Death in the Texarkana Switchyard

About 10 o’clock on a Friday evening in April 1926, Louis Riley Burns climbed on top of a boxcar in Texarkana, Texas. As a switchman for the Cotton Belt Railroad, his job was to get on top of the cars and give signals to the engineers and conductors on the ground.

Grandma Goes to Hollywood

Willella at age 4. At right is one of the family's greenhouses.

In the late 1950s, my maternal grandmother, Willella McCurdy, was working hard in her flower shop in Texarkana, Arkansas, to support her aging mother and two children. But for one week, Willella became Cinderella as she took her floral-arranging skills to Beverly Hills for a once-in-a-lifetime experience filled with celebrities and fancy balls.

The Log Truck

Omelia Rushing in 1939.

The Piney Woods cover more than 50,000 square miles, from the hills of Oklahoma and Arkansas down to the lowlands of Texas and Louisiana. Log trucks, a common sight on local highways, deliver tall pine and hardwood logs to factories and paper mills across the region.

My grandmother, Omelia Rushing, encountered one of these trucks in 1937 and barely survived to tell the story. Omelia was a single mother with two young daughters living near Fouke, Arkansas, just south of Texarkana. One evening, she and her girls were driving down Highway 71 with her father, William Calvin Rushing, and one or more of Omelia's siblings. She was the oldest of eight--six girls and two boys--and time has obscured the memory of who exactly was in the car that night.

Highway 71 is a narrow, two-lane road that runs north-south through western Arkansas. Omelia was behind the wheel of her father's car when a log truck passed her coming the other direction. Next thing she knew, her car was spinning out of control. The car crashed and she ended up in the hospital with life-threatening injuries.