A Quiet Little Boy from a Quiet Little Texas Town

I may have reached my 83rd birthday, but in my heart I still see myself as a quiet little boy from a quiet little Texas town. The town, in fact, is Walburg,
Texas. The sign near it reads “87 Friendly People and 1 Old Grouch”. I actually was born and lived in a simple house about a mile from the general store and where the saloon used to be. In the nineteenth century the community was populated by immigrants from the Czech/German border. Half of us spoke German and were Lutherans. The other half spoke Czech and went to the Catholic Church. We seldom interacted and intermarriage was a major challenge to our long held traditions. The tradition served us well. Church on Sunday, chicken salad sandwiches and homemade ice cream for birthdays, shivarees at weddings, and bar-b-que and beer for every important occasion. Quiet enough - and I was just another quiet boy in the community, at least that was my remembrance of it all until I did a bit more reflecting on my morning walk today.

I remember the excitement back in the 40’s. It was in the days of the famous outlaws Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker. I shiver in remembering the story of how some one close to me was walking along the country road. A car with two strangers in it (a man with a distinctive hat and a girl) had stopped and asked for directions. Upon reflection we all knew it was Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker and we waited in dread for the day they would come rob the Walburg State Bank!

They didn’t survive a shoot-out with the law shortly after this. But some years later there was a tragic disruption to the still quietness of Walburg and its sleepy bank. A couple of armed robbers did indeed rob the Walburg State bank one quiet Saturday morning. They were serious. My uncle Reinhold who ran the bank did all the robbers asked for. Yet they shot at him with the bullet just grazing his head. Closer to home - my sister Mimi had entered the bank for a simple Saturday morning transaction. When ordered to lie face down on the floor she complied. Yet as one of the robbers was leaving the bank he stood over her and fired directly into the back of her head. By the grace of God she survived. The cops said that the ammunition seems to have been old. Today almost 40 years later she has occasional seizures and the doctors tell her that they are the result of that terrible incident in that quiet little town. And when a highway patrolman stopped the robbers’ car down the road a ways they fatally murdered him.

In my morning walk reverie today I also recalled a little encounter that I would never have expected, growing up in Walburg. In the mid 1950’s I found myself being an educator in Hong Kong. I had been there only a few weeks when on a Wednesday night I was walking home from teaching a class. Even though I was a newcomer it seemed to me that there was extra excitement in the air. The streets were crowded, the tension palpable. When a gentleman made a threatening move toward me with a brown bottle he held in his hand I wondered if he had been drinking. I soon learned that that bottle was filled with explosives and he was threatening me. The building I had just exited had been in the middle of a street riot. Some in my class never left the building. Bullets streamed through the window. Tragically the wife of the Swiss Council General who just happened to be driving through the area was shot and killed. When the police rounded up the rioters they marched them to the police compound a block from our apartment. When they were just below our windows the police forced rioters to run quickly because in the process they all lost their wooden clogs, one less weapon to take with them. Within a day things had settled back down and Hong Kong had rest until the Red Guard movement in the 60’s - but that is another story.

Another story far from quiet Walburg found me in Tiananmen Square in Beijing on June 4,1989. My two sons and I left the square just as the army moved in and the tanks were still a few blocks away. Hours later we stood with weeping students on the Beijing University Campus as they returned from the morgue with the names of their slain friends. A hastily painted sign over the university proclaimed “Tiananmen Bathed in Blood. The Whole World Weeps.”

And so the memories wash over me. It has been and continues to be a blessed and full life, especially in the context of a quiet little boy who grew up in a quiet little Texas town.