Quips from Kay

 Nuts! I forgot one Halloween story. Long ago when I was a pre-teen in my hometown a few of us decided to go trick or treating. Of course we were too old but we wanted free candy so we set off in some of the more affluent neighborhoods. We were doing okay until the Sheriff pulled up beside us, flashing light on and yelled at us to go home. Now that Sheriff was Vail Ennis who had been written up in Time Magazine. He was larger than life and not afraid to shoot someone. We were all scared of him so we quickly ran back to a friend's house and stayed there until our parents came to get us. I don't remember if we told the about the encounter with the Sheriff. I doubt that we did.

The "boo" title of this is not meant like the scaring word but for the fact that I don't like Halloween, so BOO. Why, you ask? Because I had so much bad luck on past Halloweens. It started when we lived in Corpus and our children had friends over so that my husband, Louis, could tell them spooky stories on Halloween evening. We had a little shed in the back yard so they all gathered there to hear him. The idea was that I would tiptoe around from the front of the house and scare them while wearing a black cloak. Sounds good, eh? Well it worked  because in the darkness I stumbled over a metal boot scraper that was in the yard, fell on my face and moaned loudly. They thought it was so scary and they enjoyed it very much. I, however, had to lie there until Louis came around to see where I was and he was alarmed to find me on the ground moaning. The next Halloween incident occurred when we lived in Beeville and I was home alone with our children. Louis was off in some foreign ...

 Here's a little poem I wrote in about 1950 The little rain gauge  is covered with dust but erect and hopeful it stands Awaiting the drop of soothing rain  The splash of Heaven's hands. It wonders, as waiting the long months through, in the heat of the sun's hot rays, what has become of that wonderous rain that caressed it in better days?

 Well, it has taken me a week to come down from the fabulous party my family gave me for my birthday. The room at the Menger Hotel was decorated beautifully, the food was good, the music by my daughter, Quita, was great and everyone was cheerful and happy. We "passed a good time". We are getting tired of the campaign ads on TV as the date for the elections near. They babbler on and on saying the same things over and over, yet their sincerity is doubtful. Thankfully we didn't have that during the election years of my youth.  In my hometown of Beeville (back in the 40s) on election night everyone went downtown to learn the results because there was a huge blackboard set up outside the newspaper office just across from the movie theatre. It looked sort of like the tote board for the horse races in the movie "The Sting", only bigger. As I told you before, TV wasn't that advanced so we had to find out the results this way. The street was blocked off and we all mi...

 I am going to send you a very short note now and then I will take a few days off. Sunday I will be 90 years old and we are having a big birthday party and family reunion in San Antonio. I can hardly contain my excitement! I know this quote isn't "ladylike" but it's true. It's hard to walk straight when you have a cob up your butt.

 I know I jump around a lot with these stories but I guess I have a jumpy brain. I have a short story to tell you now and it's not about ancestors.  As I told you in a past quip, I raised cattle to put myself through college. Well, a rancher associated with the stock show and sale in Beeville, my home town, thought it would be a good idea if a girl led the Grand Champion Hereford bull around the sale ring, so he asked me to do it. Maybe you aren't aware, but in the 50s girls were not supposed to do anything "rough". We were supposed to get married, have children, cook and sew. Well, that didn't work for me as you may have read in my previous blogs. So, anyway, since I was a showoff at heart I liked the idea and off I went into the sale ring leading this enormous bull. We were the first to step into the auction ring that day so the hay was about knee deep and I stumbled going in. That was all the bull needed for encouragement and he began to gently push me with his...

 It is very easy to confuse one ancestor with another because during the years of early settlement in the New World they tended to name their children from previous relations, such as the case of Marie Anne Fourchet and Marie Anne Foucault. Foucault is the surname of my seventh great-grandmother on my mother's side. She was born in Paris in 1703 and was sent to the New World as one of the "Casket Girls" to marry French settlers and military. Marie Anne, 17 and her 19 year old sister, Marie Catherine, and 86 other girls sailed from Paris aboard the ship  La Baleine, on January 8, 1721.  I don't have time-related details but after arriving in Old Biloxi Marie Anne married Jacques Claude Dupont, a Parisian soldier in the French colony. Her sister, Marie Catherine, married Rene Sabourin, also a soldier. Marie Anne and Jacques Claude had six children before his death in April of 1735. His  widow then married Pierre Galand, (dit La Chaumette) in August of that same year an...

There was a huge building in Paris called the Salpetriere which had originally been a gunpowder factory, but King Louis XIV had it converted into a hospice for poor women of Paris as part of the General Hospital of Paris. The main hospice was for women who were learning disabled, mentally ill or epileptic as well a poor in 1657. It was incorporated with the hospice of the Pitie, designed especially for beggars' children and orphans. Between 1663 and 1673, 240 of the women of Pitie-Salpetriere were sent on a mission to populate the Americas and help build New France. During this ten year period there were 768 young women "recruited" and known as the "King's Daughters" who were sent to Quebec and Mobile, although the first few groups shipped to Quebec were really the "daughters" of nobles and upper class. The pool of young women ran low and by the time France wanted to populate the southern part of the colony (Mobile), the colonial company began roun...