PAXTON
I’ve had several to e-mail me expressing concern about the Myers Family drifting apart. I am ashamed to admit it but I am one that has not stayed in touch. I can tell you everything about my immediate family but very little about anyone else. Those of you like me that are getting a few years behind us have one thing in common. We all came from Paxton, Texas. A few weeks ago I going to the Old Home Cemetery and as usual was going through Paxton about seventy miles an hour when it dawned on me that something was missing. I turned around went back, stopped, got out of the car, the store my Mother and Dugan Hooper built in 1959 was gone. I thought how sad there is nothing left but the city limit signs. Everybody remembers back when Payne and Payne in Center had a radio show. It came on every afternoon and was the most popular show on the air except maybe for The Guiding Light. At five o’clock in the afternoon everybody was inside by the radio listening to what Mrs. Payne had to say. She kept the community up to date on everything that went on. As funny as that may seem now it was an excellent way to keep up with everything going on. Everything that happened someone sent the information to her and she told everyone that could hear radio station KDET in Center, Texas. I’m not saying we need to go on the radio but we do have the computer. Keep me informed about things happening in you family and I will pretend to be Mrs. Payne and send it out to everyone.
People traveling US 84, seeing the Paxton signs, it probably goes through their minds, there is nothing to this place. It is a shame they can’t see the stores, post office, railroad depot, cotton gin. All the cross ties and pulpwood stacked along side the railroad waiting to be loaded or the trains switching dropping off empty cars picking up the loaded ones. They don’t see Oscar and R.T. all the other Myers’, George, Leon, Tom, Shine, Odessa Hataway all the kids playing with bikes, wagons, jumping on jumping boards, riding ared pony named Champ all waving across the highway to each other. They don’t see John sitting under a big oak tree across the highway from Leon’s store keeping Lawrence McGuire and Leon in check. They don’t see Dock Watson crossing the highway going to work at the dairy barn, the young boy out with Mrs. Mary Watson trapping salamanders as she worked her oversize garden. They don’t see the school house with the only inside gymnasium in Shelby County, the fear in opponents eyes when they learn they have to play the Paxton basketball team of which the main ingredient was spelled MYERS. The only thing they see is the grass and trees waving in the wind creeping ever closer to the highway. I can only go back to the mid 1940’s, my only wish is that I could have seen Paxton at the turn of the 20th century.
The local cemeteries Ramah, Old Home, North Jericho, Sholar and a couple around Houston and Tyler have all claimed their prizes and prizes they were. Our parents and Grandparents were very proud people. I am proud to be a Myers and I know you are too. There is nothing left of Paxton but memories and it is going to be up to us to keep those memories alive so people will always remember how it was when it was PAXTON.
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