Download & Print
March 16, 2021
Growing Up In Bandera
By Glenn Clark
The Bandera Prophet
By Glenn Clark
The Bandera Prophet
Digging out from a snow or ice storm is not a normal thing around Bandera. Recently we were challenged with frozen locks and water troughs along with vehicle doors iced over as our temperatures neared record lows. We are more familiar with flooding and droughts and how to deal with those situations.
A few weeks ago I was discussing the blizzard of 2021 with John Tucker who is a little older and has some knowledge that was passed down to him from earlier residents of the Bandera area. Henry Lloyd Kalka, who ran the Sinclair Service Station in town for many years, told John of a hail storm when he was a kid and his family lived in a house near Sixth and Pecan. The location is what some older folks will remember being where Cricket and Mickey Kalka lived later on.
As the story goes the hailstones were large and started coming through the cypress shingles on the roof so Henry Lloyd's mom put all the kids under the kitchen table which had a thick top. When the kids heard the hail start hitting the pots and pans in the kitchen they started laughing and ended up getting a spanking for finding humor in a serious situation. That story brought two things to mind for me. Looking back, the kitchen table was always the gathering place when things got serious back in the day and kids are always going to see things a little different than adults.
In earlier years threats of approaching severe weather would sometimes be announced by the siren mounted on the water tower if it included a tornado warning. As a kid I knew that meant a short trip to Granddaddy Kindla's house where my mom would watch the storm clouds build and threaten to get us all into that old abandoned cobweb infested storm cellar out in the yard. My fear of spiders was greater than anything that storm was going to bring at that time in my life. Unlike Henry Lloyd and his siblings I found nothing funny about my situation.
Granddaddy's storm cellar and the old familiar outhouse disappeared around the same time while I was Growing Up In Bandera. We now have handheld devices which provide us with advanced warnings of approaching storms. When I get a warning on my cell phone I immediately start looking around for culverts and low lying areas in search of a refuge since storm cellars are no longer "a thing" around these parts.
#273 2021
The Bandera Prophet
Digging out from a snow or ice storm is not a normal thing around Bandera. Recently we were challenged with frozen locks and water troughs along with vehicle doors iced over as our temperatures neared record lows. We are more familiar with flooding and droughts and how to deal with those situations.
A few weeks ago I was discussing the blizzard of 2021 with John Tucker who is a little older and has some knowledge that was passed down to him from earlier residents of the Bandera area. Henry Lloyd Kalka, who ran the Sinclair Service Station in town for many years, told John of a hail storm when he was a kid and his family lived in a house near Sixth and Pecan. The location is what some older folks will remember being where Cricket and Mickey Kalka lived later on.
As the story goes the hailstones were large and started coming through the cypress shingles on the roof so Henry Lloyd's mom put all the kids under the kitchen table which had a thick top. When the kids heard the hail start hitting the pots and pans in the kitchen they started laughing and ended up getting a spanking for finding humor in a serious situation. That story brought two things to mind for me. Looking back, the kitchen table was always the gathering place when things got serious back in the day and kids are always going to see things a little different than adults.
In earlier years threats of approaching severe weather would sometimes be announced by the siren mounted on the water tower if it included a tornado warning. As a kid I knew that meant a short trip to Granddaddy Kindla's house where my mom would watch the storm clouds build and threaten to get us all into that old abandoned cobweb infested storm cellar out in the yard. My fear of spiders was greater than anything that storm was going to bring at that time in my life. Unlike Henry Lloyd and his siblings I found nothing funny about my situation.
Granddaddy's storm cellar and the old familiar outhouse disappeared around the same time while I was Growing Up In Bandera. We now have handheld devices which provide us with advanced warnings of approaching storms. When I get a warning on my cell phone I immediately start looking around for culverts and low lying areas in search of a refuge since storm cellars are no longer "a thing" around these parts.
#273 2021