draped over the coffin, and two old veterans began folding the flag into a tri-corner as is always done. The elderly veteran stumbled. I was the only one present in uniform. I had just flown in from West Point, New York. I caught the old man, steadied him, and said, "Sir, I'll fold this flag." I handed it to Grandma Cora on behalf of a grateful nation. Before she died, she made sure I received that flag. Some day I wish that same flag to cover my coffin, and I want it to go to my grandson, Nathaniel Isaac Peña. who is a veteran as well.
