Tarantulas & a dead pilot.

According to my mother, along with photos I have to support the fact, we first lived on Ash Crescent, literally at the top of the hill about a block and a half south of an elementary school on Vickery Blvd and a block east of Riverside Drive. Despite my mother's intentions that we were going to stay there so I could attend that school when I got old enough, it didn't work out that way.

Though we didn't remain on Ash Cresent that long , there were a couple of interesting events told by my mother that I'll relate for you. While living there (probably during 1946), a light plane crashed into a gulley that was maybe a block away, I believe, killing the pilot. Essentially, the location was a couple of hundred feet from the southeast corner of Riverside and Vickery. Remember, there was no TV news or instant media coverage in that time period, so it made for a little bit of excitement for those living in the immediate vicinity.

As for the other event, we've all gotten used today to the idea of hardly ever seeing any critters in or under our houses. Today people get upset if they see a roach in the house or a harmless spider in the garden. It wasn't always that way and a case in point was the Ash Crescent house.

My mother was a consummate animal lover, willing to do just about anything to help an injured, starving or trapped animal. Cats, especially. Anyway, she kept hearing kittens crying under the house (pier and beam foundation). No way she could ignore them and they wouldn't come to her when she called. What'd she do? You guessed it…crawled under the house to find the kittens and bring them out. Consider that there was precious little light under the house, so she couldn't see what else was under there with her. What there was would qualify for a modern episode of Fear Factor.

After she had extricated herself and the kittens from beneath the house, a neighbor came over to her to see if she was alright. When she assured the neighbor that she was, the neighbor asked her is she knew how much danger she had been in. "What danger?" my mother asked.

"Tarantulas." the neighbor replied. It so happened that tarantula spiders (You know what I'm talking about. Big. Black. Hairy. Experts also say they're non-poisonous and totally harmless. Yeah, sure. If you believe that, I've got some waterfront property in Arizona I'd like to sell you.) were quite common all over Ft. Worth at that time, but you'd usually see one or two at a time. They could even be spotted crossing streets. Turned out that the little buggers were apparently breeding under many of the houses on Ash Cresent…including ours. Despite the fact that my mother was deathly afraid of tarantulas, she had crawled thru dozens if not hundreds of them to rescue those kittens. Why none of them crawled on her while she was under the house no one ever figured out. Good thing, though. If one of'em had crawled up her leg or she could've turned on a light, she would've created a new entrance into the house by standing straight up thru the floor!

By early 1947, we had bid goodbye to the tarantulas and bought a house at 4928 Morris Street. This was on the East Side, one block south of Meadowbrook Drive and halfway between Queen Street and Tierney Road. My father was working for Swift at the Cold Storage Building on East Lancaster (I'll explain that one later), I would soon have major chest surgery, the East Side was a very desirable place to live and the 1949 flood was still two years down the road.

Except for 8 1/2 years in El Paso, I've been on the East Side ever since. This part of Ft. Worth has ranged all the way from a highly desirable location to a virtual combat zone and everything in between. Where it's going now is still to be determined, but if you don't know where it's been, you won't be able to figure out where you want it to go.

If you've managed to find this installment vaguely interesting, stick around. You may learn some things about the East Side, as well as the rest of Ft. Worth, that you didn't know. And if y'all happen to have information that'll fill in some of the gaps in my memory, don't hesitate to let me know.