Pulitzer Prize Winning Author
Gail Caldwell Delivers "Strong Local Connections"
in Her Book   A Strong West Wind

 

by: Bobby McDonald

 

Gail Caldwell

 

Always interested in a new book in the Texana genre, I was at my favorite bookstore a few weeks ago and picked-up Pulitzer Prize Winning Author, Gail Caldwell's  A Strong West Wind, and looked forward to spending a little bit of quality time reading about the Texas Panhandle, where she was reared, in Amarillo. Imagine my surprise, when I opened the book some days later and on the very first page, she mentioned Reilly Springs, Texas. "Something is wrong, here!" I told myself. "She really isn't talking about the Reilly Springs that I write about every week. Is she?"

Yes, Gail was writing about our own Hopkins County's Reilly Springs community and her father was reared just "up the road" from my own family. In Gail's memoir about her life and "coming of age" in the 1960's and 1970's, suddenly "took on new meaning." Here was a gal that heard the very same stories, was reared on the moral standards handed down from generation to generation in Reilly Springs, that I had received from my own ancestors.

A few pages later, I marveled at one of the same stories that Gail related her father telling her about boys in Reilly Springs stealing watermelons. She told it just as I had heard it myself. There was a community watermelon farmer that raised some of the biggest and best watermelons on his Reilly Springs, sandyland farm, and just as they got ripe, he knew that the local boys would be out to steal them. Well, for night upon night, he sat on his front porch with a shotgun and guarded his patch. A week or so later, almost dying from exhaustion, he came up with the idea to post a sign at the entrance to the patch, declaring that "there was one poison watermelon in the patch" and the young yokels would know which one it was, and thus leave all of them alone.

So, the farmer finally got a decent night's sleep, only to wake up the next morning and discover that the local boys had changed his sign during the night and now it read, "Now, there are TWO poison watermelons in the field!" What was a local farmer to do?

Both my father and grandfather had told the very same story from early days Reilly Springs.

 

 

 

 

Caldwell traces her formative years in the West Texas Panhandle and the many facets of her father, as he reared her to be an independent woman and to follow her dreams. Much of his own guidance had been formulated by his upbringing in Reilly Springs, in a family of ten children, the son of Pink and Della McElroy Caldwell, who lived on a the Caldwell Farm, north and west of Reilly Springs proper.

To demonstrate the "grit and determination" of her Hopkins County kinsmen and women, Caldwell tells the story of her grandmother, Della McElroy Caldwell, who was intent on marrying her grandfather, Pink. Della's father, Reilly Springs doctor, Dr. J.E. McElroy, was against the union, but not wanting to issue a permanent ultimatum, told his 90 pound, teenage daughter, that she could marry Pink when she weighed 100 pounds, thinking he would buy some time for the romance to "cool." However, the formative Della, went to her closet, retrieved her heaviest long dress, and ample petticoats and headed for the creek. She soaked in the creek and came back to stand on the scales ten pounds heavier and was prepared to proceed with her marriage.

The Caldwell family, like most all of our own, wasn't immune from the community tragedies, heartbreaks, and tough times. Gail relates the life of her uncle, Roy Caldwell, the eldest Caldwell son, who left Reilly Springs in 1915, to attend college and pursue a law degree. Consequently, he left college to serve in WWI and Gail learns many of the trials soldiers serving in "The War to End All Wars" endured for our freedoms.

Gail herself, was against the Vietnam War and openly served as a protester during the era, doing her part to encourage young men not to serve. Gail's father, a veteran of WWII, didn't necessarily agree with her decisions about the war, but allowed her to find her own path, during the troubled times.

Gail also relates her mother's side of the family, the Groves, from Breckenridge, Texas, who first worked in the oil patches of that region of the state, and eventually settled on a farm, where they raised laying hens and sold fresh eggs to the public.

Gail's formative years were influenced by her father's staunch, Reilly Springs Presbyterian Church upbringing, while her mother offered a Southern Baptist blend on her preparedness for adult life.

You're certain to identify with Gail's childhood memories, cultural landscape, and honest recollection of how life was in the 1960's and 1970's, as our nation underwent events that shaped its destiny.

Make plans to add A Strong West Wind to your list of summer reads, and learn how a young woman, with strong Hopkins County roots, evolves to become a Pulitzer Prize Winning literary critic, submitting much of her work to The Boston Globe.

Gail now makes her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and has just written a second book, entitled, Let's Take the Long Way Home.

 

 

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