When my late wife, Jacqueline, was 12 years old she spent five hours every Sunday at the Baptist church in Aledo, Texas, that was about 300 yards from the house where she was born and raised. She played the piano for the Sunday school at 9, for the main church service at 11 (they got their organ years later), for a youth group at 3 and the night service at 7:30.

Aledo was a tiny town just west of Fort Worth in Parker County "where the west begins" -- county seat, Weatherford, "the watermelon capital of the world". (Texas likes to exert leadership whenever plausible).

Her dad was a veteran, an insurance man and a part-time barber who drove her to Weatherford twice a week for her piano and voice lessons.

As in small South Carolina towns, the 12-year-old girls "took" (piano lessons and played in recitals for their folks.) This meant a small businessman or farmer had to buy a used upright piano for maybe $100 if he had a good crop that year. Music teachers were the warp and woof of culture.

These kids also went to Weatherford on Saturday afternoon to the movies, no matter what was showing (Roy Rogers, love stories where the principals barely touched each other). Nor did it matter when you got there. If you were late, you went in anyway before the price rose to 25 cents, saw the movie to the end and stayed on until you got to where you began. If you ate or drank at all, you brought it in.

In Aledo, the telephone company was owned locally by the Bedford family. Phone book was three pages plus some local ads. Joke was that, if you got the wrong number, you chatted for five minutes anyway. People listened in on the party line. During our 56-year marriage, we had four babies. They were all born where we resided in the greater New York or Chicago areas. Each time I called Texas with the great news that Jackie was fine and the baby was bouncy and normal. This could be at 2 a.m. or 3 o'clock Sunday afternoon, whenever. Each time the big-city telephone, long-distance operator got "Dukie" Bedford, who slept on a cot in the switchboard room. He'd put the call through to the Coders, the maternal grandparents or handle the long distance call his way. Once he told the big-city operator the Coders weren't home. The exasperated operator demanded that he ring them. "Oh," said Dukie. I'll ring them all right, but they're at church. I saw them go by a half hour ago." On the next day when he saw Burton, Jackie's father, he said, "That was a big'un, wasn't it. The baby had weighed 8 pounds. He'd been listening in.

The railroad line ran right through the center of Aledo -- from Fort Worth to El Paso. Some houses shook slightly. There was no station but, if arrangements were made in advance, it did stop and drop off or take on passengers. It dropped Jackie and one of our daughters off one time, just 50 yards from the house where Grandma Thelma was watering her front lawn. On those rare occasions when the train would stop, Dukie's switchboard would light up and people wanted to know who got off.

Those were depression days and "hobos" rode the trains, homeless wanderers who were seldom a criminal threat. One day my high-school-age wife was home alone and someone knocked on the back screened door. It was a hobo (tramp). He said he was passing through town and could she spare something for him to eat. The answer to that question was always, "of course." Jackie made old-fashioned, whole-egg mayonnaise that everyone loved. They didn't have imported olive oil in West Texas, but her mayonnaise was top notch. When Thelma got home, he was sitting on the back outdoor staircase wading into his second mayonnaise sandwich and seemed content and thankful. Thelma was horrified that my wife-to-be had just doled out plain mayonnaise sandwiches, but her daughter thought she'd supplied a great delicacy. She had.

When we got married in Washington, D.C., four months after Truman dropped the bombs on Hiroshima-Nagasaki and ended WWII, we went to Texas for our first meetings with her folks and my folks. One of the highest priorities was to meet the Baker sisters in Weatherford. I was still in uniform. They were gray-haired sisters -- one taught piano, one voice and one violin. They were Jackie's proud mentors and had certainly to approve of me. Two of them had trained another Parker County girl, Mary Martin, the star of South Pacific and "Peter Pan." She was older than Jackie but the families were acquainted. I never sang for anybody but who can forget "There is nothing like a dame" sung to Mary by all those actor-sailors in "South Pacific."

Each of our 50 states is unique, special to the time it was settled and by whom it was settled with its own habits and mores. How much was Orangeburgh before, during and after WWII like Parker County, Texas? I know this much, when my little girls went to the grocery store with grandma in Aledo, they met real cowboys with real cowboy hats, belt buckles and boots, and when I bid $125 for a chocolate cake, the money was to go to the Baptist church. It's because there were oil and gas wells on nearby ranches and that's where those cowboys worked.

My father-in-law had a 30-acre pecan grove up a country road. In Texas and Alabama, they call them "pecahns." In South Carolina they're just plain pecans. Maybe they picked up the pronunciation from the Mexicans. It was his hobby. He grafted seedlings and brought out varying species. He gave his crop to his insurance customers and told me one year that he had such a good crop he had to sell some. I used to walk up that road alone. In Texas they don't like lone men walking and cars would slow down and look me over. Something in their history was showing. I hunted squirrels at the pecan grove. The squirrels were red, enormous and incredibly fast. I almost always shot behind them. They were smarter than any effete big-city boy could have imagined.

I have my own Texas roots to write about someday.

Attorney Austin Cunningham has been the president of five business companies and in 1988 was named Outstanding Elder Citizen of the Year for South Carolina.

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