Served in WW I.

Memories of Daddy, by Arthur Schmeltekopf, Jr.

One of my earliest memories happened during a trip to Crawford with Daddy and Uncle Charlie. Uncle Charlie was going to see his girl friend, Alma Freyer. As we were traveling, Daddy and Uncle Charlie would point out a nice house and say it was ugly or an ugly house and say it was nice, etc. I spent the whole trip thinking that they didn’t know anything. Of course, they were entertaining both themselves and me and testing my reasoning powers at the same time. As I understood much later, Daddy employed this method of teaching on all possible occasions; he loved to force me to think for myself by, for example, suggesting that 2 + 2 = 5, and seeing if I would catch the error. After understanding the effectiveness of this teaching method, I employed it on my son Ric, who is a hard guy to fool.

Another teaching method Daddy used was to play straight dominos with his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. He taught me arithmetic, especially how to do it quickly, and as I got older, how to plan ahead and anticipate my opponents’ plays and block them. We just thought he liked to play dominos, but later understood his motives were to teach us to think. The last time I saw Abby Toepfer alive was an evening Rosie and I spent using the same methods to teach her arithmetic, a precious memory.

When Uncle Charlie and Aunt Alma got married, of course, we went to the wedding. My memory says that they got married at the Martin Freyer home (this family history says that they got married at the church, but that is not what I remember. {Talked to Charlie and he said that they got married in the Church and the reception was in the home, Both right}). It was a cold, dark, rainy, late November night. We left Rosie with Grandma Engelbrecht and I cried. The roads were all black mud: no pavement, no gravel, just mud! There was a small creek near their home and Alma’s brothers had a team of mules to pull us through the creek to get to the house. There were many people there; (remember that I was not yet 4 so my memory may be fuzzy). The floor was covered with 1 or 2 inches of mud from all of the people tracking it in after they got their cars parked. Alma’s brothers and family were good musicians, so that night I heard my first banjo and jew’s harp; I was fascinated. I often wonder how much of this memory is accurate, but it surely is a clear memory.

While we still lived in town, (before 1937) Daddy was mayor of Kyle. The two things that I remember best about that was Daddy riding on one of the 2 1/2 ton flat-bed International trucks in the 4th of July parade, and Daddy crowning the Diez y Seis Queen. What fun it was, eating tamales and seeing all the people and costumes. In those days it was a very local affair. We knew all of the people and got to see a Mariachi band playing and people dancing. We got to stay up very late because the Queen wasn’t crowned until late.

In about 1937 or 1938 Daddy came home from the store one night and complained that he didn’t feel very good. He soon was in bed. He and Mama figured out that he was having a heart attack. By that time it was dark. Since Mama wouldn’t leave to drive to town and since we didn’t have a telephone, another way had to be found to get a doctor. I was to take a flashlight and run to the Mexican house (his name was Del Fino, if I remember correctly) and get him to walk over to Lex Word’s house and have Lex call the doctor. Before I could leave, Daddy asked me to get on the bed. He told me that he may die, and that if he did, I would have to be a big boy and take care of Mama. Thank God that he recovered and I didn’t have to assume that responsibility. It is something I have thought about many times since that day.

When I was in the first grade, we had a very bad ice storm. I recall the ice being several inches thick, so thick that no texture of the underlying gravel showed on the ice surface. It was so very, very slick and there was no possibility of driving on it. I was determined to go to school, even though Mama and Daddy tried to tell me that there would be no school. So Daddy and I walked hand in hand to town, Daddy to go to work and me to school. Needless to say there was no school, so I got to spend the day at the Bon-Ton. Since there were very few customers, I had a lot of time to visit with Bob Kercheville, Adolph Hill and others in the Bob-Ton, a very enjoyable day. At the end of the school year, I got a certificate saying that I was the only person to come to school every day.

The Bon-Ton was then a real general store. It handled food, clothing, shoes and had a bank in the same building. In addition it handled hay, mules, cattle, feed and seed and was an International Harvester dealer. That meant that they had both International trucks and Farmall tractors, quite a store. Some time during 1937 or 1938 they had a plow-off on the Schlemmer farm. The Thiele butcher shop supplied the barbecue and farmers brought mules and horses to see if tractors could beat them at plowing. The real obstacle to selling tractors was the fact that farmers were used to their mules and didn’t believe that they could learn to drive a tractor (at that time we didn’t even have a tractor). Remember, this was still when most people came to town on Saturday in their wagons or buggies. After the shindig was over, the men realized that there was one more tractor to be driven to town than there were men to drive them. As I recall, Lawrence suggested that I drive the extra tractor (a model B Farmall). I was about 5 at the time and could not possibly reach the pedals or anything. He said that he would take the tractor out on the road and put it in low gear and then let me steer it to town. Before I got to the main highway, he would jump back on and take the tractor into town. Well, it worked. Daddy sold many tractors by telling farmers who said that they could never learn to drive a tractor that, “of course you can, even my 5- year-old boy can drive one”.

Daddy was not the best farmer in the community, in the sense that he did not have the best crops, but he farmed for profit. He watched his crops very carefully, always trying to decide if poisoning the leaf worms on the cotton would make enough extra cotton to pay for the poisoning, for example. By using this technique, he often took more money to the bank than did most farmers. He liked to have a clean field and made the hired people and me pull careless weeds from the corn patch and feed them to the hogs; this could still be done even when it was too wet to plow. My most dreaded farm job was to sweep the corn. During the war years in the 40’s, we had a lot of rain and the grass and weeds in the corn got very bad. I would have to take a mule and hitch it to a wide single sweep plow that would not go deep enough to hurt the corn roots but would cut out the grass and weeds. This job was done after the corn was higher than my head; that was hot and sweaty work. The corn leaves would cut and scratch me so I would have to wear heavy long sleeves and gloves, making the heat even worse.

Daddy wasn’t much of a fixer; Mama fixed all of the stuff around the house, but Daddy was a good fence fixer. He could take a handful of old wire and a few used bent staples and fix any fence. As a result, we had no decent tools at our house. One dull old crosscut saw, a hammer whose head kept falling off, crowbars for digging post holes and a few old shovels were all the tools available to a small boy who liked to build things. The earliest building project that I can remember shows that Daddy knew more about building than I did. We had moved to the country and Rosie and I had both gotten dogs. I decided that my dog needed a dog house. We had an abundance of scrap lumber from the construction of our new house as well as the old lumber available from tearing down the old (Rohdot sp?) house. I started to work; it would take me at least 20 to 30 minutes to saw off one 2X4. Finally the project was completed, shingles and all. Daddy came home for lunch and I proudly showed him my dog house. He admired it for a while and then pointed out to me that the shingles were installed reversed. The water would run into the house rather than off of it. I was so embarrassed, and remain so today, about this obvious design oversight on my part, then I began a process of learning just how much Daddy knew.

I remember very clearly the morning of Monday, Dec 8, 1941, the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed. For some reason I went to town with Daddy that morning instead of catching the school bus. There were many people gathered at the Bon-Ton talking about the start of WWII. After we moved out to the country, Mrs. Hartson became mayor of Kyle. She was a very outspoken and feisty lady. She walked into the Bon-Ton and began a long and colorful regale of how she saw the war progressing. She declared that she would see to it that Hitler, Mussolini and Hirohito would be brought to Kyle and hanged by their necks on the City Hall lawn. I was super impressed, being 9 years old; I can clearly see the image of that event in my mind today. I, of course, expected that events would turn out exactly as she described; I have always been slightly disappointed that they didn’t.

During the 2nd World War, Daddy was a very important person to many people in the area. He could read, write and speak English, German, and Spanish fluently. Many people around Kyle could not read or write; however, they had sons and daughters in the service of our country and they needed to write to them and read the return mail. Daddy performed that task for them in any of those languages. He was on the ration board, so we had a “C” gasoline stamp for our car; most people had “A” stamps. We thus had enough gasoline, but tires were hard to get. Grandma Engelbrecht was very sick in the early 40’s and died in 43, so we had to make a number of trips to Crawford. On those trips we had many flats and blowouts, all because of very poor tires, a big hassle for Daddy.

When I returned from Okinawa during the Korean war, Rosie was living with Mama and Daddy because Ernie was still in Korea. Buddy, their first child, was overdue and Daddy was getting impatient. He told Rosie to get in his pickup; he was going to take her for a ride. He took Rosie for a very bumpy ride around the farm; Buddy was soon born. This story illustrates two things about Daddy. He wasn’t the most patient person you ever met and he usually had very pragmatic ways of solving problems.

For those of you who know me (Arthur Jr.), it will come as no surprise that I occasionally needed reprimanding. The most effective method that Daddy employed was the following: Daddy would hand you his pocket knife and tell you to go and cut a switch, when you returned with the first one he would say that it clearly was not big enough for the task at hand, when you went out and cut a larger one, it too would not be large enough. By the time you had one sufficient for the job you had already received a severe punishment in your mind. I don't remember any of the whippings that I received but I sure remember trying to find a large enough switch for the job.

After Daddy retired from the Bon-Ton, he ran for and became County Commissioner in Hays County. He was a very good Commissioner. In Texas the Commissioners are in charge of maintaining the county roads. Daddy had all of the bridges in his precinct upgraded, as well as all of the roads paved. He helped to get a new hospital in Hays County. He was well-liked and was re-elected several times. When he announced that he was not going to run for re-election, I happened to be visiting Mrs. Wallace, who was the math teacher at Kyle High for many years. She begged me to try to talk Daddy into running for one more term of office. I never mentioned that conversation to him, since I knew that Daddy always thought things through very carefully before he made a decision. I had a lot of respect for Mrs. Wallace and I have always treasured that conversation with her. It told me a lot about how the people of Daddy’s precinct felt about the way he was doing his job.

Daddy had an excellent memory, he was the information keeper, not only for our immediate family be also, far the larger family. He could remember the date of everyone's wedding and birthday. In addition to the date he could remember where it happened and what the weather was like. There was a time when he was very embarrassed because his memory wasn't perfect. We, Kassie, Ric and I, were living in Austin and one afternoon, after Ric's third birthday we came to Kyle for a visit. When Ric climbed on to his grandpa's lap he announced "I am a big three year old boy". At that moment Daddy realized that he and Mama had forgotten Ric's birthday. Daddy was so embarrassed and he and Ric soon disappeared in the pickup. When they returned, Ric was in possession of a large stack of silver dollars. Ric thought that was a pretty good birthday present.

We had to work hard as children; hoeing weeds, milking the cows, feeding cows, chickens and hogs, cutting and raking hay, gathering eggs, washing dishes, picking cotton, digging post holes, etc. We, of course, griped about having to do all of these things, but, it was a great way to teach confidence and self worth to children. All of the jobs that we had to do were clearly necessary jobs for the family welfare. As such, we never thought of them as "make work" jobs, we knew that they needed to be done. We thus felt a partnership in the maintenance of our family. A very important way for children to gain experience and a sense of self-worth. This experience is hard to duplicate when living in the city.

After we moved to Boulder, CO, and after we had build a new house, we needed to build a fence to keep the deer out of our garden. Keeping in mind the philosophy espoused above, Ric was required to help build that fence. During the same period Daddy and Mama were visiting us in Boulder. Daddy sat on the porch all morning watching Ric digging post holes. When I came home for lunch he took me aside and said, "You are working that boy too hard", I replied, "Daddy you sure have a short memory". He never mentioned hard work again.

Daddy loved Mama. In their era it was not common to see displays of affection, but, Daddy would often pat Mama on the rear as she walked by, much to her embarrassment. I actually think that she enjoyed it. Hugs and kisses were common in the family and in our church. I think that it is important training for children to see that their parents both love each other and are physically attracted to each other. Daddy loved to tease Mama and us. He always planned for April Fools Day and would almost always catch us with something. A few years ago we happened to be at Rosie’s home on April Fools Day and, that morning before breakfast, I asked Rosie, ”What’s that big black dog doing in the yard”. She ran to the window to see it, and then realized what was going on just in time for me to say “April Fool”. We both got a flood of memories from that incident, since that was the first joke that Daddy usually pulled on young children.

When Kassie and I first got married, Daddy took us to the Bon-Ton to buy us the items that we needed to set up housekeeping. We had received a lot of stuff as wedding and shower gifts, but not brooms, buckets, flour, salt, etc. During that trip Daddy told Kassie; “If that boy of mine isn’t good to you, you let me know and I will straighten him out”. He made a real friend of his new daughter-in-law at that time and they remained close friends. Daddy knew that Kassie was far from home and needed to know that she had someone the she could trust, in case of trouble. Daddy could be very sensitive about person-to-person relations and, therefore, was trusted by everyone. Watching him interact with children, anyone could easily see how quickly they would come to him. They could see the love, caring trustworthiness in his face and demeanor. Daddy and all of his siblings, as well as their children, were able, and would allow themselves to cry when faced with a touching scene or story. None of them was comfortable with public speaking and would occasionally cry from nervousness. I am proud of and continue to possess, the first of these traits. All of us have managed to live with or overcome the second. I think this trait of having a soft heart is one of the good things passed on from generation to generation in our family.

Daddy loved his church. He never missed a church service that he was able to attend. He was church treasurer for many years. I can still see him counting the money when we got home on Sunday. We had devotions after breakfast every morning and when anyone in the family was going on a trip, Daddy always read Psalm 121 that morning before they left. I am sure that Daddy would be happy and proud of the fact that all three of his children continue to be active, hardworking Christians.

Heart attack 193(7 or 8), Pacemaker 196?, Died of complcations from a gall stone