Oh, it's working.
Don't touch it. Wow.
It says stand by, that's a big signal. Yeah.
Are you ready?
It's going.
All right, now that's still on. OK.
My name is Francell Collins, and I'm
with the Kerr County Historical Commission Oral History
Today is October 18, 2017, and we are here
at the Kerr County Courthouse.
I'm with Bonnie Florey.
We are talking to Wayne Rogers, who
understands that we are making an audio and video
recording of this interview, and that a
typewritten transcript
of our interview will be provided
so that changes can be made.
The audio and videotapes, however, cannot be edited.
This information, along with copies of any
family pictures
and documents provided by you, will then
be turned over to the History Center, Schreiner University,
and the Portals to Texas History
at North Texas University.
These restrictions will be placed on the
release form
after you have had a chance to review your manuscript.
Are you clear on what we're doing today?
Yes, Ma'am.
And give us your given name, please.
Otis Wayne Rogers. OK.
And when and where were you born?
Born in Comfort, Texas, at 6-3-39, 1939.
Were you born at home or in a hospital, or was
that at home?
It was in C.C. Jones' office, I think. OK.
I think Bobby Blackburn or somebody else was
born in.
Jody Lynn was.
In Comfort, yeah. OK.
And do you have any siblings?
No, I have a half-brother.
Half-brother, OK.
And can you give us your father's name, please?
Otis Patton Rogers. OK.
And where was he born?
Hartford, Texas. OK.
And what was his occupation? Frenchman.
And what was your mother's name?
Hazel Vivian Farrell. OK.
And where was she born?
At the ranch about halfway between Hartford and Kirby.
And is there a name for your ranch?
Bar Diamond Bar.
Bar Diamond Bar?
Bar Diamond Bar. OK.
And that ranch has been in your family how long?
Since 1861. OK.
And did your mother work outside the home? No.
Give us some endearing qualities about your mother,
something that you would like to tell us about her.
She was very much a ranch girl.
When she was young, she, my grandfather
raised horses and trained them to be polo horses.
He had about 50 mares and a couple of stallions
and raised cattle.
And when she was a young girl, she never
stayed at home when she went to school.
She went to school at the Klein Branch,
which she stayed with one of her first cousins.
Rode a little bull road down to school.
And when she finished Klein Branch,
which I think was sixth grade, she went to Harper
and stayed with that first cousin's mother
across the street from Harper School.
And when she went to Harper and ran out,
they went to the ninth grade, I think.
And she had to transfer to Kerrville.
So she came to Tybee and stayed with a game
warden, Mr. J.J.
Dent, his wife, right across from Tybee.
So she was never home during high school.
How far was your ranch then from school?
I mean, for Tybee, if she had to?
It's 12 miles.
The ranch is all in Gillespie County now.
It was partly in Kerr County at that time.
That's been so long. OK.
But that was kind of typical for a lot of them
to do that.
A lot of them, yeah.
They had to stay someplace to get into school.
Because if the water was up, you couldn't get in.
Just the logistics of getting to school was
very difficult.
But she went to college for about a year and a half
in Sol Ross in Alpine.
And then she married my father.
Did she meet him at college, or she knew him
from here?
No, she knew him at Harper.
He was raised there at Harper.
She knew him all her life.
There was five years difference in her age.
You said she was a ranch girl.
Could she kill a deer?
Oh, yes.
Skin one?
Skin one.
She was very active in the ranch.
She and Dad were inseparable out there on the ranch.
She didn't particularly like housekeeping. Yeah.
We don't all like that.
Have a garden?
Oh, yes.
We had a garden, and we butchered,
and we preserved the meat and all the works.
We had smokehouse in my grandparents' place,
and butchered hogs, and goats, cattle, whatever.
It was pretty self-sufficient.
She canned, I'm sure, everything that she had
in the garden.
It was her purpose, yeah.
Put up, canned in those days, or put in jars.
Was the Peril Ranch, she was a Peril, did you say?
She was a Peril.
Was that close to where you are now, or are you
living there?
I live on it.
On the Peril, OK.
I live where my mother was born, not in the
same house.
But your dad's place was further at Harper, is
that right?
My dad's place was at Harper.
He was born and raised in Harper.
My mother was born in 1911, and my dad was born
in 1906.
Rogers had a ranch out northwest of Harper,
and they had a house in town where
they came in to go to school.
Did you know your grandparents on either side?
I knew all of my grandparents, and I knew three
of my great-grandparents. Wow.
Longevity in that family, for sure.
There was some of it, yeah.
My mother died rather young.
She was in her late 60s.
My dad lived to be about two months from 90, I think.
And tell us about your grandparents now.
They were ranchers, too, though, aren't you?
Oh, yes.
Well, the Peril family were from my
great-grandfather Peril.
My great-great-grandfather Peril, excuse me.
James A. Peril was born in Virginia.
Hardy County, Virginia.
And he came from there to Missouri
and married my great-great-grandmother,
who was a foster.
And there was four boys in that family and one girl.
I believe that Peril was born on the ranch sometime
in the 1880s.
I'm not sure exactly when.
But she was the first member of the family
born in Gillespie County.
And so then it came down.
I was the fifth generation, I guess.
And my kids are sixth, and my grandkids are seventh.
Now, have you built a different house out there,
or are you in the?
We built a new house where my mother was born.
We used as much of the old house as we could
when we redid it.
My wife designed the house.
And it's in the shape, if you can take an
aerial picture
of it, it's in the shape of a bar-diamond-bar ranch.
Oh, OK.
It has a diamond with the two bars coming into it.
Interesting, yes.
OK, tell us now about your
great-great-grandfather now.
Correct, he was at the Battle of San Jacinto?
Yes, like I said, he came from Tennessee.
And he was 19 years old.
And he had a career, according to the family history,
between Stephen F. Austin and Sam Houston.
And fortunately, he was not at the Alamo.
He was at San Jacinto. OK.
Now, when did the first descendants
come to this area and settle?
The Perils came to Texas in 1958 at Burnett. 1858?
18, excuse me, 1858, 1858, Burnett.
And then came to Gillespie County in 1861
and built a home out there where we live, a
part of the ranch.
Now, am I right in assuming there
was some cattle drives that went through your area?
They drove the cattle and horses down here.
And they were very much cattle and horse people.
It has occurred to me lately that my grandmother,
the line of the Perils was James Alexander,
William Alexander,
William Randolph was my grandfather, and then
my mother.
And William Randolph, my grandmother, was a Beerspool.
And my great-grandmother was Mary Olive Locke,
that married William Alexander Peril.
And she was from the Locke family in San Antonio.
Is that L-O-C-K-E? L-O-C-K-E.
Locke Hills, Elkhorn, in San Antonio.
And her mother, I understand, was very disturbed
with the fact she was coming out into the wilderness
when she got married.
I guess.
There was an interesting family story about a,
I guess, great-great-grandmother.
Questioned Locke, questioned my grandfather,
great-grandfather, about the house.
She wanted to know if there was water at the house.
He says, yes, right there at the house.
Actually, it was about a quarter of a mile down
in the creek.
That lured her on, though.
But anyway, I guess that qualified her.
She didn't want to come out and look at it anyway.
So my great-grandmother, they had four children.
They had four boys and, no, five children.
Had four boys and one girl.
And she, when my grandfather was born in 1872
out there at the ranch, she would pack two buckets.
If the Indians were not at the spring,
she would pack two wooden buckets and hem down there
and leapfrog the buckets full without putting
him down.
She'd leapfrog it back up to the house.
So it was not real convenient.
Otherwise, they had a stone kitchen and slots
in it
because the Indians were there at times.
And they had barrels of water in the house
in case the Indians cut them off in the water.
One story that they told, the Indians
were there at least as long and up until about 1880
because they had a Muda in the corral right
here by the house.
And the Indians stole them.
And most of the men were gone, the older men.
My great-grandfather and his brothers and the health
that they had.
And the Indians stole the horses and left with them.
They leave their own horses there?
No, they took everything, including a little pony
that my great-grandfather had just given my grandfather,
which was the first small horse that he could
get on.
And my grandfather was eight or nine years old
at the time.
So when the men got back the next day or the
day after,
they went after the horses.
And they caught the Indians in Menard
and got the horses back, except for the pony.
And the Indians had killed and eaten the pony
on the way back.
So my grandfather was never particularly
pleased with the Indians.
Now, what tribe was this? Comanche.
Yeah, OK. Interesting.
So that was amazing that they got the horses back.
Well, yeah.
Well, now, were some of the cattle drives
that Captain Schreiner did, did that go your
way, too? Yes.
And as a matter of fact, there's a historical marker
right before you get to the county line that
says that the Texas Western Trail went into
Glisby County
over the Peril Divide, which was Uptown Creek
and over the Divide.
So that's pretty well qualified there. Right.
And my great-grandfather has written up
in the Texas Trail Drivers' Magazine.
He has an article in that.
About his escapades as a trail driver.
He drove one herd from down here south of San Antonio.
This is how he got acquainted with John Locke,
the Colonel
Locke, and his future wife.
And he drove that trail drive, two other men,
of course,
to Presidio, from down south of San Antonio to Presidio.
And crossed at the cowhead crossing of the Pecos.
I guess the first herd that went across at that point.
Anyway, they went to Presidio.
They sold them into Mexico.
And you got paid in gold doubloons
and brought it back down in saddlebags
and paid off the people that had sent the
cattle up there.
So he did that at 19 years old. Wow.
Did they buy the land back then?
Most of it was patented. OK.
I don't have any idea of where they
have herd up to as much as 20,000 acres at that time.
But it's dwindled during the generation.
But it was very much a horse and cattle outfit.
Most of the families up there were horse people.
Like the Morris Ranch was a horse outfit.
The Duderstadt family was a horse outfit.
Or my dad's family, the Pattons were horse people.
Horses and cows were pretty much the way it went.
Were those quarter horses?
They were mostly quarter, thoroughbreds, Cross.
And my grandfather sold most of his horses,
this was before my time, to Fort Sam Houston
to the officers down there, the cavalry.
They were all solid color, gray, bayer, black.
And then he sold quite a few of them, I think,
to the officers for polo horses.
So he had a good reputation as a horseman.
Pretty well, pretty well-reputated.
To sell that high up, yeah.
He ran quite a bit of cattle.
Started out, of course, with the Longhorns.
Shorthorn, Durham Cross, Devon Cross,
pretty much the British breeds into the Longhorns.
And then finally to the Hereford.
And that was a boy, almost pure Hereford.
Is that what you still have there now, is Hereford?
No, we've messed up the whole thing.
Oh, yeah?
And he had a crossbreed cattle again. OK.
So we had mostly black.
Whatever is selling good.
Whatever makes the most money.
Yeah, right.
Because this is not real good cow country.
The ranch that we live on now, if you
take the center line of our house,
any rain that falls on the south side
goes into the Guadalupe watershed.
Anything that falls on the north side
goes into Pernellis watershed.
So it's very much on the river side.
You'll have to come up and see it.
We will.
If you have sheep or goats or anything else,
are you?
Well, that's part of the story.
My grandmother, my mother's mother, was a peril.
Well, it was a birch wool before she was a peril.
And a German family, a German sheepherder family.
They were migrant sheepherders.
And that was not a real good combination
for the peril family, because they didn't
have any use for sheep people.
It was part of the old cattle sheep thing.
Until 1918, 17 and 18.
And the drought in 17 and 18 was so bad
that the cattle business and the horse business
wasn't that great.
So it's not something that I was told.
I just kind of figured it out.
In 1918, my grandfather bought some sheep.
So my grandmother finally convinced him
that they really needed a few sheep there.
And we've had sheep.
In 1936, my mother and dad bought a herd of goats.
That was awful bad times, you know?
My mother and dad got married.
And on Christmas Day in 1934, my dad
was working for a man named Jim Todd in
Toleran, Texas.
He was carrying for 1,500 head of steers at
Bernal Branch
and had two cowboys under him.
He was the foreman.
He was the foreman, so to speak.
He got paid $60 a month.
The two cowboys got $30 a month.
And when mother and dad got married,
well, she fed the cowboys.
She said they lived in a little two-room house.
And if you'd stomp on the floor, you
would learn to rattlesnake for rattling.
So that was the kind of deal they had.
In 1936, 1935, they came home for Christmas Day
because that was the day they got married,
because that was his day off here in Kerrville.
His day off.
They got married in Kerrville in 1934,
Christmas Day.
And the next year, in 35, they came back down
and visited the ranch out here on Christmas Day
and went home, back to Toleran.
In 1936, they got down here, and my mother got sick.
And they didn't get back to Toleran on
Christmas night.
So my dad got fired.
And he said, well, now what do we do?
And my mom said, well, my grandmother's
given me a section of land on the east side of
the ranch
over there.
And I guess we could go back and see what we
can do with that.
So he said, I don't have any better ideas than
what we did.
And they built a house.
They had $600 saved up.
I don't know how they saved it up on the kind
of money,
but they had it.
So they built a 20 by 30 rock house right
on the side of 783 out there.
And they paid $600 for that 600 square foot house.
And so they had no money left.
So they went to Harper Bank and borrowed $100
and bought 400 head of Angora Nannies.
Was that just on a handshake they borrowed? Yeah.
And that was in 1936.
My dad fenced off the section so the goats
wouldn't get back out on the rest of the barrel ranch
and fed them by chopping live oaks through that winter
and the next winter.
And of course, in 1939, the war started.
And Mohair went to a dollar a pound.
And my dad shared his own, and they got in the
Goat business.
He shared all the goats himself.
Oh my goodness.
Oh, I still do.
You do? Uh-huh.
Oh my.
All the goats I've got, I don't have near that
many anymore.
I can't raise them out there.
That's a job.
It's good exercise. Yeah.
I was going to ask you something else.
But your ranch has been ranched all these years
since it started.
It's never been idle.
But the sheep came on, it'll be 100 years next year.
The goats came on in 1936.
We've had Goat, sheep, horses, and cattle out there
ever since it started.
And you shear the sheep, too?
Oh, yeah.
What kind of sheep are they?
They're Rambolais now.
I think they originally started out, I think,
with the lame.
And they're mostly rambolais, and I messed that
up, too,
because I cross-breed them with the Suffolks,
because the lambs bring more.
Now, where did you start school?
I know your mom had to go into different schools.
Well, I started school in Tybee.
Oh, you did?
First grade?
First grade. OK.
And how'd you get to school?
My mother drove me.
She did?
We were too far down on the east side of the county.
The road was unpaved there.
We were about a mile and a half or a mile and 3 quarters
from the county line in Kerrville.
There wasn't a school bus back then?
There was a school bus down to the Dittmer place,
and there were three girls down there.
But that was about six miles from our house.
So it was a 12-mile round trip, and the bus
didn't want to come down for one kid.
For one kid?
So she drove you every day?
So she drove me every day until I was 14,
and then I drove her to. Wow.
That was admirable of her to do that.
Well, they paid the whole sum, I think,
$25 transfer fee.
So it wasn't that bad.
Were you supposed to go to another school?
I was in Harper School.
Oh, in Harper School District. OK.
So they had to pay tuition.
Pay tuition. Yeah.
So you started there, and you went to Tyvee all
the way?
I went to Tyvee through the fourth grade,
and then they put Starkey in.
And I went up to Starkey for two years
because I was on the west side of Thalen.
And I came back to high school.
And what year did you graduate? 57.
And what were you involved in at school?
Very little.
I was in the band.
That was about the only extracurricular thing
because I had chores to do at the house,
and so I didn't get in any sports or anything
like that.
What did you play?
I played trumpet. Trumpet?
You enjoyed that?
Bob Blackburn and I both played trumpet.
So you weren't in the ranch? FAA?
You had enough of that at home.
Yeah, I hadn't played it anymore.
I was raised pretty much as a loner out there.
There were no my cousins.
My cousin, who was considerably older than I
was, Bill Peral.
And how close was he from your house?
Well, he was on the other end of the ranch.
He was about five miles away. OK.
They moved into town and lived in one of my grandmother's
houses in town here and sent him to school.
But we didn't do that.
And he graduated, I think, in 1952.
He was a band major, so I was good.
I started playing, I think, in the band in
sixth grade,
something like that.
Was that Mr. Armstrong?
It was Mr.
Before that.
Yeah, it was before that. Yeah.
I believe.
Do you remember his name? Sandage.
Sandage, yes.
Sandage, John Sandage.
And I came from Starkey, Oregon, the band home.
And I was in the band for six years.
Do you remember any of your teachers at Tidey?
Oh, I remember quite a few of them.
The likable ones.
Tell us some of the likable ones.
Well, I didn't dislike any of them.
I had trouble with the third grade
because I talked too much.
Oh, me too.
And Mrs. Cleveland didn't appreciate that.
I had Mrs. Hahn for the first grade.
That was Sally Hahn, right? Yeah.
Mrs. Second grade, let's see.
Did you have Ms. Cunningham in there anywhere?
No, I didn't have Ms. Cunningham.
Ms. Sutton?
Then I had Mrs. I can't remember the second grade.
I don't remember that one, yeah.
I think her name was Bateke.
And then the third grade, I had Mrs. Cleveland.
Fourth grade, I had Mrs. Corley.
And she went out to Starkey.
And then I had Mrs. Fonk and Mr. Talley.
Tom Daniels was the principal when I was in
first grade.
And Fred Talley was the principal at Starkey. Yeah.
Did you have Mrs. Hardy when you were in high school?
Oh, I had Mrs. Hardy, yes I did.
So you were prepared for college.
Mrs. Hardy and I got along very well.
My grandmother had moved back.
She had moved into the Kerrville.
My grandfather died in 1946.
And my grandmother had four sisters
that lived on the west side of Kerrville.
And so she had a house that she bought over there.
My grandmother was a very frugal German lady.
She bought three houses in Kerrville
while they were on the ranch.
She sold butter, eggs, a little chicken.
And she bought three houses in Kerrville.
And she rented two and lived in one.
When she left the ranch, she'd come down
and live on Twermer Street.
That's my neighborhood.
Is that right?
Well, she had a sister out on Guadalupe.
She had two over on the, well, one of them
lived right beside her on Twermer from after Guam.
And she had, actually, three sisters down the,
what is it?
Well, the one on Guadalupe, right there at Five Boys.
It starts at Five Boys.
Oh, Main Street or Water Street? Hugo.
It's the one that goes right beside the bank
going north. Hugo.
That's Hugo. Hugo.
Yeah, it was Hugo.
That's right.
I remember.
Anyway, she had three sisters lived down that street.
And so she moved down with her family.
So she was kind of like a Mrs. Butt then
that started out selling stuff door to door and
then kind of.
Well, she sold all her stuff to Shriner Store.
Oh, OK.
Shriner had butter and eggs and chickens,
if you remember that Chicken house out there.
They'd take all the roosters and the old hens
and whatever.
So she'd take them all and that's over.
She bought three houses there.
Wow, yeah.
So they would buy them out there if somebody
come out on the ranch and wanted something,
eggs or butter
or milk or something.
My grandfather, I remember, would say,
well, you have to talk to the madam about that.
It was her business.
She's a storekeeper.
So then what did you do after you graduated
from TIDY?
Well, I went to Texas Western College in El Paso.
It was Texas Western at that time, now UTEP.
And I majored in metallurgical engineering.
And it took me four and a half years, plus the summer,
to get the degree.
It's a BS degree.
I kind of resent the fact that two years after
I got out,
they dropped it from 169 required hours to 134.
Wow, that's a lot.
I mean, that's a big drop.
I ended up with 172 hours and got a BS degree
for it.
My son went to San Angelo, and he got a
master's degree
for that kind of hours.
But anyway, I got into the business of metallurgical
And you want to tell us what that is?
There's two portions of metallurgical engineering.
One of them is the extraction of metal from the
earth forward.
That's extractive metallurgy.
And the other they call physical metallurgy,
because it's the application and work with heat treating,
welding, forming, so forth, physical metallurgy
of the metal after it's smelted in a usable product.
So is that mining?
I had to take mining courses.
That's one of the reasons I got that many hours.
But mining is not.
Mining is just taking the ore out of the ground.
But metallurgy is the smelting of it
and turning it into a usable metal.
After school, I went to my job.
I got a job with Kaiser Aluminum.
And where was that?
Or Kaiser Steel, excuse me, in Fontana, California.
And it was Kaiser Steel Company.
Kaiser had 28 different companies.
They had the aluminum company.
Everybody's familiar with Kaiser Aluminum.
Most people didn't know that they also had a
steel company.
The steel company was put out there basically,
I think,
financed by the government, the United States government,
during the war period, World War II.
They moved a lot of old equipment
from Pennsylvania and the east to the West Coast
so that they had separation production.
The U.S. Steel had one in Provo, Utah.
And then there was one in Fontana, California.
It was pretty well a fully integrated steel mill.
It had the big smelters for reducing iron ore
to steel.
It had their own coal mines out there.
They made everything from plate to pipe.
How many years were you with them?
I was with them 2 and 3 14 years. OK.
I was in school 4 and 12 years.
All together, I was away from home about 7 years.
And then I didn't really like living in California,
you might guess.
And so six months after I got out there,
I came back to El Paso and married my wife.
We went back out to California together.
She is of Lebanese descent.
And we were married in July 29, 1962.
And we've had our 55th anniversary this year.
And you have how many children? Two.
The son and her daughter.
Are they in this area now?
They live, both of them now, on the ranch.
On the ranch.
Russell lived where I was raised there on the highway.
He and his wife and two granddaughters.
My daughter has never married.
Both the kids went to San Angelo State to college
after graduating from Harvard.
So they went to Harvard to go to college.
They went to Harvard because the road was paved
and the bus
was free.
Yeah, right.
So they both went to Harvard.
My daughter-in-law is a Jenny Self.
My son's name is Russell Patton Rogers.
My daughter's name is Denise Lynette Rogers.
And my daughter-in-law, her name was Jenny Self.
She came from Burford, Texas.
She has been postmistress at Harvard now for, well,
ever since pretty much they got married.
The oldest granddaughter just graduated from Harvard.
She's in art school now in San Antonio.
My son's work, they were all country,
and he's now USAA in San Antonio.
He commutes from the ranch every morning.
It's a good drive.
Oh, yeah.
Fortunately, the daughter goes to school at the
Art Institute
right beside USAA.
Oh, they go together.
She goes down there with him.
Anyway, back to my wife and I. We moved from El Paso.
Well, I was already in California, and I came back.
And we married and moved out there.
You already knew her before?
Oh, yeah.
We had gone together a couple of years before I
went to work.
And her folks, her grandparents, immigrated
from Lebanon.
And her folks lived there in El Paso.
They were in the grocery business, hardware business,
had a number of rentals around El Paso.
They started out just like my folks did.
Didn't have anything when they got here, and
did pretty well.
Worked hard, yeah.
Worked hard, that's right.
And again, my father-in-law told me
that his first job was at Safeway Foods, $13 a week.
So we don't know how fortunate we were.
That's right, that's exactly right.
Anyway, we stayed out there two and a half years.
She never had been away from home very much.
She went to school a year at UTEP, or Texas Western.
And then she worked for my wife, worked for
KROD TV,
Radio and TV in El Paso, from the time
she left college until we got married.
We lived in Pomona, California, in a pretty
good trailer park.
I drove about 20 miles back to Fontana.
Fontana was east on Highway 66, by the way.
Route 66.
Route 66, yeah.
You remember, it goes through Cucamonga.
Anyway, I had-
So is that where most of the metallurgical jobs
are out there in California?
That particular one was out there.
And I had a job offer out of college from out there.
So I just took it.
I really would have preferred, I think,
to go into the extractive metallurgy business.
But most of that, by the time I got out of school,
was being done overseas.
So I didn't want to go overseas.
They had some extractive copper things
in New Mexico, and Utah, and Idaho.
But I got a little better offer out in,
which wasn't that great, but I got a little
better offer
out there for titer.
So I went out there and stayed two years.
Two and a half years, two and three quarter
years, actually.
And then I couldn't take it anymore.
So I came back down here, and we-
Your parents still alive when you came here?
My parents were still alive.
So you just kind of came and helped them out.
And so we lived with them for a little while.
And that's not a good deal.
But we were working on the ranch with them,
and things went down pretty bad,
because this was after the 50s drought in New Orleans.
And lambs, when we got there, got back down here,
were bringing 5 or ¢10 a pound.
So a lamb would bring you, a 50-pound lamb,
bring you $5.
So that didn't work out too well
for poor people trying to live there.
And so I ended up going down here.
I read in the paper where there was a class
going on
for drafting, and of course, I had drafting in college,
so I thought, well, okay.
So I went down here, and a guy named Herbie Witt
was instructing the drafting class.
I said, well, you know, we took it high school together,
so I guess he learned more than I did.
And where was that, where he was instructing?
It was at Mooney.
Oh, at Mooney, okay.
It was a Mooney class, a night class,
that Mooney was putting on.
And it was over here on Water Street.
So I came down and enrolled in that.
And after I'd gotten into it about,
I don't know, it was a two- or three-week course,
and there was a guy named Phil Furman,
which you're probably familiar with.
He was vice president of engineering at that time.
And he came down there, and we knew each other,
of course,
because we were in high school together.
He was the head of engineering.
He said, wait, I see you've got a degree in metallurgy.
I said, I sure do.
He said, well, what are you doing in here?
I said, well, I need a job.
He said, well, come in Monday and talk to us.
And so I did, and that was in 1966.
And so a guy named John Duderstadt, who was our neighbor.
Oh, my goodness.
They hired me, and I started working for them.
And I retired from many.
Were you a draftsman then, or?
Well, no, they hired me as a metallurgical engineer.
Oh, okay, because they were using that.
Because I had that degree.
Phil said, you know, I've read your application,
or your deal there, and I see you're
a metallurgical engineer.
What the heck are you doing a drafting job?
I said, I need a job.
So I actually hired on as a metallurgical engineer.
Okay, and how long did you stay with me?
39-something years.
Oh, my goodness.
Off and on, you understand how many were.
Yeah, I have.
I retired.
Actually, they shut down in 62, and I retired.
I was, I don't know what.
It was 2000, I guess.
About 2000, they shut down, and I went,
I retired, I was 62 at that time.
So 2002, I was 62 at that time, and went.
So I just retired, back to the ranch on Social Security.
And they started up again, and there was a fellow
that I had worked with before, when they
started back up.
He came in and called me several times,
and I said, no, I'm not really that keen about
coming back.
He said, well, come down.
We'll make you a good offer.
Well, after about the third call,
he said, okay, I'll come down and talk to you.
And he did, he made me a good offer,
and I talked to my wife about it.
We had the two kids, and had built a house out there.
There were things we wanted to do with the house,
and he said, well, it wouldn't hurt a few more years.
So I went back down there, and at that time,
I retired in 2005, 2004, December 31, 2004.
So that was 39 years all together, or was that a?
39 years from 66-2005, but I had a few months
off for each time they shut down.
One time, when they shut down,
there was a lawsuit going on between Mooney
and a wife, an aircraft, Ted Smith aircraft
in Van Nuys, California.
So I got on that, and it was a pretty good sign,
well, they sued for that, so four of us hired
back on
to pursue that after they shut down again.
And so I had a period of time when I consulted
with them,
but I was still getting paid, I think.
And I spent time in Van Nuys, and on and on,
and more time than I wanted to in Chicago,
because that's where the law firm was.
Oh, okay.
So I worked for them for almost 40 years.
Now, Lenny's been good to this area.
Oh, it's been, absolutely, you know.
And I was, it's kind of embarrassing to me.
I was a liaison engineer for a whole lot of the time
that I was down there.
Liaison meant that I was the intermediary,
liaison between engineering staff
and the production and quality people.
As liaison, I had an office down in the plant,
and I had bosses, my boss is up in the engineering.
And so it was a pretty good walk,
if you know where the engineering building is
versus the production area.
So in the liaison, anything that happened on
the floor
was a liaison job.
You had to go down there and make it, correct it.
And the Fed says, the FAA says,
that it has to be equal to or better than
the original design.
So I did that off and on for about 20 years,
during that time, 15 or 20.
And I'd get paged about every 30 minutes.
And so everybody out there knew who I was,
they were there and working.
And I worked with a lot of them and knew a lot
of them.
But a lot of them I didn't know.
And they still see me in town somewhere,
and they still know me and call me Wayne.
And I have no idea, you know,
my memory for names are not good.
I might not have ever known their name.
But I see a lot of people that weren't too many.
And a lot of, we had a, actually,
so many of us worked for Harper.
I had a bus that came down and picked up
for about four years, and picked up with a bus
and brought us down to Kern.
And the bus was pretty full, 15 or 16 of us.
My goodness, you know.
Is Mooney about the same size it was back then now,
or do you know?
Mooney got up to 1,200 people at one time,
or 1,100, something like that.
But the production time of Mooney was in the 60s.
I have a theory about that.
The most Mooneys we ever sold were 800,
800 plus aircraft a year.
That's a lot of production.
And we were working two and three shifts.
800 a year?
800 a year. My.
And my theory is that in the 60s,
the guys from World War II had been back for 20 years,
back from 45, 46, and they had flown
prop-driven airplanes.
And Mooney was by far, and basically still is,
I think, the best,
this is not because of the workforce,
but the best single-engine airplane on the market.
Still is, you said?
Still is, I think.
And it's because it's well-built,
well-designed, well-built.
And the guys who had been in the war,
there was 2,000, 2 million of them,
that had been in the war and flown these airplanes.
And Mooney was very much like what they flew.
It was fast, it was neat and trim,
well-built, and that's why we could sell 800.
Wasn't a real difficult plane to learn?
It was a skilled pilot plane.
You know, it was not a,
you could certainly learn to fly,
but it was a skilled pilot airplane.
Low weighing, low gear, retractable gear.
And so I think that that's why we had a good heyday
selling airplanes in the 60s, early 70s.
Now, I was there for the good years,
and I was there for the bad years.
I can remember when we had like 130, 140 airplanes
down in the field.
That you needed to get rid of?
Oh, okay, yeah.
It'd be real scary when there was a hail storm.
Oh, yeah.
It was hard to store that many airplanes in a
hail storm. Yeah.
And some of the controls on them were like 016 aluminum.
It was kind of like foil.
Oh, my, they could be destroyed easily.
So it took a dent, not very well. Yeah.
And then you had to replace them all if you got
a leak.
So it was a rush for the, when you heard the,
you're watching the weather,
as much as you did out there, it's rain.
Yeah, right.
It was a scurry for the sheds down there.
So coming back to Curver was a good thing.
Oh, yeah, you know,
like I said, I only spent seven years away from Curver.
Yeah, good.
And my wife was not real happy about it
because she had family, a lot of family in El Paso.
And she wanted to kind of stay out there.
I'm bludgeoning her into coming down here.
It's been a good place to raise your children.
And I thought so, too.
We didn't have any kids at all.
They asked us when we were in California,
you don't have any kids?
No, we don't have any kids.
And, well, why not?
I said, well, honestly, I don't want my kids
to have to go stand in the corner
and say I was born in California.
That's a good one.
It wasn't a real reason.
It was a good way to get them to shut up. Right.
Well, thank you, we've really enjoyed this.
You've had some good family history
and it's.
Yeah, my dad's family had ranching.
They sold the ranch there
and my grandparents moved to Uvalde.
And so they had ranch down there.
Most of the family were teachers, the girls were.
And my uncle was, he was principal at Harper School
for 40 years or something like that.
One of them.
And my dad's younger brother was a rancher,
just like my dad was.
And he, my first cousin, I'm the oldest left
in the generation of the Rogerses.
And my younger, next younger cousin
is a rancher down in Dexter, New Mexico.
They went down through Uvalde and out to New Mexico.
And she and I are still real close.
Well, you don't make a lot of money ranching,
but it sure is good to take care of the land,
isn't it?
It's good, it's my obsession.
I wanted to do that all my life.
And my dad said, you know,
they can take the ranch away from you,
but they can't take the medication away from you.
So he insisted that I do something.
He did not finish high school.
He had, believe it or not, ruptured appendix
in his senior year, and he lived through that.
Interesting story about that is they were on
the ranch
out there when that happened.
They couldn't get into town with a wheeled vehicle
because it was raining and muddy.
So my grandfather put my dad, a 16-year-old boy,
on horseback.
Oh, my, with a ruptured appendix.
And carried him into Fort Worth.
16 years old, 14 miles out to the ranch in Fort Worth.
And he got in there, and they put him in the car
and took him to Fredrick, where he was in the hospital
for four months.
Oh, goodness.
So his class left.
Of course, he gangrened or whatever.
I guess a little levity wouldn't hurt.
He said that he thought the old doctor,
he knew the old doctor was an alcoholic.
But he said he could just picture him.
Dad didn't know this, but he told this story.
He said the old doctor, he was pretty sure
would just take a drink and pour a little down
in him
and so up in the hole.
That's probably true.
But anyway, that's a.
That'll heal anything.
I'm glad he did it.
Yeah, and he lived.
He lived, and I wouldn't be here, so.
A little side to that, my son just had a
ruptured appendix
about six months ago, so.
Goodness, you don't hear about appendix so much anymore.
Like you used to.
No, it was, in the 1920s, it was a death knell.
Oh, yeah, uh-huh.
But it was bad for you and my son.
He had a bad time with it, now, and it's not good.
Well, thank you, Wayne.
We've enjoyed it, getting to.
Well, I got a lot more history.
I'm kind of a history bub, history.
That's good, yeah.
Got it all written down?
Well, a lot of it.
Yeah, good.
I kind of tell the story that I had to go
all the way to El Paso to marry a Lebanese girl
to find somebody who wouldn't kid to me.
Oh, that's good.
But we made it work for 55 years.
She'd been very tolerant.
And that's not real big in the Arab people.
They're not really tolerant people.
You can tell by what goes on in the Middle East.
And actually, her parents left over there.
Let me look at this a little bit.
Her parents left over there because, of course,
she was Christian Orthodox,
and they were forced out.
The same situation that's going on right now.
Right now.
Beat battles that'll never be solved.
No, I don't think it's solvable.
No, it's not.
And she still has relatives over there.
They do, yeah.
And there's concern for them. Yeah.
Also, I want to put in, just before we get on,
I inherited that ranch out there from my mother
in 1980
when she passed away.
It took me 15 years to pay almost half a
million dollars
in estate taxes on that ranch.
So it wasn't set up.
It was set up, but the way they appraised the ranch
was, they appraised the ranch because of like property,
like kind property.
They appraised the ranch so high
that the deduction for inheritance tax at that time
was $80,000.
And it far exceeded that. Yeah.
How many acres do you have? Pardon?
How many acres do you have there?
We have five sections still left in there.
I'm very, very adamant about getting rid
of the inheritance tax because I think
that's a fair tax to pay.
It took me 15 years, and God willing, it rained.
The prices were good.
I had a job at a questionable company. Yeah.
And I had two kids in college.
So that made my hair gray. Yeah.
Me grumpy. Yeah.
But it worked out, and I give God all the
credit for that. Absolutely.
Alrighty, well, thank you.