Wednesday, April 24, 2024
Robert Lee “Uncle Bob” Saunders was an early-day resident of Gatesville and the son of one of Gatesville’s early business pioneers. Born in 1880 in Gatesville, Uncle Bob had many memories and stories from his childhood which, later in life, he put in writing during the 1940s and 1950s for The Gatesville Messenger in a weekly column titled “Down Memory Lane.”
According to John Frank Post, editor of the Gatesville Messenger from 1946-1978, “Mr. Saunders composed his Down Memory Lane columns from his West Main Street home in the shadow of the county courthouse dome. Deadline time would find him hunched square-shouldered over his small desk pecking away at his typewriter.” Post continued, “disdaining the rules of grammar and political correctness, he wrote like he talked – straight and plain-speaking. He was spared any tedious research, as his gifted memory supplied him with facts that he could weave into his own inimitable embroidery, using colorful anecdotes, local history, and happenings. Yes, Uncle Bob knew how to juice up a story.”
Post recalled that the “Down Memory Lane” column was a hit with the readers of the newspaper from the beginning. Post said that Uncle Bob’s close friends felt he viewed his writing as a “gift to his generation and a legacy to generations to come.”
The following is an excerpt of Uncle Bob’s Down Memory Lane column that appeared in the January 27, 1950, edition of The Gatesville Messenger:
Town-Clock Purchasers Accused of Buying Four Clocks Instead of One
In this good year of Our Lord 1950, we have what we call the pore man’s clock that tolls the hours for us throughout the day and night. What a comfort the town clock in the tower of the courthouse is. We who are privileged to live in this day when we can wake at night and hear the old town clock strike on the hour can hardly realize that there was a time in the dim past when we had no town clock to ring out the hours, but had to depend altogether on the crowing of that old Shanghi rooster or the braying of Uncle Johnny Grant’s jack to get us up in the morning.
You can bet that the old red roosters and the old jack never failed to sound off at the first break of day. They knowed better than any human when it was time to get up in the morning. You could look out the window and see the old red roosters and their flock of hens flying down out of the trees; not too many folks had fine chicken houses in that day and time. Down in the West end under the bluff where the writer growed up, that old brindle jack down to Uncle Johnny Grant’s old home on the Leon River would wake up in that old pole stall that Uncle John kept him in and bray until Uncle Johnny Grant would come down to the lot to give him his breakfast of sheaf oats and good yellow dent corn. That old jack brayed at the same time every morning just as regular as an alarm clock; in fact, he was an alarm clock for everybody living under the bluff in the West end of old Gatesville.
But to get back to my subject about the town clock – I remember just before the turn of the century how the Populist Party in Coryell County protested the extravagance of the Democrats who built our new courthouse and put our present town clock in the tower. I heard two of them talking after they had a few drinks, saying that the d—n Democrats wasn’t satisfied with one clock, they had to put in four – one on each side of the tower. Them soaptails was so ignorant that they couldn’t figger that one clock could have four faces. Them old mossbacks figgered that we had been getting along without a clock for over 40 years and why couldn’t we save the taxpayers the money that fine clock cost? So today we can thank our county judge, T.C. Taylor (the Blue Stud) and his commissioners, not only for our fine courthouse but the town clock that tolls out the hours throughout the night and day.
I remember mighty well the first time the janitor wound it up, and Frank Parsons could have been that janitor, and it tolled out the hour and we folks that wasn’t rich had the time of day for free. I heard the malcontents say that it shore never would keep correct time, but it has and even we Old Timers still listen to the tolling of the bell in the courthouse tower as it strikes the hour, and it is sweet music to we children of the 80’s and 90’s who had to depend on the fowls and animals to wake us up in the morning.
