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"The Golden Triangle" Dobbin, Dacus, Montgomery "Reflections" Dobbin-Dacus-Montgomery At one time all three boys found some Keenan area girls their choice. Bybee fell for a very pretty young lady named Marietta Kelly. Miss Kelly lived further down the road from the Griffith girls that Pete and James courted. Bybee told me about a time when he wanted when he wanted very much to visit his girl and there was no transportation available. He lived close to an Uncle Jessie Weisinger and hit on the idea of borrowing his Uncle Jessie’s plow horse to ride over to see Marietta. Bybee lived in the Weisinger clan neighborhood which started at the Fisherman Reef-Rabon Chapel Road on Highway 105 and ended up at the April Sound area. Bybee got the loan of his uncle’s horse, a valuable animal for a farmer. He had to ride quite a distance to ride from Highway 105 to the Honea area on the side of FM 2854. Whether Bybee tied the horse up by the bridge or tied the wrong kind of knot or that the horse just got tired of waiting on Bybee will never be known, but we do know that when Bybee decided it was time to go, the horse was dead. Bybee said that even today as a man in his 70's, the remembrance is painful. I don’t think James fell in love quite as hard as my brother Pete and Bybee did. I found some interesting newspaper items in the Conroe papers loaned to me by Martha and Harley Gandy which shows that my brother Pete is just a "chip off the old block". An article titled "Dots from Spring Branch" my family community four miles south of Montgomery states that three single young men of that community, "George Bishop, "Stump" Martin, (the father of Pete and I) and Frank Hosford visited Dacus", in 1908. Those young men had a long ride on horseback to visit Dacus, the northernmost arm of the Golden Triangle. The 1908 time would make our father’s age as twenty-five. When Pete and James were finding Dobbin and Keenan so attractive they would have been around fifteen. I found a newspaper clipping from the Montgomery County News, the one that was printed in Conroe in 1909 that was titled "Keenan News" by Buffalo Kid. The article states "There is a certain girl in Keenan. "Stump" (I.L. Martin, Sr.) has a standing invitation but seems so shy". That news item was dated December 17th, 1909. I found another news item also dated December 17th, 1909 in the Spring Branch news that states "Stump is getting liberal nowadays and says he is going to give his girl a yearling for a Christmas present." it must have gotten serious. But Pete and I will never know and I don’t believe things got too serious in Keenan for Pete and James and Bybee. There were too many attractions closer to home and the greatest interest for Pete and James was baseball. While the two boys were still in school they could only devote the weekends to getting together to play or to practice and then the war came along and them away and after time baseball was out of the picture. The end of the war and the re-adjustment period was a paralyzing time. I’m sure it was the same for most of those young men, a "standstill" time, trying to come back to life and reality in the world they had been raised in. Both my brothers came home and some of the others who were lucky enough to get back had regular card game sessions in my kitchen drinking gallons of hot cocoa (I had a good milk cow so milk, butter and cream was no problem) and I made pounds of Mexican Pecan Candy. Gradually baseball began to get their interest. There was very little money to buy bats and ball and catchers mitts and gloves, there were no baseball diamonds laid out, no open areas with the grass and weeds cut, no open areas large enough to avoid losing a ball in the woods or creek. Donald Denn of Dacus told me that Dobbin had the first golf course when he was a boy. It was an open spot just north of the present day Mock’s Country Store, founded by Leo and Mary Mock on the corner of Highway 105 and F.M. 1486. This spot was in a heavily wooded pine forest and was the cause of many lost balls, both golf and later baseballs. Donald said he and one or two of the Dacus - Pinery boys would walk down to the Dobbin Golf Course to pick up the small tips and the Conroe golfers would pay them to caddy or to find their golf balls lost in the pine and brush thickets. The end of the Dobbin Golf Course came when the Nutter family moved from the Pinery community to Conroe. The Fred Nutter branch of the family built a huge business in that city, specializing in farm machinery and I’m sure was the leading force in building golf facilities in Conroe. That left the open ground available to the baseball minded young men, black and white, who began to really get intereted in the sport. I don’t know how they decided who was going to pitch coach or umpire and I didn’t know that my brother Pete was the star pitcher until James told this story to me. To be continued. |
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©Montgomery
County News, 2004 |
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