My Hometown, Perryton (Part 1 of 2)

Main Street, Downtown Perryton, TX in 1955 when the author was growing up there. Photo courtesy of Davick Services.

Not long ago, I drove down the street where I grew up, the eleven-hundred block of Amherst in Perryton, Texas. The houses seemed smaller than I remembered, and most showed their age, but I recognized them all and recalled the names of the boys who lived in them: Robert O’Rear, Lefty Mayberry, Bob Wright, Harry and Grant Drake, Jimmy Gipson, Jim Bruce Johnson, Bobby Barnett, and the Symons twins, Kerry and Terry.

I saw no children playing in my old neighborhood. Perhaps they were inside, watching television or texting on their phones. Back in the Fifties, the boys on our block would have been outside, playing football on a vacant lot, climbing trees, playing with our dogs and cats, or digging a “hideout” in someone’s back yard.

We occupied a world that had no daycare centers, no sports leagues, and no shopping malls. We invented our own entertainment, created our own facilities for football, basketball, volleyball, and track—coached, refereed, and played the games ourselves.

In the Fifties, Perryton had a population of about three thousand, and a fairly stable, sometimes prosperous economy based on wheat farming and cattle ranching. The discovery of oil and natural gas in 1956 brought new people into the community and took some of the sting out of the drought of the Fifties.

The Perryton of my youth was a good place to grow up, and whatever problems I encountered as a boy were not significant. I worried that I might be too skinny to excel in football, and was self-conscious that I had to start wearing glasses in the third grade.

I was ashamed that we lived in an old house and drove old cars. My father was shrewd enough to understand that the purchase of a new automobile was a poor investment, since it lost twenty or thirty percent of its value the moment you drove it away from the dealership.

He was right about that, but it did nothing to ease the embarrassment I felt, riding down Main Street in our old yellow 1954 Plymouth.

My heroes in those days were an odd mix: ranchers and cowboys from my mother’s family; characters from the Bible (Moses, David, Samson, and Samuel); and figures from Texas history (Houston, Bowie, Travis, and Crockett), with an occasional name from current events (Douglas McArthur and Dwight Eisenhower).

As to the future, I gave it little thought. At various times in my youth, I considered being a surgeon, lawyer, rancher, minister, and politician. The thought of becoming a writer never entered my mind until I was a senior in high school.

Church attendance was probably the most important element in the life of my family. We belonged to the First Baptist Church because that was the church my mother had grown up in (my father had been raised Presbyterian in Independence, Missouri), and when the church doors opened, the Ericksons were there.