My Portfolio

My grandfather, Petillo Emmett Leatherwood, loved history because he lived it. Growing up quite literally at his knee, I lived history vicariously and learned to love it, too. He was born in 1873 on a tenant farm in Bastrop County, TX. Orphaned by the death of his father at the age...

I believe children are born knowing how to cobble together a pile of leaves and jump in it! No one had to show me how to rake mountains of leaves and take a flying leap. Living next door to my grandparents, I had the bounty of two yards, though theirs had...

This week marks the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Missle Crisis, a time when we skated closer to the line of nuclear war than we realized then or think about now. I was not quite 18, a freshman at Texas Woman's University in Denton. I don't remember how my roommate and...

When I was growing up, I especially loved the fall season when we could "sleep cold" with the windows open, and the sound of a gentle autumn rain lulled one to sleep. Using long cane fishing poles, we used to "thresh" the pecan trees along the street in front of the...

     When I was four, we moved from our house at 1704 Paseo de Vaca, the house my parents had built before they married and in which their wedding took place, and moved in with my paternal grandparents at 3 North Madison while our house was being built next door at...

     In 1950, with my sixth birthday falling long after the cut-off date for beginning first grade, my parents placed me in private school. Mrs. Bode's School was a two-story white stucco house on Monroe St., just behind our house on Madison. If I stood in the back yard and looked...