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Published: April 15th 2010
Kilgore College Rangerettes!
They wanted us to join, I'm sure, but we're waaaay to busy for that! Plus, they kick too high....(Brookhaven Retreat)
We’re in Hawkins, TX, this month~~about 100 miles east of Dallas. We are in the hill country now, even more than we were last month. Brookhaven is a camp situated on a privately own lake (Brooks Lake); the camp has one side of the lake, and private homeowners own the rest. It’s a smallish lake (oh come on, I don’t know how big!) with no power boats or anything like that allowed on it. Mostly it has men fishing on it. The camp doesn’t use it for swimming or boating any more, as it caused disagreements between them and the homeowners, but we’ve been cleared to canoe on it if we want. The camp has a large swimming pool, and a private lake. I’ll have pictures of that later.
We have three on our team again…Tim and Donna are new to us, and Dennis and Zelma were with us in November. Also, Dennis was chairman of the RVICS board last year, and is still an active member. The women painted the dining room last week, and this week Donna is sewing curtains for some of the motel rooms, while Zelma and I are inventorying the gift
You can see that the mud caused
the wheel to come off the wagon! shop~~you know that’s one of my favorite things to do! Except that it ends up costing me quite a bit of money! Last week the men built a lifeguard platform for the small lake, and leveled the gift shop, where one corner had started to collapse. This week they worked on leveling a stretch of decks that run along one side of the motel unit. They’ve also done repairs on windows, and such.
Last week we toured East Texas Oil Museum at Kilgore College. Oil came into this part of Texas in the ‘30s. Their museum was set up with the front area holding most of the facts and pictures, along with some artifacts~~a regular museum, lacking much excitement. But then you go through doors into a boom town, with the muddy street, and businesses set up as they would have been during those days. There’s a movie theatre that shows a film using actual footage. It was amazing how the whole thing was set up, and how much we learned.
About forty years ago, not far from Kilgore there was a school heated by natural gas, and unknown to anyone, the gas line had a leak; when
To make these streets look so real,
they mixed the cement, added color to make it look like mud, and then had the football team come in and drag and push the cars through the mixture so they'd get the splash and print of the real thing! the furnace was started, the school blew up, killing more than 350 kids, and burning many more. As a result of that fire, the smell was added to natural gas, so people would know when there was a leak. Someone had a stained glass window created in memory of the lost students, and it was on display, as well as some of the items recovered from the schoolhouse.
We had lunch and then took a tour through the Rangerette museum also at the college. The Rangerettes are a world famous dance team from the college; we weren’t familiar with them until we saw their uniforms, and then Bob said he’s seen them perform on tv. We were given a tour by a woman who was very enthusiastic about them; she graduated in 1938 and they didn’t start the dance program until 1940, so she missed the chance to be on the team. Her daughter, and daughter-in-law and granddaughter had all been dancers, and she was so knowledgeable…not just with facts, but with emotions and inside stories too! We hadn’t planned on going to that museum, but we were all glad we did, and the men were glad we didn’t
I tried to get the picture while
the little girl had her toe in the "mud"! You'd be surprised how man people stuck their foot out there to be sure it wasn't real...my husband included! stay longer than we did!
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Bob and Carrell
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dogwoods
Did you learn that the dogwoods are a symbol of Easter? Probably because the flower is in the form of a cross and typically blooms around Easter. I think to live in a part of the country that has dogwoods and boxwoods is almost like heaven will be. Did you get anywhere near Longview, TX - Letourneau University? That's where our daughter went to school and where our oldest grandchild was born. Blessings on all your work. Bob and Carrell