The Long Road

Dear Seth: I am eighty years old. I live in a retirement home of l28 apartments of varying sizes and prices. I took the Long Road, once myself. I had help from my mother and dad and got good part-time jobs and worked hard to succeed in rearing, training, and loving one daughter and three sons. My grandparents of both my parents were immigrants to Beaumont, known as Gladys City in 1892. My paternal grandfather named Spindletop Oil Field. His name was Lee Frank Daniell and he and a Mr. Tevis drew the first maps of the city. He built roads from Beaumont to Orange, Texas to engineer building more roads on a large ranch and later to build the first high bridge over the Sabine River into Louisiana. The first roads we took to get to the Gulf of Mexico were earthen ruts which we took planks of lumber from my great uncle's old house to lay in some of the wider ruts to help our primitive Model T Ford go smoother over the ruts. We loved going crabbing at the Intercoastal Canal that ran along the coast of Texas. We purchased fish and crabs from the fishermen's seines at the beach at Gilchrist, where we built a beach cottage from some of the lumber Dad took from Uncle Charlie's house he could not return to after his wife and baby daughter died of tuberculosis around 1900. My oldest son likes photography also. He takes his camera and tripod with him every day and shoots some good pictures in Lubbock. Good luck. Just remember that old Chinese proverb that the most successful persons are those who get right back up after a fall. God bless you.