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When we arrived in Big Lake in September 1965, we placed the trailer house on a plot on 3rd Avenue. It was not a particularly pretty block since the alley and the surrounding land was mostly trash and tree limbs. We built a small fence around our backyard to keep the dog from running free. Just past the fence, my friend, Lendell Laxton, and I built a fort by digging several holes and covering them with sheets of tin. This was great fun until it rained and all of the sides caved in. We learned later that we had dug on the top of an old cesspool and, if we had dug another two or three feet, we could have fallen into it. This was the first town that we lived in that had a large number of blacks. Leiellen was only two years old at that time. She, Mama, and I were at Cheatam's Grocery store and were putting our bags into the car when a black man walked into the store. Leiellen looked up at him with wide-open eyes and said, "Mama, is he a chocolate man?" The man was good-natured about it and asked Leiellen if she would like to taste his hand to check if he was. After first arriving, Lendell and I were shooting our BB guns in an open field. We would shoot cans and bottles until we bored of it. Then, we found an old wrecked car and started shooting its windshield. The owner of the house across the road came out and started yelling at us. He was going to call the police if we didn't pay him for the damage. When asked for our names, I replied Robert and Lendell said Laxton. Well, since we were both new in town, he thought I was a boy named Roberts and Lendell a boy named Luxton. Both of these families lived in Big Lake. We were both basically honest boys so we both went home and got $5 each. We brought the money to him and asked him to not call the police. Later, we found out that he didn't even own the car. Lendell and I were always hunting something. We would use BB guns, bows, .22, or long rifles all of the time. We got to be pretty good shots thanks the Junior National Rifle Association. They had a program for boys aged 9 to 16 that taught safety and proper usage of firearms. I qualified all of the way to Expert 3rd Bar using a .22 rifle on the indoor range. We qualified from the prone, sitting, and standing positions. Once, when we were practicing shooting our bows and arrows, I was shooting the arrow up into the air and seeing how high it would go. I was using a short arrow and pulled the bowstring back as far as it would go. When I let it go, it slipped and went into my left hand. I was pretty shaken at seeing an arrow sticking out of my hand but I didn't have any pain. I just grabbed the shaft and pulled it out. It went in about four inches but it only left a small scar on my hand. Of course, Mama had a hissy fit and took my bow away. In 1967, I went on my first deer hunting expedition. Lendell, Don Laxton, Dutch and I went to Don's lease near Ozona. I had borrowed a .30-06 from Don and was walking between two ridges about three miles from camp. I was pretty tired and decided to take a break. I sat down next to a tree and started day-dreaming about world issues like what was for supper. I heard a branch crack and looked up in time to see a deer no more than 30 yards from me. I picked up the rifle and took a quick aim from the sitting position. When I fired the gun, the kick knocked me over backwards and I didn't know if I'd hit the deer or not. When I picked myself up, I saw a big buck running away from me with a doe in trail. I thought I had missed but when I went over to where the deer had been, I found a spike buck. It was mid-afternoon by the time I got back to camp and I found that no one else had seen a deer, let alone shoot one. On my birthday in 1967, Dutch gave me a Remington 16 gauge pump shotgun. I wanted to go out immediately and use it. Lendell and I took it out to the Rocker B ranch and started shooting jackrabbits. Later, Dutch and I got in Old Blue and rode the country roads shooting jacks. After a while, he got upset at me for shooting all of the rabbits before he got a chance to aim his .22. During the next dove season, Lendell and I shot 44 doves in one day. Of course, the limit was only twelve per person so we had to hide the rest of them until Don came and picked us up. The sunsets in West Texas were always beautiful. Just after dusk, the sky would be lovely purple and scarlet. But I liked that time the best, not for the beauty of the sky, but rather since that is when I would go bat fishing. We would take a rod and reel and place a fishing lure on it. Then, we would get near a street light and wait for the bats to come around. They would be feeding on the flying insects, darting in and out of the light, and we would cast the lure in the air. The bats would dash in and grab the lure, get hooked, and crash to the ground. I didn't kill them, rather I would hold them down, unhook them, and let them fly away. One day, when I was doing this, our neighbor stopped by to watch me. After I had caught a couple he mentioned that many of the bats carried rabies and that I probably ought to be very careful. I decided to stop. During Junior High School, I played on all the sports teams available, except basketball. I played tackle on the football squad and was a shotputter and discus hurler on the track team. We weren't very successful in football but were much better in track. In the 8th grade, I was the only one to score in every track meet we participated in. But just barely. I had tied for the last point position at one track meet and received only one-eighth of a point. But I was the only one to score anything at that meet. While in junior high, we were expected to take band or be placed in a study period. All the good-looking girls were in band, so I decided to continue playing the tuba. I only lasted one week before I told my homeroom teacher, Mrs. Day, that I didn't want to do that anymore. Our band teacher was a real jerk and he and I did not get along very well from the first. So, I went into study hall. After a couple of months, the teachers noticed that my grades were really good and they told me that I was to be a tutor for the slower students. I went to another classroom during study hall and, along with Rosalinda Gonzales, Barbara Ybarra, Jimmy Martin, and Pete Midkiff, helped other students with their class work. During the summer of 1968, Lendell and I spent most of our time walking around the area outside of Big Lake, exploring and hunting. We found an old lake that had dried up and the area was covered with salt. We later found out that this was where local Indians would come to get their salt. While there, we would shoot snakes and lizards and decided to try our hand at frying them up. We had brought some Crisco and a frying pan so he got a fire going while I cut up the snake and lizards. The rattlers were easy to clean but the lizards were a little small. Lendell, being part Potawatomi Indian, was willing to try the lizards first. After eating the first one, he decided that they weren't that good. I ate mine and decided the same thing. There just wasn't enough meat on them to make it worth our while eating around the tiny bones. One the other hand, the rattlesnake was quite good. Also during this summer, we found out that some local businessmen were training greyhounds for the races in New Mexico. We learned that they were paying $1 per jackrabbit for live ones. They were using the rabbits to train the dogs. Whichever dog caught the rabbit got to eat it. We tried catching them in cages and traps but succeeded in catching only one alive and uninjured. Lendell and I were always doing something weird outside. We bought some old traps and put them out on the Rocker B ranch to catch coyotes, foxes, or other animals that we could sell. One day, Mama took us out to check our traps. We had nothing in the first few but came across the last one that had a skunk in it. Not being too smart, we took our slingshots and tried to kill the skunk so we could remove it from the trap. We both pulled back and took careful aim but before we could shoot, the skunk did. He covered both of us with his defensive weapon. The smell was horrible. After we walked back to the car, Mama had us take our clothes off before we could get in. We went home and had to scrub our bodies with lemon and tomato juice to try to remove the smell. I was almost sick from the smell for several hours. The morale here is to avoid any entanglement with skunks. On one evening in 1968, Mama and I were outside watching the sunset when we noticed a large ring of color in the sky. We both wondered what it was and invented several theories as to what caused this phenomenon. After a few minutes, we noticed that many of our neighbors were outside also looking at the ring. One lady said it was God's sign that the world was going to be destroyed. Personally, I think she was a little on the stupid side. Anyway, others were worried that the Russians had started a war or that the Air Force was testing some super secret bomb. As it turned out, the White Sands Missile range in Almagordo, New Mexico, had fired a rocket containing some chemicals that was to explode in the upper atmosphere. They were experimenting and trying to determine the wind currents there. The ring could be seen in a 1500 mile radius. The summer of 1968 was memorable because that was when I had my first real girlfriend. Debbie Dykes was a friend of mine since I first arrived in Big Lake but it took a ton of bricks, and Jeanine, to make me understand that Debbie wanted to go steady with me. We went to the baseball games together and generally hung out with each other all summer. Unfortunately, we broke up the week school started. It seems that I didn't know how to treat a girl as a girlfriend and not just a friend. She was upset with me because I didn't know I was supposed to kiss her. When we were seniors, we became good friends again but never boy/girlfriend again. Her dad took Ricky Roach and us to Lake Nasworthy one day and let us take his boat for a ride. I was the most aggressive of the three so I took control. We rode around on the lake for almost an hour before we came back to shore. Mr. Dykes was really angry at us for being away for so long. He just brought the boat back up onto its trailer and told us to get into the car. We didn't spend any more time at the lake. We bought a new trailer house in 1969 and moved to 8th Avenue. Within weeks of moving in, November 1969, I was playing a football game in McCamey. Our Junior Varsity team was undefeated and ranked fairly high in the state. During the third quarter, I was playing defensive tackle and had just hit the quarterback as he was passing. We intercepted the ball and I went to block downfield. I hit number 74 low and he flipped over my back and landed on my left knee. I heard a snap and collapsed onto the field. Mr. Lucas helped me off of the field and I never played another down in football. Mama was in the stands and didn't know how badly I was hurt. We went on to an undefeated season. Ironically, the boy who hurt me was my cousin Gary's cousin on his mother's side. During the summer practice for football in 1970, I re-injured my knee on the first day. I went into the hospital again and had to stop all forms of sports. This was a blessing in disguise because I got involved with the school journalism class. I got into the photography job by accident my junior year. Since I was unable to play football, my counselor placed me in Library for a study hall. I was there all by myself and, within two days, had read every single science fiction book in our school library - all one of them. Then, one day a teacher came in and found out that I was completely bored. So, she offered me a non-credit course on the annual staff. I gladly accepted and became the assistant to the photographer. I got to take pictures at all of the sporting events including football, basketball, volleyball, track, tennis, and golf. With this experience, I was selected as the school photographer my senior year and had two juniors as my assistants. Also during my sophomore year, I took Driver's Education Course, or, Driver's Ed. The junior high football coach and history teacher, Mr. Byrd, was our trainer. He gave us all of the necessary book lessons and told us that we would have to practice on our own to pass the driving portion of the test. Mama could not help since she would be too nervous so we asked Merldean Laxton if she would help me learn how to drive a manual transmission. She and I took the 1967 Ford pickup, Old Blue, out just about every day for three weeks. She was patient with me when I would grind the gears and always have encouraging words. Finally, the big day came when I got to take the driving test. The examiner was from San Angelo and wasn't familiar with Big Lake. Anyway, he gave me the test; turn right here, turn left in two corners, come to a complete stop, back up, parallel park. My hands were shaking I was so nervous. Afterwards, he said that I had a couple of points taken off because I didn't look in both directions when I crossed Utah Street. I started to tell him that no one in their right mind drives on Utah but held my tongue until I found out if I had passed. He eventually completed his quite lengthy dissertation on my driving faults. I passed. And I was the only one of my class to pass the driver's portion of the test on the first try. Not too long after I got my license, I borrowed the pickup and took a couple of friends to Lake Nasworthy in San Angelo. We drove up to the lake and parked a few yards from the shore and were enjoying the sunshine. I was sitting on the hood of the truck, leaning on the windshield, watching the boys throw rocks into the lake. They started getting silly and began tossing rocks at each other. I told them they should be careful or they would put someone's eye out. They laughed and tossed a rock at me. I instinctively ducked and the rock hit the windshield. Of course, it left a nice crack in the window. I got pretty upset and told them that I was going back to Big Lake so they'd better get in. I wasn't talking to them and started the truck. I placed it in reverse, looked back, and then let the clutch out. About 15 feet away, there was an iron bar sticking out of the ground about three feet high. You guessed it. I backed the pickup right into that bar and put a nice dent in the side of the truck. It wasn't my day. Now, I was upset and mad so I jammed the gears into first and pulled away. As I was driving back to the black top, I hit a high spot and put a hole in the muffler. By the time I got back to Big Lake, I figured that I owed Dutch over $200 for repairs. He didn't say much to me but I didn't get to borrow the truck again for a few months. Johnnie Gay and I continuously were on the lookout for finding extra money. We found that a recycling plant in San Angelo was taking aluminum cans and paying 21 cents a pound. We traveled up and down the county roads looking for and collecting beer and soda cans. We would crush them at Johnnie's house and take them the 75 miles to San Angelo to sell them. We never made any money even though gasoline was about 29 cents a gallon. Another sure-fire method for getting us extra money was collecting copper and brass. The local junkyard bought scrap copper so we would find any source that we could and sell it. There wasn't much around the town but if we went to the deserted towns around, we sometimes found old wire in the houses and pulled it out. It got to be a lot of work, pulling the wires out and then stripping the insulation off. Someone else actually went to an electrical shop and stole several thousand feet of new wire and tried to sell it (wasn't us). The junk man had already been notified and turned the guy in to the police. During the summer of 1969, Ricky Roach, Herb Woods, and I started a band. I played the bass guitar, Ricky played keyboard and Herb was on drums. We called ourselves the Trials of Electric Sounds, T.O.E.S., and hoped to get a recording contract when we graduated. Of course, none of us could play or sing but it was a lot of fun practicing. In fact, none of us had any instruments. Our practices consisted of the air guitar, air drums and air bass. The summer of 1971 was full of different experiences for me. I started noticing girls. I dated one girl, Linda, who was a lot more serious than I was. She invited me out to the local airport to help her dad wash his airplane. It was a two-seater and took us about 30 minutes to wash it. Then, he asked if I wanted to go for a ride. Of course, I jumped at the chance. There was no air traffic controller or even a tower. We took off and flew around for a few minutes then he gave me the controls. I was nervous as hell and after five or so minutes asked if he would take over. He laughed, took control, and landed. This was my first ever airplane ride. But I never really got serious with any of the girls until I met Carla Harris. She was a free spirit and very intelligent. She came to Big Lake during our junior year and made a lot of friends quickly. She and I became friends and spent a lot of time together during the school year. We were not "going" together rather, simply friends with common interests and likes. When we went to the Cotton Bowl (discussed a little later), I was going with her best friend but Carla and I spent most of the bus ride together. As it turned out, we started seeing each other the last week of school. When we both left Big Lake after graduation, neither of us knew that we would see each other again. As it turned out, we kept in contact and saw each other after I joined the Navy. I received several accolades my senior year, 1971-72. I was selected for the National Honor Society for the second year. To be selected for the NHS, one had to have a good academic record and be recommended by the school. In my senior class, we only had seven NHS members so I got to serve as the Vice-President of our chapter. During the fall of 1971, all sophomores, juniors and seniors from more than 20 high schools got together at Sul Ross State University for the first annual Government Contest. The neat part of this trip was that we got to explore the campus and meet lots of the university students. Craig Barnes, Jimmy Martin and I were exploring the dorms and, by mistake, entered the women's dorm. They were nice but insisted that we leave. Craig later went back to the dorm and met a girl that he later started dating. The competition was tough but my school, Reagan County HS, fared very well. We took second place for 10th grade and the top two places for the 11th. But the best part was that our school won all three positions for the senior competition. Each essay was then placed into a pool (all grades) and the best essay of all of them would be awarded the overall top prize. My essay on government won the top prize at the Sul Ross State University Government contest. Our school took seven of the ten awards given. I was voted to be the senior class secretary. This was an easy job and I never had to take notes at any of the meetings. Our English teacher was interested in forming a debate club and competing with all the local schools. I earned a position on the school debating squad and was paired with Pete Midkiff. He and I, and Mr. Judah, got to go to Crane, Stanton, Midland, San Angelo, and Lubbock to debate. The girls' team couldn't go to Lubbock because we had to stay in one room. Anyway, we never won a debate until the district competition. We also got to compete in journalism at the district level. I was never interested in anything to do with journalism except taking pictures. However, since there were only six of us taking Journalism, we all had to compete in two or three events. I was told to do Newswriting and Headlines. Surprisingly, I won the district competition in Newswriting. I have been interested in history forever. Growing up in Texas I naturally had interest in Texas History. I would do extra reading on my own time simply because it was fun and I learned a lot about the culture, politics and social conditions in my state. With all of this extra reading, the Texas History course was a breeze and I would tend to discuss certain items about Texas history that was not covered in the textbook. Many times my teacher and I would not see the history in exactly the same way and our discussions were lively at times. At the end of the year, our school would recognize the most outstanding student in each of the areas and give them the title of "Who's Who" in that subject. I was surprised when I was selected as the "Who's Who" in Texas History. But the most memorable honor I received was being selected by the band members to travel with them to the Cotton Bowl game pitting Texas against Notre Dame for the national championship on 1 January 1972. I went with them, at no cost, to take pictures of the band during the parade and when they marched at half time. The entire trip was exceptional and I took more than 300 pictures of the band. Unfortunately, the developing chemicals were bad and most of the pictures did not come out. I was very upset since most people thought I didn't take many pictures. In March of 1972, I started visiting colleges in order to make a decision about where I would attend. I got to take my first commercial airplane ride when I traveled to Alabama. There I spent a week with some friends in Birmingham and visited the University of Alabama campus at Tuscaloosa. The highlight of that trip was my meeting with Coach Paul "Bear" Bryant at the new sports complex. All he wanted to know was whether or not I played football. When I got back to school, Mr. Magruder, the principal, gave me an unexcused absence for the week. He and I never got along. The spring before I graduated was when I started being a rebel. I decided that I should be able to buy beer because the government was picking numbers by a lottery to see who would be drafted and sent to Vietnam. Several of my friends and I would go to Brawleys' beer joint and buy some beer from him. He knew that we were underage but he didn't care less since we were paying cash. He only sold us Schlitz or Pearl because his other customers wouldn't drink them. One day, Herb, Connie Smith and I cut school and took Herb's car to Ozona. His car, a 1971 Dodge Challenger RT had a 383 magnum under the hood and would really move. Connie was driving back to Big Lake and decided to see how fast the car would go. He had the car up over 140 mph and we made the 48-mile trip in 24 minutes. And that included a complete stop at the intersection halfway between the two towns. I never wanted to go that fast again.
Taken from the manuscript "Out of the Deep", by Robert L. Goehring. Published 1995, 1998.
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