Milton Lentz
Milton Lentz
Interview July 2014
Milton Lentz (ML001)
Milton: cutting cedar with them.
Milton: You called a girl’s name. I bet it’s her. Should have to be her grandfather that worked for my Dad back there in the Depressions, cuttin’ cedar.
Ken: Margie Carlton?
Milton: Carlton is the last name.
Ken: Yeah, Carlton
Milton: I think that’s right
Ken: Yeah, that was her dad that had that land down on the river, and
Milton: It must be after they took the land
Ken: It was, I think they were cutting it off. But let me first introduce ourselves. This is, I’m Ken Roberts. Let me tell you about…this will all be on tape and we will put this for your kids to listen to. It will be on a repository at Southwestern University and it’s an oral history. So this is sort-of an oral history of the cedar business and the people that know about it. I have now probably thirty tapes. But, anyway, we’re sitting here on the third of July of 2014 with Ray Lentz. Can I call you Ray?
Milton: You can, but heh heh
Ken: Alright. And I’m Ken Roberts.
Milton: My people will understand that.
Ken: Alright. Alright. Milton Ray Lentz
Milton: Yes
Ken: And we’re going to talk about him growing up in Austin. Like I said, on every one of these tapes, you learn something. And the nice thing about it is, uh, that this tape is there forever. It will be there and I’ll try to make, if I can afford it, to make a transcript of it. But, um, the very first interview I did was two years ago with a guy named Ronnie Roberts. He’s not related to me. He is sixty four years old. He’s in prime health. He looked like he was in prime health. I called him up just the other day. We’ve been talking a lot. He had a cedar yard – his granddaddy had a cedar yard in Oak Hill – and he passed away. And so I’m going to see his sister tomorrow and I’m going to give her those tapes that we made, and that will just be blessing for his family to have that. And I’m now realizing four of the people I’ve talked to have passed away and that’s all happened in two years. So I hope I’m not a jinx (laughter). But, anyway, there’s not anybody that
Milton: You don’t have any control over that.
Ken: (laughter) There’s not anybody. I have learned something from every one I’ve talked to. Let’s just put it that way. So anything you have to say about your growing up in Austin would be very valuable. It usually takes about an hour, no more than that.
Milton: Well, it’s a, you know, it’s a different time. Austin was a city, gosh I think their population in 1940 was about fifty thousand. I think. Forty to fifty thousand. But it was a lot different growing up in Austin at that time. Kid’s didn’t have cars. There was no television. Air conditioning was…you didn’t even know about it. My family, and there was eight of us kids and Mama and Daddy, and, uh, we lived, they lived, during the Depression they found work wherever they could, you know. My Dad drove busses during World War II, taking prisoners from Austin, they’d bring ‘em in here and take ‘em out to Bergstrom airport base at that time and then over to San Antonio. He was a chauffeur for some of the convicts, I think, I’m not sure, for a while during this war and during the Depression. They lived up in the country and things, and one of the things that I have valued is a letter of my Dad up to my Mother and my older brothers from Austin, down there where was staying in Austin to work. So he’d take care of the family and get some cash money. Cash money was hard to come by for people during the Depression.
Ken: Yes
Milton: They, (cleared throat), food was not really a problem because if you lived in the country, or, really, if you lived in the city and had the right place, you could raise enough vegetables and stuff to eat
Ken: Um-hum
Milton: But, uh, they lived out … I think they lived on Lake Austin Boulevard, out there, when my older two brothers were born and he was a chauffeur for the convicts. ____ owned a lot of land, and I don’t know if – they were probably in some kind of business and I wasn’t familiar with them. But they raised a family of eight kids and my oldest brother was Lewis. Next to him was Buford, my brother, and then Rodney, and then Lorene, and Dorothy and Anne, myself, and then Ellen. It was hard times growing up with a family like that. Of course, my Dad died in 1947 from a heart attack. He was coming back home in a truck on 183 out there and he, apparently he had a stroke
Ken: hum
Milton: and I’m just looking and just guessing. None of my brothers and sisters have had any heart problems what to speak of. They, some of them have high blood pressure but they take medication
Ken: Um-hum
Milton: OK. But that kind of stuff wasn’t available in 1947
Ken: Right
Milton: But we lived out there at 822 Reinli when we first moved to town. That was my grandfather’s property. My mother inherited it in 1939 or 40 and she got three and a third acres. They built a house down there in ’39.
Ken: That was on, near Lake Austin Boulevard?
Milton: No. This was on Lake Austin. When they lived on Lake Austin Boulevard it was longer, it was longer ago than that
Ken: Oh, OK
Milton: During the Depression
Ken: OK
Milton: And they had lived out there probably, probably around ’39 then moved in to there. But right shortly thereafter they started building the house on the land, my mothers, out there. We had a well and things, on Middle Fiskville Road. Of course the government came in there and they was going to put highway 290, but they bought the land in 1940. So they moved our house up to, on Reinli Street, which is on the same land, and right now today, where the Ihop pancake house is on 290 and 35, is sitting on our back yard.
Ken: Um-hum
Milton: And I used to have calves there, and chickens
Ken: Um-hum
Milton: we had an outhouse. But, most of us kids, we were raised, things were getting somewhat modern, and a lot of people had indoor bathrooms then. But we was raised on an outhouse. And we was raised like, the same as kids were one hundred and fifty years before that
Ken: Right
Milton: we had, Mama washed, there wasn’t any washing machines during World War II. You had to get a permit, or get on the list, to buy a refrigerator, all that. But we had an ice box on the back porch. We had an outhouse and things. And some of the funny things about that, during World War II, we had, my brother, my two, my oldest brother was in the service during World War II and he was a sergeant and he was a machine gun specialist. They protected the 105 mm guns over there. They had a perimeter of fifteen that they---and, it’s a funny thing, I was talking to him when we was burying him over there, ___ and he said “you know how long, in combat, machine gun specialist’s life is?” And I said “no.” And he said “thirty seconds.” (laugh)
Ken: Hum
Milton: I said “how…whatever”, you know. But anyway, Lewis went in the service, and Rodney went in the service when he became eighteen, in ’44 I think it was. But, my mother and dad had kids from 1920 and then they had ‘22, ‘25, ‘28, ‘30, ‘33, ‘36, and then ’43.
Ken: Um-hum
Milton: Through those years. So they had to go through that Depression, and then I come along right there in the Depression too. So it wasn’t easy for them to make money, you know. And most, uh, a lot of people, if they got a second or a fifth grade education, that was, it was acceptable back then.
Ken: You bet
Milton: I think that’s all my brother’s got. Wait a second. I think my other, Rodney, went to the fifth grade, I’m not sure. And my oldest sister Lorene, she got to the eighth or ninth grade. And the other two got to the tenth grade, I think. And then myself and Ellen, we graduated from high school in Chaney.
Ken: Time’s did change
Milton: Huh?
Ken: Times did change
Milton: Yes they did. World War II changed this country tremendously. But my dad and brothers cut, they cut wood for BBQ places back then and that’s where they got into the cedar business.
Ken: I see, they were cutting oak wood then
Milton: Yes, they were cutting oak wood and things for the fire place…for the BBQ places. And they, they furnished wood for Cecil’s BBQ down on Sixth Street and I think its, I want to say Sabine, but I don’t think that’s right. It was down close to where the old 7-Up bottle company was
Ken: Alright
Milton: It was on Seventh Street, but it was close there somewhere, if you know where that was.
Ken: More or less
Milton: Us kids, when we was little, we used to go in there and just watch those bottles go around and cap. You know, that was something for us kids
Ken: I do remember seeing that, yeah
Milton: and stuff
Ken: I remember seeing that as a kid
Milton: They closed it down, you know they closed all the, all the bottling companys, Coke and everybody, and they bottle them in one place, you know, and transport them
Ken: Once they got the trucks
Milton: Yeah
Ken: That’s another thing that I think totally changed
Milton: Yeah
Ken: Changed the people, like your Dad, because you couldn’t hardly get tires or gasoline
Milton: Nope
Ken: in World War II
Milton: You had to have stamps to to get ‘em and gasoline – I pumped gas up there at Carl Lawyers’ which is on Highway 71 going to Llano, kind-of north west of Bee Caves, I guess it is now
Ken: Um-hum, Yep
Milton: where 620 and Bee Caves run in
Ken: Yes
Milton: The highway just across that dip there, the pavement was a gravel road all the way to Llano then
Ken: Right
Milton: The gravel changed when you crossed, what is it, 183, I can’t --- it comes through Marble Falls. I can’t –
Ken: What took you out there. How old were you when you did that?
Milton: Well, we was out there cutting cedar.
Ken: Oh, you were?
Milton: I was about seven, six, seven years old
Ken: So, you were helping at seven years old?
Milton: Oh, yeah, somewhat. I’ll tell you what happened there. That, my brother, my dad cut an axe handle two foot for me when I was, and I don’t know when I was six, seven, five, or what.
Ken: Um-hum
Milton: But I cut my head. I stuck it in my head. I reached up to cut some limbs and that axe come back and stuck in my head
Ken: (sigh)
Milton: And then I cut this vein right here. There’s still a scar there. I was cutting, trimming a tree up.
Ken: Uh-hum
Milton: Dick Simons.
Ken: Dick Simons. That’s right
Milton: Dick Simons cut me a little patch. He saw me cutting cedar and I looked like I was struggling, well you’d think a seven year old was struggling. Yeah. I had seen people use an axe. That’s the way they taught you anything back then. You’d watch what people did and then you’d replicate it. You know. So, I was cutting cedar and trimming it up, and I was having a hard time cutting that cedar. So old Dick Simons, he, I think back, he was really the cedar cutting – him and my next to oldest brother were some of the best that I knew, and of course I was partial to both of ‘em because they
Ken: How did they meet?
Milton: Dick
Ken: How did your father and your brothers meet the Simons? They’re a Bull Creek family, aren’t they?
Milton: Well, I don’t know really, cutting cedar.
Ken: Uh-hum
Milton: My Daddy was a cedar contractor and he’d go out and get these places and then guys come in, get guys to come in and cut it.
Ken: Uh-huh
Milton: And then have to, what they’d do during the war – the government was paying something like two dollars an acre to flat cut that. In other words, cut all the cedar. The little bushes, everything, except just a wimp like that. They cut ‘em all off. And they would have preferred if they’d of pulled ‘em up, but you couldn’t do that and make any money. But they had to flat cut it and then get the posts then for free
Ken: For nothing
Milton: Other places, if it was good, thick cedar, they had to pay twenty-five percent of it to the landowner to make Oot there during the Depression, you know, and I don’t know what it was, in ’36 I was too little, but, the post prices and things, but you know they’d make eight, ten dollars a day.
Ken: Back in the ’30s?
Milton: Yeah, In the forties.
Ken: In the forties.
Milton: Yeah. And in ’47, ’48 you know, my Dad, they’d go up there and cut all week sometimes. And they’d stay up there sometimes.
Ken: Where would they be cutting?
Milton: Oh, it’d be all over the – that land, if you know where the
Milton Lentz (ML002)
Milton: Dam is, Marshall Ford Dam is?
Ken: Yes. Right.
Milton: My Dad run that cedar yard, right up, used to be up there on Comanche Road
Ken: Yes
Milton: Right there, at Highway 620, it was a cedar yard, and he run it for Mr. Cahill, I believe
Ken: OK, I’ve heard of his name.
Milton: And we moved up there in 1939, the summer of 1939. We was already in our house, down in Austin, but they had a house on this cedar yard, and my Dad moved us up there.
Ken: Right
Milton: And we, we had to clean that house up, you know, it was just an old house. But it was home, you know, had floors in it and everything. But I got in it, I didn’t know what poison ivy was and we had to get all that – I got that stuff all over me. I was swelled up, I imagine, I wasn’t but three years old.
Ken: Uh-huh
Milton: But that’s where I remember being alive.
Ken: Right
Milton: When I was three years old. And we came in there one night and my Mother had a coat with a fuzzy collar on it and I remember getting that, because it was cold, you know about that. We came into that cedar yard up there, and I don’t know whether it was the first time, or we’d been down in Austin and stuff, but we moved up there in 193-, and then in fall we moved back, I think
Ken: Uh-huh
Milton: it didn’t pan out, or something, I don’t know what happened
Ken: Uh-huh. Did your Dad have a truck to haul cedar with?
Milton: Oh, yeah. He had an old ’37 Chevy.
Ken: Uh-huh. Flat bed?
Milton: And old flat bed. I think those were two and a half ton
Ken: OK
Milton: trucks. I’m not sure. It had a wooden bed. He built the bed
Ken: Uh-huh
Milton: but it had those slotted doors. It had little slotted door knobs and they’d slide to open the doors. It was green
Ken: Uh-huh
Milton: And we – that was our family car, and a truck too, you know. And we’d haul cedar. But, my brothers, of course, when the boys, my brother, my oldest brother and then the younger brother, he, uh, they went off to war, well Dad didn’t have the help that he had, so he started driving bus for Bowen Bus Company down there in Austin, and, uh, stuff. And then, he and I cut, he cut a little cedar. Cut a little of what we called “a jag,” you know, just a day’s worth of cedar
Ken: Uh-huh
Milton: and take it it in
Ken: get a little cash
Milton: Yeah. Cash money was hard to come by
Ken: You betcha
Milton: And the main thing that I want to make plain here is people have an opinion of a lot of cedar cutters. And they , uh, they have drank. They drank alcohol and they’ve messed up some of their lives with a lot of it. But all of them didn’t.
Ken: That’s right
Milton: A lot of ‘em were decent people and a lot of ‘em drank. My Dad drank but I never saw him falling down drunk in my life
Ken: Um-hum
Milton: You know, but
Ken: Yeah, you know, I’ve talked to enough people, so this raises and interesting point. I’ve talked to enough people that I know -- -that most of the people that I’ve talked to are good people and their families are, you know, are very good people. And, you know, you come in to something like this and you hear the stories from Emmett Shelton and all that, you know, about these bad boys, you know, back in the ’30s, and there were some. But most weren’t. So then as you start to thinking about, well, how did they handle those folks? I mean, you ever have any sense of people talking, your Dad or something, talking about “well, ‘ole __” I don’t know if it would be Dick Simons, but “ole so-and-so, he is a good worker, but, you know …
Milton: Got an alcohol problem
Ken: he’s got an alcohol problem, or he, you know, spent some time in the pen, or, you know, something like that. Have you ever had any sense of how they, how they sort-of, because they didn’t, they didn’t tattle on each other. They’re not going to turn each other in to the police.
Milton: Well, I’ll tell you what they thought about some of that. They was scared to and they was scared not to. They had an everyday battle over that, you know. But these people were neighbors and stuff like that, and didn’t pay attention to that stuff.
Ken: Because it might get you in trouble?
Milton: That’s right. If it didn’t get you in trouble with the law it would get you in trouble with them. And they did honor that thing. Some of them were fighters
Ken: Um-hum
Milton: There is no doubt about it. You know
Ken: So, there was a code, sort of a code of honor
Milton: Certainly. There was a lot of liquor run out of Bull Creek
Ken: Oh, you betcha. Dick Simons sold it at the capital
Milton: Yeah
Ken: I heard that from, from one of ‘em. He’d have a load of charcoal, and he’d have that liquor under there, and he’d go right to the capital doors. Where they made deliveries.
Milton: Yeah. I didn’t know that, but I do know that Dick didn’t drink.
Ken: Uh-huh
Milton: He drank, but he lost the place he owned up there and he quit
Ken: Did he lose that in a game? I heard that story
Milton: gambling game
Ken: that he lost his place in a gambling game.
Milton: That’s right. But he’d been drinking (phone ringing)
Ken: That will beat you
Milton: That’s what I heard.
Ken: Uh-huh
Milton: That’s hearsay
Ken: And some of the Boatright boys got in trouble with running liquor.
Milton: and some of them went to the pen for a short period of time
Ken: Um-hum
Milton: Six, seven months, you know, back then
Ken: Right
Milton: But that was kind-of, you know, there’s places up there that, not right there at Bull Creek, but, uh, I was going to tell you about that place and I got, got on that cedar yard my Dad run. But, uh, Hughes, he used to own, uh, pretty much, the property where that dam is built down there. Hughes’owned that, and I believe there was
Ken: Creates Lake Austin?
Milton: Thom Hughes and his brother, were Fritz Hughes.
Ken: Is that were Lake Austin was created, by that dam?
Milton: No, not Lake Austin. Lake Travis.
Ken: Mansfield Dam then.
Milton: Marshall Ford Dam
Ken: Marshall Ford Dam. Right, uh-huh, got it.
Milton: And the Marshalls lived over at the end of 620 right there at Bee Creek. And I met one of those sons of him. He’s a good friend of mine. He’s a good friend of mine.
Ken: Mr. Marshall?
Milton: Yeah, Marshall. Dale Marshall. He was, I took him back over to Sam Houston one night, when I, I was about sixteen years old. Fifteen, sixteen. And he, he decided, he came in as Assistant Manager. I used to work for Superior Dairies on First and Red River, at that, at that Lockhart Store
Ken: Um-hum
Milton: I took him, he was Assistant Manger, and he I ain’t going back in the service. So I, he came over to see me one time and I took him back over there. But he, they were fighters. You know, Ray, nobody messed with them.
Ken: Uh-huh
Milton: Now old Dale, he was, you know, he was, there is just some people that’s designed to fight. They know how to fight when they come out of the womb, you know. And others, you know, have to be trained. And, uh, all those people, you didn’t mess with ‘em up there. You didn’t mess with those Simons, or, now Clarence, and, uh, Clarence was a big guy. He dated my sister for a long time and I never understood why they didn’t get married. But, uh
Ken: Huh
Milton: But, uh, they went together for years. (phone ringing)
Ken: You know, one of the reasons they could have been such good fighters is that’s just hard work.
Milton: Oh, yeah. Well they
Ken: If you’re
Milton: If you’re cutting cedar
Ken: All day long
Milton: It’s hard work running cattle, and building fence
Ken: Yeah
Milton: Stuff that they, when they’re tired and they’re aggravated and stuff, you just didn’t mess with them.
Ken: Right
Milton: You know. My Dad was the mildest man I’ve ever know. You know. My Dad, you had to really do something to.
Ken: Uh-huh
Milton: He whipped me one time in my short life. I was ten and a half when he died. But he was just. Now my mother, she was, she protected her kids, oh man, she was a war horse (laughing) about her kids, you know.
Ken: Yeah. I was talking to this lady, uh, one of the names out there is Patterson, out there by where you’re talking about Patterson Road, it’s up near corner of Cuernavaca and Comanche and all that. And she was a Patterson. And she married, she married her school bus driver. There was a little school house out on Bee Cave Road and, anyway, she was just real, real sweet and stuff, and I asked her, ‘cause she was talking about they’d go into Austin every so often, not very often
Milton: Yeah
Ken: you know, they’d take a wagon, you know, one thing or another, and I asked her “did you ever feel, you know, inferior?” I was thinking that maybe that’s why they were fighting, ‘cause they were feeling like people were putting them down, like, they used to call ‘em hillbillies, you know, back in the
Milton: Oh, yeah, there was a lot of names
Ken: Oh, yeah
Milton: Hayseeds
Ken: Uh-huh
Milton: They used that cedar cutter stuff. I’ve been run down, you know
Ken: Uh-huh
Milton: School kids. They don’t do it now, when I go to the reunions.
Ken: Well, they said that, she said that
Milton: But I deserved some of it, you know
Ken: Well, I, you know, I’m – just a lack of understanding. It’s like it’s just two different cultures, uh, and she said “you know”, she said “that never bothered me. It bothered my sisters, though.”
Milton: Yes. It didn’t bother my sisters. They never had any problems with it. But I, uh, me and my next door neighbor had a big fight over it and his mother got mad at him. You know, and I probably deserved it. But I beat the hound out of him
Ken: Yeah
Milton: And my next oldest brother, that was, my Dad was very dark. Dark complected. Black hair and black eyes
Ken: Um-hum
Milton: All my brothers and I, I was telling Jerry that, I don’t remember…my oldest brother had blue eyes, and I think Buford had blue eyes, Rodney had green, Lorene had green, Dorothy had green, Anne had blue. I had brown and my little sister had black eyes like Dad, and things. But, the reason I was telling you that my Dad was dark, they thought he was a Mexican. Mama said, I want to comment, I never thought anything about it growing up a kid, but we, uh, we was on somebody’s ranch, my Dad was cutting cedar up there, and back then all those creeks up there. And we was north, north of Bee Creek, if you where Bee Creek, where it comes into Pedernales
Ken: Yes
Milton: Up there, and we forded that Bee Creek down there. You had to ford it back then and I could get close, but it is so different nowadays. I can’t find that place. I was just a mean ‘lil old kid, you know. My family spoiled me. My Daddy bought me Milky Ways. You’d give a nickel for them back there and stuff, you know. But back then there were some people come across that Bee Creek and they didn’t know how to drive, ford a creek that way, and they drownded the car out and they got up on the other side and it quit. And Daddy and I was going in there, and, uh, so they were parked along there. Daddy stopped and he fixed their car for them and they offered him five dollars and he said “no”. He wouldn’t take money for helping somebody out.
Ken: Um-hum
Milton: That’s just the way country people were. And they didn’t do that.
Ken: Sure
Milton: That’s just, but, uh, there is a story and I wasn’t part of it, and I don’t remember it, but my brother was telling about it. We went in to, all these kids, eight kids and Mama and Daddy, I can’t imagine, I know imagine Lewis wasn’t there, I don’t know. But it’s almost like they had two different families, you know
Ken: Right. With the age difference, Yeah.
Milton: But people asked us to leave because, you know, I guess we were tattered and barefooted and stuff, so people asked us to leave.
Ken: In a store in Austin?
Milton: In a hamburger place. I think it was out there on 183. Now, I’m not sure.
Ken: Huh
Milton: But we used to go into Lammes Candy down there
Ken: Yes
Milton: My Dad was working a hoist down there in Austin at the capital building at that time and my, we walked all the way to town. Six miles
Ken: Isn’t that something
Milton: And went down there and ate ice cream, got some of that sherbert at that Lammes Candy thing. I don’t – it was probably gone by the time you came along
Ken: It’s still there.
Milton: Is it?
Ken: Lammes Candies is still there on Airport Boulevard.
Milton: Yeah. No, it was on Congress.
Ken: Oh, it was on Congress then?
Milton: Yeah, Congress
Ken: You’re right. I do remember it now.
Milton:Congress Avenue. About Eleventh, Tenth or Eleventh Street.
Ken: Um-hum
Milton: Anyway, we walked to town from all the way out there on 290 and
Ken: That’s something. Yeah
Milton: Then, uh, but Dad fixed that car, but that, we was on those cedar, cutting cedar, this was probably ’44, ’43. My brothers were gone. And my other brother was married and he couldn’t get into the military because he had asthma and they wouldn’t take him.
Ken: Um-hum
Milton: And he was living down at Leakey at that time, cedar chopping
Ken: How did he, I know this is… I don’t want to get you off track, but, that’s interesting. How did he hear about the cedar in Leakey? Is that, that turned out to be
Milton: Well they went down there and looked at it and it was good cedar
Ken: Uh-huh
Milton: They knew. I’d show you the difference between good cedar and bad cedar.
Ken: Yeah
Milton: You may know
Ken: I do
Milton: People do. And, but it’s, you could cut a lot of cedar, Buford could cut 200 posts a day of good cedar
Ken: Could he really? That’s amazing
Milton: And, uh, I used. The first job I ever had, paying job, was helping him load the truck up at the cedar yard up at Cedar Park up there. There used to be a cedar yard and that’s where I met Harve Simons.
Ken: That’s where, Dick Boatright had a yard there
Milton: Yeah, Boatrights had a yard
Ken: And I think there were several yards there, actually
Milton: Yeah, yeah
Ken: He heard about that Leakey – because some of the Boatrights went up to Leaky
Milton: Well I don’t know who all went down there with him, but
Milton Lentz (ML003)
Milton: Like I say, Dick, and, uh, Buford and them. But Buford, you asked me how he met Dick. I don’t know where this started, but I think Dad knew him. But, uh, my brother lived with Dick a long time. Worked for Dick cutting cedar until he could buy his own truck.
Ken: Buford did?
Milton: Yeah. And, uh, things. But, uh
Ken: I wonder what a truck cost back then. Do you, they wouldn’t be new trucks, I could imagine
Milton: Oh, no, he had an old truck that my Dad was killed in it, it was a ’34 Ford. And he bought it from, gosh, I haven’t looked at those old papers in years.
Ken: Your Dad was killed? That’s when he was killed in his truck?
Milton: Killed in that truck – ran over him. He hit a cedar tree, of all things, took the bark and things off, we walked up there and looked at it, and he’d come across there and there was a, back then they had a rock curb about that high. It wasn’t built, it was just before they cut it down for making ditches along side that, right where that 183 goes down that hill into Austin, Burnet Road, going to Jollyville
Ken: Yeah
Milton: Up there. Now, you can’t hardly go that way unless you
Ken: Right. I do know where it is. Yep.
Milton: He jumped that curb and the door came open and he fell out and the dual wheels ran over him.
Ken: Hum
Milton: They say he had a heart attack
Ken: Hum. Do they, did they do an autopsy and stuff like that?
Milton: I don’t think so. I don’t know
Ken: Yeah
Milton: I was, you know, I wasn’t
Ken: You were ten years old?
Milton: I was, yeah, I was ten, it was in March the 29th, the 29th or 30th, of 1947. The year before, 1946, my grandfather died, ’47 my dad died and my grandma Lentz, ’48, grandma died. But, that’s what is on the death certificate.
Ken: So you and your younger sister, then, they had to be supported. Y’all had to be supported.
Milton: My oldest brother sent us money from San Antonio, over there
Ken: Um-hum
Milton: And he sent his pay home from war, and he furnished a lot of the money until we got up, but I went to work at twelve years old
Ken: Um-hum
Milton: twelve, thirteen, washing dishes. Families had a way of putting you to work (laugh)
Ken: Oh, yeah.
Milton: But, it’s, Buford, he had an interesting story. Daddy got him a job for Kerrville Bus Company in East Austin, over there. He’s a worker. You know, I don’t think anybody could look at my family and say there is a slacker
Ken: Uh-huh. Well, two hundred posts a day, that’s a
Milton: Unless it’d be, and I learned better and something, I don’t know. But I can work. I just, you know, I think you ought to work smart and everything.
Ken: How long did Buford, how long did he cut posts?
Milton: Until 1951, and then he moved to San Antonio and he went to work with CMC Concrete Company. My oldest brother was superintendant there
Ken: OK
Milton: and he took care of the trucks, and the hauling. They was, the City of San Antonio was doing a lot of work, and my oldest brother was running a team of Mexicans doing, he spoke Spanish, so, he, run them to manufacture that concrete pipe that they was using in storm drains and all that on the side. They ended up making some eighty-two inch, which is gigantic, and Buford done the hauling and unloading the trucks, and things, out there. He had drivers, but, you know, sometimes guys don’t know how to unload that stuff.
Ken: How old was he when he started doing that?
Milton: Well, he was born in ’22, so that’s ’51, so that’s
Ken: OK
Milton: it would be thirty years old
Ken: So he had some good years cutting cedar
Milton: Oh, he did
Ken: Now, I’ve heard a lot of folks that just say that they would rather cut cedar. They can make as much money, or more, cutting cedar, than they could of doing a wage job, working on the roads, in a quarry, or something like that
Milton: Yeah, they can when you’re young.
Ken: Uh-huh
Milton: When you’re up to about thirty five, but, uh, your physical thing takes its toll. That’s what was wrong with my Dad. My Dad, he worked himself to death fixing places up for everybody else because they was tenant farmers, ranchers, and I don’t know where --- do you know where the, do you know where the Lucky Hit Ranch is? I think it’s still down there
Ken: Bagdad Road?
Milton: Down there in Leander
Ken: Yeah. I know. I mean, I live a mile from there as the crow flies.
Milton: My dead mother and dad run that place.
Ken: Is that right!
Milton: yeah
Ken: Do you know the story on that place?
Milton: No, I don’t.
Ken: That lady, she, she inherited that place from her husband that she had just married for a few years. This is a recent story. I’m thinking we’re talking about the same place. Right on Bagdad Road and
Milton: Big old two story house. If I had
Ken: There is, yeah. It probably was a bigger place back then. Oh, I know, I know what you’re talking about. Lucky Hit Road. I know exactly what you’re. Our place backs up on Lucky Hit Road.
Milton: My Dad, probably, about, probably your place, probably used to belong to that Ranch.
Ken: It was not. It was actually Mr. Whitt. David Whitt, Bernard Whitt owned our place and another place, and the Manards were right in there too
Milton: Yeah
Ken: But, yeah, we back right up on Lucky Hit Road. So, I’m sure that’s where he was. They turned that into a subdivision in the ‘70s.
Milton: Did they? Well, Anyway, that’s a
Ken: Isn’t that something.
Milton: I’ve got a picture of my three brothers somewhere, sitting on the front porch of that house. It was a two story house, and then later on things got bad. You know, families get in trouble, in crisis, during the Depression, and my grandparents moved over there with my mother and dad, and then my aunt and my cousins moved in, up here. They live at Killeen now.
Ken: Um-hum
Milton: You know, I think. It’s just back and forth I expect. They stayed six years down there before the built the dam, on that farm down in Lake Travis. You still could see the, it’s down so bad now that you can, if you wander around there, you could probably find out where the old house was.
Ken: Isn’t that something.
Milton: There still would be remnants from it.
Ken: Yeah. But, you know, I was thinking, talking about, asking about Buford, because he took this job, you know, that your brother gave him, you know, and some of those folks, they would rather have the independence, they got the independence
Milton: Oh, he would’ve, he would’ve. But that’s what happened is he almost cut his foot off.
Ken: Oh
Milton: And he, uh, there used to be a station on 620 and 71, right there at Bee Caves.
Ken: Yes
Milton: And he was cutting cedar way on up there. There used to be some brothers, and I can’t remember their name, had a ranch and we was cutting cedar on it, and he was cutting too, and he almost cut his foot off and he wrapped a towel around it and headed into Austin – he knew he was going to need some help. And he stopped there at that station and those people took pity on him and drove him into Austin. But he drove his self to that.
Ken: That is a common story.
Milton: And, but, it’s a, you know, and that’s the reason, what I didn’t tell you, when I cut myself in the head and neck, I never saw that axe any more. They took it away from me (laugh)
Ken: (laugh)
Milton: So I guess that saved me from getting on the cedar hook
Ken: Uh-huh
Milton: Because you could, individually, make more money, than somebody wanted to pay you.
Ken: Um-hum
Milton: You know, when you think about it, when you think about a guy starting a business, you know, whether you’ve ever been in business, you’ve got to make a lot of money to pay for an employee. Even back then. If you was paying a dollar an hour, you had to pay, you had to pay seven and a half percent Social Security, you know, and you had to have a lot of sales, or whatever you was doing, or marketing stuff, you had to have a lot of sales to pay for an employee. I had a friend of mine up there, and this has been recent, he was in the eighties, 1980 or so, he said he had to farm four hundred acres, in addition, to pay for one employee.
Ken: Um!
Milton: Get him to come in and combine for him, you know they hire combines
Ken: Umh-hum, Um-hum
Milton: People have fussed about the wet backs, you know, for years, and stuff like that. But they’ve used ‘em, yeah. Everybody gets taken advantage of. Eveybody gets a dose of that.
Ken: Um-hum
Milton: Cutting cedar, all you had was an old truck. You didn’t want to buy a new one. The biggest thing back then, in the War years, was tires. They was made out of rayon, and, uh, you know, they just, you’d run over a staub, and it’d be hard not to run over a staub
Ken: Sure
Milton: ‘cause you had to make roads, sometimes, to get into the place
Ken: Right
Milton: You had to cut your way in (laugh)
Ken: (laugh) I heard that!
Milton: and, but I sat there, with Buford’s wife, he married her, she married Lackeys and they cut cedar for Buford for a while, and his Dad was, and he used to, he used to, he didn’t have any teeth, they just gummed food. It always amazed me as a kid, you know, just looking
Ken: Buford’s wife was a Lackey?
Milton: I always observed
Ken: She was a Lackey?
Milton: Yes. His first wife
Ken: Because the Lackeys -- That’s a Liberty Hill name.
Milton: Yeah. They lived over there, Lackey, and I don’t know a lot about them, but she was a nice lady. I always knew her as kid. They used to go up around Bull Creek, her and my sisters, and they’d dive off those rocks and stuff up in there. Somewhere in my family is old pictures of that. You wouldn’t know where it’s at today, hardly.
Ken: Beautiful country
Milton: The memories I’ve got of that, in here, I can’t reproduce. And people tell me, they say “why in the world did you move away from that beautiful….” I said “you don’t know half of it. It’s not pretty to me now. It’s ugly if all them old houses out there in Highland Acres. That used to be a …
BREAK
Milton: He’d roll A cigarette. Bull Durham.
Ken: Uh-huh
Milton: and he’d roll it, _____ it, smoke a cigarette. He couldn’t roll it over about an inch long, you know, then twist the end of it
Ken: Uh-huh
Milton: Stick it in your mouth. And I asked him, I said, and he knew what he was doing. He was steering with his feet, his knees and rolling that cigarette and then he’d put it in his mouth and he swapped it back and forth. I was just a little old kid, just watching, loved watching. I wasn’t missing anything. That’s the way a young kid, what I’ve figured out, is kids thought that was a way to get to be an adult. So you couold smoke and do all that stuff that adults do
Ken: Um-hum
Milton: and I asked him something and he said “son, don’t ever smoke.” Just like that.
Ken: Um-hum
Milton: And I never did.
Ken: Good!
Milton: That’s how much -- I loved my Dad, and I didn’t realize how much, when I lost him, what was wrong with me through the teenaged years. Because I wasn’t a, I wasn’t a good person to be around. My wife says I’m not now sometimes. (laugh)
Ken: (laugh)
Milton: But, it was because I lost my dad
Ken: Uh-huh
Milton: I was still mourning that, and they didn’t have anybody to come in and coach you through that, counselors and stuff like that to get kids through it. And I carried it all inside. You were just left to carry it all inside.
Ken: Absolutely
Milton: And I carried it from the time I was ten and a half to the time I was sixty years old. And I didn’t realize that. And I knew what was wrong with me, ‘cause I changed after I moved to Dallas.
Ken: Um-hum
Milton: I was pretty much an introvert. And if I pointed to any one thing that changed me it was, I learned to fly an airplane.
Ken: Huh!
Milton: And
Ken: It gave you a different view of the world
Milton: It opened up, It opened up and you have to do some things. You know, sometimes you don’t feel worthy. You know, you don’t. And, because I came from, and kids did, they put a, a pretty much deal on you, you know, if you were poor, you know.
Ken: Yeah,
Milton: And I deserved it, don’t get me wrong. I didn’t know anything about deodorant and stuff like that (laugh)
Ken: Right
Milton: I didn’t know. I thought, I had Brogan shoes. I don’t think I got out of them until I was, ‘til after Daddy died. That’s all I had was a dollar ninety-eight Brogan shoes, you know, people make fun of you.
Ken: Uh-huh
Milton: Shoot, I was lucky to have shoes!
Ken: Yeah!
Milton: (laugh) But it’s just, you know, stuff like that, and, and, uh
Ken: Did yall have a place to take a bath?
Milton: When we grew up? Not in the house. We had a #3 wash tub and we had a wood stove, we had a wood stove, an outhouse, uh, we had, we finally got electric lights, the kind that dropped down from the ceiling
and water in 1941 when we moved up there to the, the State moved our house up there, and bought that land
Ken: Uh-huh
Milton: And Daddy put water in, and, we had a well, down there when we first moved out there, we had an outhouse, and we didn’t have any lights. Daddy wired the house for lights when we got up there.
Ken: Uh-huh
Milton: and got electricity, and water, but we didn’t have a bathroom in the house until 1953. My brother-in-law put a septic tank in for us and, and tub, and things
Ken: Yeah. You know I think a lot of those kids in Eanes, they didn’t have any, they didn’t have running water, you know, that lived out in West Lake and stuff like that.
Milton: They lived by creeks.
Ken: They lived by creeks.
Milton: That’s the reason why I said we lived …
Milton Lentz (ML004)
Milton: My mother still ironed with an old iron
Ken: Um-hum. Charcoal?
Milton: No. A heating iron – a wood stove. You’d put an old cast iron
Ken: Oh, yes, Uh-huh
Milton: iron there, and she’d iron cloths with that. Her and my sisters
Ken: Yeah
Milton: All during the War, and we, then when we finally got electricity, uh, she ironed clothes for people. She crocheted. She made quilts. I could, uh …
Ken: But you know, it’s no wonder those, so, when they put that Eanes School in that old rock school out there, you know, where West Lake Drive hits, uh, Bee Cave Road
Milton: Yeah
Ken: They put in a shower. This was, this was pretty late, right in the ’40s, at least, and they put in a shower. Then the kids started coming to school. Because this is the only way they could ever take a bath.
Milton: Yeah
Ken: And, uh, they enjoyed it.
Milton: Yeah
Ken: You know, if you think about where their reputation came from, there is – I cut a lot of cedar in my life. Not with an axe. With a chainsaw – but there is nothing dirtier and hotter, you know, and you’ve got that cedar bark all over you and
Milton: If you had an axe
Ken: If you had to carry a post, well then you’re gonna have wax all over you and everything is going to stick to it.
Milton: Yeah
Ken: and if you can’t bathe … I thank the Lord every day.
Milton: Well, you perspire
Ken: I know. When I work on the ranch, I don’t ever take a shower without saying a “Thank you for this shower!”
Milton: You know, it’s, people really don’t appreciate this world we’re in.
Ken: I know
Milton: You really don’t appreciate the body that God gave you because it’s a miraculous thing until you start losing it. I wear hearing aids and I couldn’t hear you if is wasn’t for these hearing aids
Ken: Uh-huh
Milton: But for many years I didn’t need ‘em. But your eyes, and your body healing things yourself, people lived back then, if it wasn’t for blueing for wasps stings, uh
Both together: kerosene
Milton: for cuts
Ken: Yep
Milton: And stings, and stuff like that I would have never got to eighteen. I saw my first doctor when I got, when I was nineteen years old and I got a physical to get married.
Ken: Uh-huh, yeah. So,
Milton: And, and think
Ken: It’s little wonder – that’s such a different life
Milton: It is
Ken: from living in the city
Milton: You can’t appreciate it
Ken: You can’t. And that’s why, I guess, these kids would call ‘em names and stuff like that. Because they
Milton: Oh, yeah, well, you smelled. And we, me and this other kid, when we was about the fifth grade, I had to grow through that. I had to get used to it, you know. And I thought, you know, fighting – I saw all these old movies, Hopalong Cassidy, and I saw him jump up and hit him, looked like he was hitting him, and it didn’t hurt him or anything and I thought that’s the way it was until I got hit a few times (laugh)
Ken: (laugh) It does hurt, doesn’t it?
Milton: But I got a friend. We started grade school out here, and it’s funny. We get to talking some times. But, uh, they’d all run you down, but they’re not that way now. People are not that way.
Ken: Unt-uh
Milton: But it was because the friction, you know. I’d hump up with it, you know, and you’d take it, and a lot of time people were kidding, and you didn’t know how to take kidding. You didn’t kid
Ken: I know
Milton: You didn’t kid with Dick Simons and Harve Simons and those guys, and the Boatrights
Ken: Uh-huh
Milton: You didn’t go up and say “well, you’re losing all your hair”, or “you’re doing all this”
Ken: Uh-huh
Milton: a little kidding, you know.
Ken: Right
Milton: And they just – this guy said, told me one time, he lost all his hair, and I never paid any attention to that, but he said “you know, God really must love me.” And I said “why is that?” And he said “loved my face.” I said “why, why is that?” And he said “well, he give me such a long one.” (laugh)
Ken: (laugh)
Milton: And it’s just – you don’t… They drank and they cut cedar and it was a hard old life. Keeping the ... I’ve seen my brother, on Sundays, afternoons when he fixed all these old cars and it’s hard to keep- he lived up there, he cut, he cut land on, if you go across the dam up at Marshall Ford,
Ken: Um-hum
Milton: He lived right around there. And right around there was an ‘ol boy who had a ranch and he cut cedar right there and hauled it in. But he lived just a little ways in a little old house, you know, and, uh, he and his wife and Don was born there, and these boys, you know. And he lived there and made a good living up until he was thirty years old. But he had always had that old truck. He wouldn’t take a brand new truck.
Ken: Into the cedar breaks
Milton: There was no trucks, back then. Dick drove a Diamond T.
Ken: Um-hum
Milton: An old Diamond T truck, and I remember that, ever since, you know, I met him. And my brothers had all kinds of trucks, uh, Daddy had that ’37 Chevy, but, of course, he wasn’t driving it. He was driving my brother’s truck when he got killed. Anyway, it’s so much a different world. The food. I didn’t know there was anything but round steak on a cow until I was thirty years old.
Ken: (laugh) Yeah
Milton: And it’s just, it – people didn’t know. You knew a lot. I’m amazed at how much I know – I remember from being a kid. And I can tell my brothers and sisters things. I know that talking in the family, you can get stories straight, but this, even you didn’t even know anything about it
Ken: You know, I think people’s attitudes are changing. I, for instance, I listen to country music and I really didn’t listen to that much country music when I was a kid. I was more into Elvis Presley and, you know, people up, but I think there is a rediscovery of your roots, I think, going on in Texas. And, I think people are proud. They’re going to be proud. That’s my impression of having, of their daddy or themselves, having raised a family with a cedar axe.
Milton: Well
Ken: That’s a pretty amazing thing to do.
Milton: They worked all different kinds - my Dad worked all different kinds
Ken: Sure
Milton: he was bus driver, you know, he’d farm and ranch if he’d get a good deal, but, anyway, he didn’t, the guy wanted to change to somebody else, or if he wasn’t making any money, or his tax thing – farming has always been a tax write off
Ken: Yeah, and the ‘50s were tough on farmers
Milton: And if you didn’t make the money to, to support a farm, you couldn’t own one.
Ken: Right, you had to have a big one
Milton: So, you had to be able to write it off, and things, and kind-of save some of your money and create equity
Ken: Yeah
Milton: But, it’s uh, they, those people inherited a lot of that land from their daddies that had come in and settled it, and they got it from grandfathers, a lot of that. The Hughes used to own land, Leonard East, you’ve heard the name Leonard East, he used to have a chicken killing factory there on Fifth and Red River.
Ken: Um-hum
Milton: I worked right next door into a garage, I worked for Duke’s garage right there
Ken: Um-hum, there’s a name
Milton: that I, for a summer, I think, while I took summer school up at Austin High, and when I think about the things that I’ve done in my life. I’ve got a deal, my wife did it for me, and, those were all business. This is not when I was going to school. I always worked. I worked until eleven o’clock at night and go to school the next day and I wonder why my grades weren’t that good. And I wasn’t never surprised. In fact, I run into my second grade school teacher, when I worked for the power station down there. She married a guy that retired from the Army, and then uh…she was an old maid school teacher, I thought. She married him late, you know. She said, “well Milton, I thought you”, you know I’d had this guy named Bill Allen, that we run around together. We sold stuff at the ball games and things when we were in grade school. We’d ride our bicycles down there and sell things, and she said “I was so worried about you and Bill and everything.” But I, dumb me I didn’t know --- I said “what were you worried about us for?” We were so skinny – we were so skinny that, you know, you are raised on beans and corn bread and working and busy like a kid is, you don’t get fat.
Ken: Uh-huh
Milton: And I look at these kids now up here at Temple School, and I look, people coming up, and I knew this thing was coming with them. These kids don’t have P.E., they are not forced to take P.E., they are not doing this, not doing that, and they’re riding a bus to school. I never rode a school bus in my life. Not in my lifetime. I paid to ride the transit bus when I went down to UJH, when I graduated from Reagan down at UJH. I rode that a few times, but then I got a car when I was fourteen.
Ken: Uh-huh
Milton: And that’s kind-of an interesting thing. But that hasn’t got anything to do with the cedar.
Ken: (chuckle)
Milton: But it’s just, uh, I
Ken: It is a different world.
Milton: Yeah, it is
Ken: and that’s …
Milton: And the guys that, you know, if you didn’t have a job, you know, guys thought, there was a lot of guys that thought they wanted to cut cedar to make some money.
Ken: Really?
Milton: They were out of work, you know. Couldn’t get jobs. So they thought they’d want to cut it. But when they saw really how hard it is
Ken: Uh-huh
Milton: You had to – it cost you, you had an old truck, you had to have an axe, and you had to have a file to keep that axe sharp.
Ken: Uh-huh
Milton: and some of ‘em liked gloves. My family never used gloves. I can’t work with gloves on.
Ken: Huh
Milton: I, even when I built fence, you know, handling barbed wire? I just got over a scratch right there
Ken: Yeah, I hate barbed wire
Milton: I went up there the other day and I just leased my place out. And it’s, and I got into it. Every time you get across it you cut it.
Ken: Absolutely. I get two feet from barbed wire and I’ve got scratches on me. I hate it.
Milton: Yeah, and it’s Dick, but, they cut all those posts down for me and I trimmed ‘em up, you know, but he just, he just went through it, whop, whop, and downed about twenty of ‘em just, I mean
Ken: Just two or three licks
Milton: He had big ‘ol long arms
Ken: Uh-huh
Milton: and, man, he could take that axe and, he and my brother, were the most magnificent thing I could see with an axe. You’d be … if I could put them back together at the age they were when I saw them, you would be amazed. It looked like a bulldozer going, pushing things out, with them cutting side by side.
Ken: And how old were they when they were doing that?
Milton: Oh, he was twenty five, twenty eight years old, and Dick was probably fifty.
Ken: Oh, fifty, Uh-huh
Milton: I would bet. Maybe forty
Ken: Uh-huh
Milton: Well, Clarence and Dexter, and they had a girl, his wife was named Edith. Edith Simons, and Dick and, Dexter was the oldest and there was a girl, and she died here a while back. My brother was telling me. And then there was Clarence. Clarence played football, but he was a big guy, man.
Ken: Really?
Milton: I don’t know why
Ken: You know, he was tiny when he was born. He was born prematurely. Did you hear that story?
Milton: I hadn’t heard that.
Ken: Erlene told me this story, and, uh, his mother’s sister was killed by a Pierce, her husband. There in the Bull Creek area, I think it was. Berry Pierce. And, that sent his mother, grieved, and had Clarence prematurely. Apparently he was this tiny little thing and they put him in a drawer, the top drawer of the dresser drawers.
Milton: I heard such thing (laugh)
Ken: (laugh) That’s why they called him Baby Clarence,
Milton: Baby Lee
Ken: Baby Lee, yeah
Milton: I don’t know, I think Dick’s name might have been Lee. Lee – they called him Dick, you know. They always give everybody nicknames
Ken: Everybody had nicknames – I know. I think there was an Eva, maybe she was a Simpson, Eva Simpson.
Milton: Yeah
Ken: And she was, she was killed by her husband for no good reason, apparently.
Milton: Well, there was a lot of people that killed. I know those, there are some brothers that used to live up there on Bee Caves Road, up on Bull Creek Road, well it’s 2222, I guess, goes through there, that cut-off that goes back over to the Park that’s on Lake Austin.
Ken: Yeah,
Milton: They lived right on the
Ken: Anderson, Anderson Mill?
Milton: I’m trying to think of it, Burt, his name was Burt, I can’t think of their last name. But his son, his Dad, Burt was the one we knew, and, uh, his brother, I think, almost beat his Dad to death with an axe handle up there. They got in a fight. I never saw, I asked my brothers, I said “did y’all ever fight when you was a kid?” He said no, they never did. That’s my Dad’s calmness coming through
Ken: Um-hum
Milton: They didn’t even fight with each other. Now they’ve had to fight at schools, and things, when they went to school. They used to call my oldest brother “Ears”, they said his ears stood way out, so they called him “Ears”
Ken: Oh, they were bad back then
Milton: messing with him
Ken: Yeah, all the time
Milton: They’d just, but, uh, the cedar, uh, they cut cedar up there in Spicewood Springs. My brother lived up there a while. He cut cedar longer, it ended up, than my other two brothers.
Ken: Um-hum
Milton: When my oldest brother went in the Army, after he came back he was, uh, they, they cut cedar for a little while and hauled it
Ken: Did Buford go in the Army?
Milton: No, he was, had asthma, and they wouldn’t take him
Ken: Oh, right. OK
Milton: They wouldn’t take him. And, of course, his education wasn’t, he didn’t, uh
Ken: Did they require you to have a
Milton: Well, he couldn’t read and write
Ken: They required you to be literate?
Milton: And he learned, his wife taught him. I don’t I’ve never figured that out. I didn’t know he couldn’t read and write until he was, uh, sixty five years old. He’s ninety-one now. I didn’t know that. Now that’s, if my mother had been alive I’d of asked her. I don’t know what happened to him. He’s not dumb. He’s a smart person
Ken: Uh-huh
Milton:
Milton Lentz (ML005)
Ken: Didn’t go to school
Milton: Well, he told me, he said, “well, we’d go to school and every time they’d move and we’d go to a different school.”
Ken: Right.
Milton: And military kids go through that, but not quite as bad as Mama because they’d live here a couple years, this that and another
Ken: Right
Milton: and, I guess my Dad felt like if he had to add and do this, but I don’t know what happened. My Dad used to read, he could read.
Ken: Uh-huh
Milton: He, my other brother told him Daddy used to read to him, you know, on nights and times when he was a kid
Ken: Uh-huh, Uh-huh
Milton: and my mother could read. And my mother, uh, she’d write letters and I never saw anything wrong with the English and I’m not an English major, you know, I
Ken: Yeah
Milton: But it’s just, uh, but he cut cedar up there all over that place and they used to have a ferry up there on Lake Travis and I don’t remember where that was. I’ve ridden it with a load of cedar posts and I’ve been with him in that old truck when it gets so hot in the summer. I bet it’s a hundred and ten out there in the cedar breaks.
Ken: Yeah, there’s no place hotter
Milton: And the cedar starts out gassing. It gets so hot, and if you struck a match it would go up, just like that. In fact, I was trying to work for the volunteer fire department when I was running for commissioner, and he said “well, what would you do?” and I said “I’d cut all that cedar out of there because it’s too thick. Those people had it in their yards, and I said I’d go out there, and around the oaks, because they afraid of fires because they had too much fuel on the ground. You know, twigs, nature, and I said I’d put a ring around those trees and I’d get me a pump out of that lake and then, if a fire started around there, a grass fire, I’d fill those rings around with water. But, anyway, that’s, a, he cut cedar all over. When we was at that cedar yard up there on 620, we had taken, uh, they cut cedar off that Hughes places, and Leonard East bought it later on from the Hughes, Thom and Fritz Hughes, they bought it from them. And, you know, owners of land change
Ken: Um-hum
Milton: And so, he didn’t allow them to cut any cedar for a while. And then they started cutting cedar back, but. It made a living for a lot of people and a lot of, a lot of people run liquor and everything else back then. It was because of the Depression and no money, And demand. And corn, corn, you couldn’t get any money for corn, you know. So they’d make that corn liquor and sell it in town and make money. I didn’t know about that thing of Dick on the capital grounds there, but let’s face it, most of the guys that was arresting for things, they drank too.
Ken: I know. All the congressman did, senators
Milton: Yeah, and
Ken: Yeah
Milton: It’s – people get carried away with that and some families, I think what the biggest thing that aggrevated my family with others, and they tied a name to it, thieves, and stuff, stealing and stuff like that, more so than anything else.
Ken: It aggrevated them, other people stealing, being a thief
Milton: Yeah. You wouldn’t your kids, wouldn’t want us to be friends or something with a bunch of kids and a bunch of thieves.
Ken: Right. That’s what Emmet Shelton had a really interesting quote. You know, he’s Mr. West Lake. He made these tapes. He called ‘the Cedar Choppers’, and he said, he said, they were honest people. I’m more-or-less paraphrasing. They were honest people. Now, they did a lot of fighting and mayhem and stuff like that, but they wouldn’t steal. They were honest people. So that’s what the meaning of honesty was.
Milton: Yeah
Ken: Do you remember Petmekey’s store on Congress Avenue?
Milton: Who?
Ken: Petmekey’s .
Milton: Yeah
Ken: My Daddy was a hunter, a big hunter
END
Milton: cutting cedar with them.
Milton: You called a girl’s name. I bet it’s her. Should have to be her grandfather that worked for my Dad back there in the Depressions, cuttin’ cedar.
Ken: Margie Carlton?
Milton: Carlton is the last name.
Ken: Yeah, Carlton
Milton: I think that’s right
Ken: Yeah, that was her dad that had that land down on the river, and
Milton: It must be after they took the land
Ken: It was, I think they were cutting it off. But let me first introduce ourselves. This is, I’m Ken Roberts. Let me tell you about…this will all be on tape and we will put this for your kids to listen to. It will be on a repository at Southwestern University and it’s an oral history. So this is sort-of an oral history of the cedar business and the people that know about it. I have now probably thirty tapes. But, anyway, we’re sitting here on the third of July of 2014 with Ray Lentz. Can I call you Ray?
Milton: You can, but heh heh
Ken: Alright. And I’m Ken Roberts.
Milton: My people will understand that.
Ken: Alright. Alright. Milton Ray Lentz
Milton: Yes
Ken: And we’re going to talk about him growing up in Austin. Like I said, on every one of these tapes, you learn something. And the nice thing about it is, uh, that this tape is there forever. It will be there and I’ll try to make, if I can afford it, to make a transcript of it. But, um, the very first interview I did was two years ago with a guy named Ronnie Roberts. He’s not related to me. He is sixty four years old. He’s in prime health. He looked like he was in prime health. I called him up just the other day. We’ve been talking a lot. He had a cedar yard – his granddaddy had a cedar yard in Oak Hill – and he passed away. And so I’m going to see his sister tomorrow and I’m going to give her those tapes that we made, and that will just be blessing for his family to have that. And I’m now realizing four of the people I’ve talked to have passed away and that’s all happened in two years. So I hope I’m not a jinx (laughter). But, anyway, there’s not anybody that
Milton: You don’t have any control over that.
Ken: (laughter) There’s not anybody. I have learned something from every one I’ve talked to. Let’s just put it that way. So anything you have to say about your growing up in Austin would be very valuable. It usually takes about an hour, no more than that.
Milton: Well, it’s a, you know, it’s a different time. Austin was a city, gosh I think their population in 1940 was about fifty thousand. I think. Forty to fifty thousand. But it was a lot different growing up in Austin at that time. Kid’s didn’t have cars. There was no television. Air conditioning was…you didn’t even know about it. My family, and there was eight of us kids and Mama and Daddy, and, uh, we lived, they lived, during the Depression they found work wherever they could, you know. My Dad drove busses during World War II, taking prisoners from Austin, they’d bring ‘em in here and take ‘em out to Bergstrom airport base at that time and then over to San Antonio. He was a chauffeur for some of the convicts, I think, I’m not sure, for a while during this war and during the Depression. They lived up in the country and things, and one of the things that I have valued is a letter of my Dad up to my Mother and my older brothers from Austin, down there where was staying in Austin to work. So he’d take care of the family and get some cash money. Cash money was hard to come by for people during the Depression.
Ken: Yes
Milton: They, (cleared throat), food was not really a problem because if you lived in the country, or, really, if you lived in the city and had the right place, you could raise enough vegetables and stuff to eat
Ken: Um-hum
Milton: But, uh, they lived out … I think they lived on Lake Austin Boulevard, out there, when my older two brothers were born and he was a chauffeur for the convicts. ____ owned a lot of land, and I don’t know if – they were probably in some kind of business and I wasn’t familiar with them. But they raised a family of eight kids and my oldest brother was Lewis. Next to him was Buford, my brother, and then Rodney, and then Lorene, and Dorothy and Anne, myself, and then Ellen. It was hard times growing up with a family like that. Of course, my Dad died in 1947 from a heart attack. He was coming back home in a truck on 183 out there and he, apparently he had a stroke
Ken: hum
Milton: and I’m just looking and just guessing. None of my brothers and sisters have had any heart problems what to speak of. They, some of them have high blood pressure but they take medication
Ken: Um-hum
Milton: OK. But that kind of stuff wasn’t available in 1947
Ken: Right
Milton: But we lived out there at 822 Reinli when we first moved to town. That was my grandfather’s property. My mother inherited it in 1939 or 40 and she got three and a third acres. They built a house down there in ’39.
Ken: That was on, near Lake Austin Boulevard?
Milton: No. This was on Lake Austin. When they lived on Lake Austin Boulevard it was longer, it was longer ago than that
Ken: Oh, OK
Milton: During the Depression
Ken: OK
Milton: And they had lived out there probably, probably around ’39 then moved in to there. But right shortly thereafter they started building the house on the land, my mothers, out there. We had a well and things, on Middle Fiskville Road. Of course the government came in there and they was going to put highway 290, but they bought the land in 1940. So they moved our house up to, on Reinli Street, which is on the same land, and right now today, where the Ihop pancake house is on 290 and 35, is sitting on our back yard.
Ken: Um-hum
Milton: And I used to have calves there, and chickens
Ken: Um-hum
Milton: we had an outhouse. But, most of us kids, we were raised, things were getting somewhat modern, and a lot of people had indoor bathrooms then. But we was raised on an outhouse. And we was raised like, the same as kids were one hundred and fifty years before that
Ken: Right
Milton: we had, Mama washed, there wasn’t any washing machines during World War II. You had to get a permit, or get on the list, to buy a refrigerator, all that. But we had an ice box on the back porch. We had an outhouse and things. And some of the funny things about that, during World War II, we had, my brother, my two, my oldest brother was in the service during World War II and he was a sergeant and he was a machine gun specialist. They protected the 105 mm guns over there. They had a perimeter of fifteen that they---and, it’s a funny thing, I was talking to him when we was burying him over there, ___ and he said “you know how long, in combat, machine gun specialist’s life is?” And I said “no.” And he said “thirty seconds.” (laugh)
Ken: Hum
Milton: I said “how…whatever”, you know. But anyway, Lewis went in the service, and Rodney went in the service when he became eighteen, in ’44 I think it was. But, my mother and dad had kids from 1920 and then they had ‘22, ‘25, ‘28, ‘30, ‘33, ‘36, and then ’43.
Ken: Um-hum
Milton: Through those years. So they had to go through that Depression, and then I come along right there in the Depression too. So it wasn’t easy for them to make money, you know. And most, uh, a lot of people, if they got a second or a fifth grade education, that was, it was acceptable back then.
Ken: You bet
Milton: I think that’s all my brother’s got. Wait a second. I think my other, Rodney, went to the fifth grade, I’m not sure. And my oldest sister Lorene, she got to the eighth or ninth grade. And the other two got to the tenth grade, I think. And then myself and Ellen, we graduated from high school in Chaney.
Ken: Time’s did change
Milton: Huh?
Ken: Times did change
Milton: Yes they did. World War II changed this country tremendously. But my dad and brothers cut, they cut wood for BBQ places back then and that’s where they got into the cedar business.
Ken: I see, they were cutting oak wood then
Milton: Yes, they were cutting oak wood and things for the fire place…for the BBQ places. And they, they furnished wood for Cecil’s BBQ down on Sixth Street and I think its, I want to say Sabine, but I don’t think that’s right. It was down close to where the old 7-Up bottle company was
Ken: Alright
Milton: It was on Seventh Street, but it was close there somewhere, if you know where that was.
Ken: More or less
Milton: Us kids, when we was little, we used to go in there and just watch those bottles go around and cap. You know, that was something for us kids
Ken: I do remember seeing that, yeah
Milton: and stuff
Ken: I remember seeing that as a kid
Milton: They closed it down, you know they closed all the, all the bottling companys, Coke and everybody, and they bottle them in one place, you know, and transport them
Ken: Once they got the trucks
Milton: Yeah
Ken: That’s another thing that I think totally changed
Milton: Yeah
Ken: Changed the people, like your Dad, because you couldn’t hardly get tires or gasoline
Milton: Nope
Ken: in World War II
Milton: You had to have stamps to to get ‘em and gasoline – I pumped gas up there at Carl Lawyers’ which is on Highway 71 going to Llano, kind-of north west of Bee Caves, I guess it is now
Ken: Um-hum, Yep
Milton: where 620 and Bee Caves run in
Ken: Yes
Milton: The highway just across that dip there, the pavement was a gravel road all the way to Llano then
Ken: Right
Milton: The gravel changed when you crossed, what is it, 183, I can’t --- it comes through Marble Falls. I can’t –
Ken: What took you out there. How old were you when you did that?
Milton: Well, we was out there cutting cedar.
Ken: Oh, you were?
Milton: I was about seven, six, seven years old
Ken: So, you were helping at seven years old?
Milton: Oh, yeah, somewhat. I’ll tell you what happened there. That, my brother, my dad cut an axe handle two foot for me when I was, and I don’t know when I was six, seven, five, or what.
Ken: Um-hum
Milton: But I cut my head. I stuck it in my head. I reached up to cut some limbs and that axe come back and stuck in my head
Ken: (sigh)
Milton: And then I cut this vein right here. There’s still a scar there. I was cutting, trimming a tree up.
Ken: Uh-hum
Milton: Dick Simons.
Ken: Dick Simons. That’s right
Milton: Dick Simons cut me a little patch. He saw me cutting cedar and I looked like I was struggling, well you’d think a seven year old was struggling. Yeah. I had seen people use an axe. That’s the way they taught you anything back then. You’d watch what people did and then you’d replicate it. You know. So, I was cutting cedar and trimming it up, and I was having a hard time cutting that cedar. So old Dick Simons, he, I think back, he was really the cedar cutting – him and my next to oldest brother were some of the best that I knew, and of course I was partial to both of ‘em because they
Ken: How did they meet?
Milton: Dick
Ken: How did your father and your brothers meet the Simons? They’re a Bull Creek family, aren’t they?
Milton: Well, I don’t know really, cutting cedar.
Ken: Uh-hum
Milton: My Daddy was a cedar contractor and he’d go out and get these places and then guys come in, get guys to come in and cut it.
Ken: Uh-huh
Milton: And then have to, what they’d do during the war – the government was paying something like two dollars an acre to flat cut that. In other words, cut all the cedar. The little bushes, everything, except just a wimp like that. They cut ‘em all off. And they would have preferred if they’d of pulled ‘em up, but you couldn’t do that and make any money. But they had to flat cut it and then get the posts then for free
Ken: For nothing
Milton: Other places, if it was good, thick cedar, they had to pay twenty-five percent of it to the landowner to make Oot there during the Depression, you know, and I don’t know what it was, in ’36 I was too little, but, the post prices and things, but you know they’d make eight, ten dollars a day.
Ken: Back in the ’30s?
Milton: Yeah, In the forties.
Ken: In the forties.
Milton: Yeah. And in ’47, ’48 you know, my Dad, they’d go up there and cut all week sometimes. And they’d stay up there sometimes.
Ken: Where would they be cutting?
Milton: Oh, it’d be all over the – that land, if you know where the
Milton Lentz (ML002)
Milton: Dam is, Marshall Ford Dam is?
Ken: Yes. Right.
Milton: My Dad run that cedar yard, right up, used to be up there on Comanche Road
Ken: Yes
Milton: Right there, at Highway 620, it was a cedar yard, and he run it for Mr. Cahill, I believe
Ken: OK, I’ve heard of his name.
Milton: And we moved up there in 1939, the summer of 1939. We was already in our house, down in Austin, but they had a house on this cedar yard, and my Dad moved us up there.
Ken: Right
Milton: And we, we had to clean that house up, you know, it was just an old house. But it was home, you know, had floors in it and everything. But I got in it, I didn’t know what poison ivy was and we had to get all that – I got that stuff all over me. I was swelled up, I imagine, I wasn’t but three years old.
Ken: Uh-huh
Milton: But that’s where I remember being alive.
Ken: Right
Milton: When I was three years old. And we came in there one night and my Mother had a coat with a fuzzy collar on it and I remember getting that, because it was cold, you know about that. We came into that cedar yard up there, and I don’t know whether it was the first time, or we’d been down in Austin and stuff, but we moved up there in 193-, and then in fall we moved back, I think
Ken: Uh-huh
Milton: it didn’t pan out, or something, I don’t know what happened
Ken: Uh-huh. Did your Dad have a truck to haul cedar with?
Milton: Oh, yeah. He had an old ’37 Chevy.
Ken: Uh-huh. Flat bed?
Milton: And old flat bed. I think those were two and a half ton
Ken: OK
Milton: trucks. I’m not sure. It had a wooden bed. He built the bed
Ken: Uh-huh
Milton: but it had those slotted doors. It had little slotted door knobs and they’d slide to open the doors. It was green
Ken: Uh-huh
Milton: And we – that was our family car, and a truck too, you know. And we’d haul cedar. But, my brothers, of course, when the boys, my brother, my oldest brother and then the younger brother, he, uh, they went off to war, well Dad didn’t have the help that he had, so he started driving bus for Bowen Bus Company down there in Austin, and, uh, stuff. And then, he and I cut, he cut a little cedar. Cut a little of what we called “a jag,” you know, just a day’s worth of cedar
Ken: Uh-huh
Milton: and take it it in
Ken: get a little cash
Milton: Yeah. Cash money was hard to come by
Ken: You betcha
Milton: And the main thing that I want to make plain here is people have an opinion of a lot of cedar cutters. And they , uh, they have drank. They drank alcohol and they’ve messed up some of their lives with a lot of it. But all of them didn’t.
Ken: That’s right
Milton: A lot of ‘em were decent people and a lot of ‘em drank. My Dad drank but I never saw him falling down drunk in my life
Ken: Um-hum
Milton: You know, but
Ken: Yeah, you know, I’ve talked to enough people, so this raises and interesting point. I’ve talked to enough people that I know -- -that most of the people that I’ve talked to are good people and their families are, you know, are very good people. And, you know, you come in to something like this and you hear the stories from Emmett Shelton and all that, you know, about these bad boys, you know, back in the ’30s, and there were some. But most weren’t. So then as you start to thinking about, well, how did they handle those folks? I mean, you ever have any sense of people talking, your Dad or something, talking about “well, ‘ole __” I don’t know if it would be Dick Simons, but “ole so-and-so, he is a good worker, but, you know …
Milton: Got an alcohol problem
Ken: he’s got an alcohol problem, or he, you know, spent some time in the pen, or, you know, something like that. Have you ever had any sense of how they, how they sort-of, because they didn’t, they didn’t tattle on each other. They’re not going to turn each other in to the police.
Milton: Well, I’ll tell you what they thought about some of that. They was scared to and they was scared not to. They had an everyday battle over that, you know. But these people were neighbors and stuff like that, and didn’t pay attention to that stuff.
Ken: Because it might get you in trouble?
Milton: That’s right. If it didn’t get you in trouble with the law it would get you in trouble with them. And they did honor that thing. Some of them were fighters
Ken: Um-hum
Milton: There is no doubt about it. You know
Ken: So, there was a code, sort of a code of honor
Milton: Certainly. There was a lot of liquor run out of Bull Creek
Ken: Oh, you betcha. Dick Simons sold it at the capital
Milton: Yeah
Ken: I heard that from, from one of ‘em. He’d have a load of charcoal, and he’d have that liquor under there, and he’d go right to the capital doors. Where they made deliveries.
Milton: Yeah. I didn’t know that, but I do know that Dick didn’t drink.
Ken: Uh-huh
Milton: He drank, but he lost the place he owned up there and he quit
Ken: Did he lose that in a game? I heard that story
Milton: gambling game
Ken: that he lost his place in a gambling game.
Milton: That’s right. But he’d been drinking (phone ringing)
Ken: That will beat you
Milton: That’s what I heard.
Ken: Uh-huh
Milton: That’s hearsay
Ken: And some of the Boatright boys got in trouble with running liquor.
Milton: and some of them went to the pen for a short period of time
Ken: Um-hum
Milton: Six, seven months, you know, back then
Ken: Right
Milton: But that was kind-of, you know, there’s places up there that, not right there at Bull Creek, but, uh, I was going to tell you about that place and I got, got on that cedar yard my Dad run. But, uh, Hughes, he used to own, uh, pretty much, the property where that dam is built down there. Hughes’owned that, and I believe there was
Ken: Creates Lake Austin?
Milton: Thom Hughes and his brother, were Fritz Hughes.
Ken: Is that were Lake Austin was created, by that dam?
Milton: No, not Lake Austin. Lake Travis.
Ken: Mansfield Dam then.
Milton: Marshall Ford Dam
Ken: Marshall Ford Dam. Right, uh-huh, got it.
Milton: And the Marshalls lived over at the end of 620 right there at Bee Creek. And I met one of those sons of him. He’s a good friend of mine. He’s a good friend of mine.
Ken: Mr. Marshall?
Milton: Yeah, Marshall. Dale Marshall. He was, I took him back over to Sam Houston one night, when I, I was about sixteen years old. Fifteen, sixteen. And he, he decided, he came in as Assistant Manager. I used to work for Superior Dairies on First and Red River, at that, at that Lockhart Store
Ken: Um-hum
Milton: I took him, he was Assistant Manger, and he I ain’t going back in the service. So I, he came over to see me one time and I took him back over there. But he, they were fighters. You know, Ray, nobody messed with them.
Ken: Uh-huh
Milton: Now old Dale, he was, you know, he was, there is just some people that’s designed to fight. They know how to fight when they come out of the womb, you know. And others, you know, have to be trained. And, uh, all those people, you didn’t mess with ‘em up there. You didn’t mess with those Simons, or, now Clarence, and, uh, Clarence was a big guy. He dated my sister for a long time and I never understood why they didn’t get married. But, uh
Ken: Huh
Milton: But, uh, they went together for years. (phone ringing)
Ken: You know, one of the reasons they could have been such good fighters is that’s just hard work.
Milton: Oh, yeah. Well they
Ken: If you’re
Milton: If you’re cutting cedar
Ken: All day long
Milton: It’s hard work running cattle, and building fence
Ken: Yeah
Milton: Stuff that they, when they’re tired and they’re aggravated and stuff, you just didn’t mess with them.
Ken: Right
Milton: You know. My Dad was the mildest man I’ve ever know. You know. My Dad, you had to really do something to.
Ken: Uh-huh
Milton: He whipped me one time in my short life. I was ten and a half when he died. But he was just. Now my mother, she was, she protected her kids, oh man, she was a war horse (laughing) about her kids, you know.
Ken: Yeah. I was talking to this lady, uh, one of the names out there is Patterson, out there by where you’re talking about Patterson Road, it’s up near corner of Cuernavaca and Comanche and all that. And she was a Patterson. And she married, she married her school bus driver. There was a little school house out on Bee Cave Road and, anyway, she was just real, real sweet and stuff, and I asked her, ‘cause she was talking about they’d go into Austin every so often, not very often
Milton: Yeah
Ken: you know, they’d take a wagon, you know, one thing or another, and I asked her “did you ever feel, you know, inferior?” I was thinking that maybe that’s why they were fighting, ‘cause they were feeling like people were putting them down, like, they used to call ‘em hillbillies, you know, back in the
Milton: Oh, yeah, there was a lot of names
Ken: Oh, yeah
Milton: Hayseeds
Ken: Uh-huh
Milton: They used that cedar cutter stuff. I’ve been run down, you know
Ken: Uh-huh
Milton: School kids. They don’t do it now, when I go to the reunions.
Ken: Well, they said that, she said that
Milton: But I deserved some of it, you know
Ken: Well, I, you know, I’m – just a lack of understanding. It’s like it’s just two different cultures, uh, and she said “you know”, she said “that never bothered me. It bothered my sisters, though.”
Milton: Yes. It didn’t bother my sisters. They never had any problems with it. But I, uh, me and my next door neighbor had a big fight over it and his mother got mad at him. You know, and I probably deserved it. But I beat the hound out of him
Ken: Yeah
Milton: And my next oldest brother, that was, my Dad was very dark. Dark complected. Black hair and black eyes
Ken: Um-hum
Milton: All my brothers and I, I was telling Jerry that, I don’t remember…my oldest brother had blue eyes, and I think Buford had blue eyes, Rodney had green, Lorene had green, Dorothy had green, Anne had blue. I had brown and my little sister had black eyes like Dad, and things. But, the reason I was telling you that my Dad was dark, they thought he was a Mexican. Mama said, I want to comment, I never thought anything about it growing up a kid, but we, uh, we was on somebody’s ranch, my Dad was cutting cedar up there, and back then all those creeks up there. And we was north, north of Bee Creek, if you where Bee Creek, where it comes into Pedernales
Ken: Yes
Milton: Up there, and we forded that Bee Creek down there. You had to ford it back then and I could get close, but it is so different nowadays. I can’t find that place. I was just a mean ‘lil old kid, you know. My family spoiled me. My Daddy bought me Milky Ways. You’d give a nickel for them back there and stuff, you know. But back then there were some people come across that Bee Creek and they didn’t know how to drive, ford a creek that way, and they drownded the car out and they got up on the other side and it quit. And Daddy and I was going in there, and, uh, so they were parked along there. Daddy stopped and he fixed their car for them and they offered him five dollars and he said “no”. He wouldn’t take money for helping somebody out.
Ken: Um-hum
Milton: That’s just the way country people were. And they didn’t do that.
Ken: Sure
Milton: That’s just, but, uh, there is a story and I wasn’t part of it, and I don’t remember it, but my brother was telling about it. We went in to, all these kids, eight kids and Mama and Daddy, I can’t imagine, I know imagine Lewis wasn’t there, I don’t know. But it’s almost like they had two different families, you know
Ken: Right. With the age difference, Yeah.
Milton: But people asked us to leave because, you know, I guess we were tattered and barefooted and stuff, so people asked us to leave.
Ken: In a store in Austin?
Milton: In a hamburger place. I think it was out there on 183. Now, I’m not sure.
Ken: Huh
Milton: But we used to go into Lammes Candy down there
Ken: Yes
Milton: My Dad was working a hoist down there in Austin at the capital building at that time and my, we walked all the way to town. Six miles
Ken: Isn’t that something
Milton: And went down there and ate ice cream, got some of that sherbert at that Lammes Candy thing. I don’t – it was probably gone by the time you came along
Ken: It’s still there.
Milton: Is it?
Ken: Lammes Candies is still there on Airport Boulevard.
Milton: Yeah. No, it was on Congress.
Ken: Oh, it was on Congress then?
Milton: Yeah, Congress
Ken: You’re right. I do remember it now.
Milton:Congress Avenue. About Eleventh, Tenth or Eleventh Street.
Ken: Um-hum
Milton: Anyway, we walked to town from all the way out there on 290 and
Ken: That’s something. Yeah
Milton: Then, uh, but Dad fixed that car, but that, we was on those cedar, cutting cedar, this was probably ’44, ’43. My brothers were gone. And my other brother was married and he couldn’t get into the military because he had asthma and they wouldn’t take him.
Ken: Um-hum
Milton: And he was living down at Leakey at that time, cedar chopping
Ken: How did he, I know this is… I don’t want to get you off track, but, that’s interesting. How did he hear about the cedar in Leakey? Is that, that turned out to be
Milton: Well they went down there and looked at it and it was good cedar
Ken: Uh-huh
Milton: They knew. I’d show you the difference between good cedar and bad cedar.
Ken: Yeah
Milton: You may know
Ken: I do
Milton: People do. And, but it’s, you could cut a lot of cedar, Buford could cut 200 posts a day of good cedar
Ken: Could he really? That’s amazing
Milton: And, uh, I used. The first job I ever had, paying job, was helping him load the truck up at the cedar yard up at Cedar Park up there. There used to be a cedar yard and that’s where I met Harve Simons.
Ken: That’s where, Dick Boatright had a yard there
Milton: Yeah, Boatrights had a yard
Ken: And I think there were several yards there, actually
Milton: Yeah, yeah
Ken: He heard about that Leakey – because some of the Boatrights went up to Leaky
Milton: Well I don’t know who all went down there with him, but
Milton Lentz (ML003)
Milton: Like I say, Dick, and, uh, Buford and them. But Buford, you asked me how he met Dick. I don’t know where this started, but I think Dad knew him. But, uh, my brother lived with Dick a long time. Worked for Dick cutting cedar until he could buy his own truck.
Ken: Buford did?
Milton: Yeah. And, uh, things. But, uh
Ken: I wonder what a truck cost back then. Do you, they wouldn’t be new trucks, I could imagine
Milton: Oh, no, he had an old truck that my Dad was killed in it, it was a ’34 Ford. And he bought it from, gosh, I haven’t looked at those old papers in years.
Ken: Your Dad was killed? That’s when he was killed in his truck?
Milton: Killed in that truck – ran over him. He hit a cedar tree, of all things, took the bark and things off, we walked up there and looked at it, and he’d come across there and there was a, back then they had a rock curb about that high. It wasn’t built, it was just before they cut it down for making ditches along side that, right where that 183 goes down that hill into Austin, Burnet Road, going to Jollyville
Ken: Yeah
Milton: Up there. Now, you can’t hardly go that way unless you
Ken: Right. I do know where it is. Yep.
Milton: He jumped that curb and the door came open and he fell out and the dual wheels ran over him.
Ken: Hum
Milton: They say he had a heart attack
Ken: Hum. Do they, did they do an autopsy and stuff like that?
Milton: I don’t think so. I don’t know
Ken: Yeah
Milton: I was, you know, I wasn’t
Ken: You were ten years old?
Milton: I was, yeah, I was ten, it was in March the 29th, the 29th or 30th, of 1947. The year before, 1946, my grandfather died, ’47 my dad died and my grandma Lentz, ’48, grandma died. But, that’s what is on the death certificate.
Ken: So you and your younger sister, then, they had to be supported. Y’all had to be supported.
Milton: My oldest brother sent us money from San Antonio, over there
Ken: Um-hum
Milton: And he sent his pay home from war, and he furnished a lot of the money until we got up, but I went to work at twelve years old
Ken: Um-hum
Milton: twelve, thirteen, washing dishes. Families had a way of putting you to work (laugh)
Ken: Oh, yeah.
Milton: But, it’s, Buford, he had an interesting story. Daddy got him a job for Kerrville Bus Company in East Austin, over there. He’s a worker. You know, I don’t think anybody could look at my family and say there is a slacker
Ken: Uh-huh. Well, two hundred posts a day, that’s a
Milton: Unless it’d be, and I learned better and something, I don’t know. But I can work. I just, you know, I think you ought to work smart and everything.
Ken: How long did Buford, how long did he cut posts?
Milton: Until 1951, and then he moved to San Antonio and he went to work with CMC Concrete Company. My oldest brother was superintendant there
Ken: OK
Milton: and he took care of the trucks, and the hauling. They was, the City of San Antonio was doing a lot of work, and my oldest brother was running a team of Mexicans doing, he spoke Spanish, so, he, run them to manufacture that concrete pipe that they was using in storm drains and all that on the side. They ended up making some eighty-two inch, which is gigantic, and Buford done the hauling and unloading the trucks, and things, out there. He had drivers, but, you know, sometimes guys don’t know how to unload that stuff.
Ken: How old was he when he started doing that?
Milton: Well, he was born in ’22, so that’s ’51, so that’s
Ken: OK
Milton: it would be thirty years old
Ken: So he had some good years cutting cedar
Milton: Oh, he did
Ken: Now, I’ve heard a lot of folks that just say that they would rather cut cedar. They can make as much money, or more, cutting cedar, than they could of doing a wage job, working on the roads, in a quarry, or something like that
Milton: Yeah, they can when you’re young.
Ken: Uh-huh
Milton: When you’re up to about thirty five, but, uh, your physical thing takes its toll. That’s what was wrong with my Dad. My Dad, he worked himself to death fixing places up for everybody else because they was tenant farmers, ranchers, and I don’t know where --- do you know where the, do you know where the Lucky Hit Ranch is? I think it’s still down there
Ken: Bagdad Road?
Milton: Down there in Leander
Ken: Yeah. I know. I mean, I live a mile from there as the crow flies.
Milton: My dead mother and dad run that place.
Ken: Is that right!
Milton: yeah
Ken: Do you know the story on that place?
Milton: No, I don’t.
Ken: That lady, she, she inherited that place from her husband that she had just married for a few years. This is a recent story. I’m thinking we’re talking about the same place. Right on Bagdad Road and
Milton: Big old two story house. If I had
Ken: There is, yeah. It probably was a bigger place back then. Oh, I know, I know what you’re talking about. Lucky Hit Road. I know exactly what you’re. Our place backs up on Lucky Hit Road.
Milton: My Dad, probably, about, probably your place, probably used to belong to that Ranch.
Ken: It was not. It was actually Mr. Whitt. David Whitt, Bernard Whitt owned our place and another place, and the Manards were right in there too
Milton: Yeah
Ken: But, yeah, we back right up on Lucky Hit Road. So, I’m sure that’s where he was. They turned that into a subdivision in the ‘70s.
Milton: Did they? Well, Anyway, that’s a
Ken: Isn’t that something.
Milton: I’ve got a picture of my three brothers somewhere, sitting on the front porch of that house. It was a two story house, and then later on things got bad. You know, families get in trouble, in crisis, during the Depression, and my grandparents moved over there with my mother and dad, and then my aunt and my cousins moved in, up here. They live at Killeen now.
Ken: Um-hum
Milton: You know, I think. It’s just back and forth I expect. They stayed six years down there before the built the dam, on that farm down in Lake Travis. You still could see the, it’s down so bad now that you can, if you wander around there, you could probably find out where the old house was.
Ken: Isn’t that something.
Milton: There still would be remnants from it.
Ken: Yeah. But, you know, I was thinking, talking about, asking about Buford, because he took this job, you know, that your brother gave him, you know, and some of those folks, they would rather have the independence, they got the independence
Milton: Oh, he would’ve, he would’ve. But that’s what happened is he almost cut his foot off.
Ken: Oh
Milton: And he, uh, there used to be a station on 620 and 71, right there at Bee Caves.
Ken: Yes
Milton: And he was cutting cedar way on up there. There used to be some brothers, and I can’t remember their name, had a ranch and we was cutting cedar on it, and he was cutting too, and he almost cut his foot off and he wrapped a towel around it and headed into Austin – he knew he was going to need some help. And he stopped there at that station and those people took pity on him and drove him into Austin. But he drove his self to that.
Ken: That is a common story.
Milton: And, but, it’s a, you know, and that’s the reason, what I didn’t tell you, when I cut myself in the head and neck, I never saw that axe any more. They took it away from me (laugh)
Ken: (laugh)
Milton: So I guess that saved me from getting on the cedar hook
Ken: Uh-huh
Milton: Because you could, individually, make more money, than somebody wanted to pay you.
Ken: Um-hum
Milton: You know, when you think about it, when you think about a guy starting a business, you know, whether you’ve ever been in business, you’ve got to make a lot of money to pay for an employee. Even back then. If you was paying a dollar an hour, you had to pay, you had to pay seven and a half percent Social Security, you know, and you had to have a lot of sales, or whatever you was doing, or marketing stuff, you had to have a lot of sales to pay for an employee. I had a friend of mine up there, and this has been recent, he was in the eighties, 1980 or so, he said he had to farm four hundred acres, in addition, to pay for one employee.
Ken: Um!
Milton: Get him to come in and combine for him, you know they hire combines
Ken: Umh-hum, Um-hum
Milton: People have fussed about the wet backs, you know, for years, and stuff like that. But they’ve used ‘em, yeah. Everybody gets taken advantage of. Eveybody gets a dose of that.
Ken: Um-hum
Milton: Cutting cedar, all you had was an old truck. You didn’t want to buy a new one. The biggest thing back then, in the War years, was tires. They was made out of rayon, and, uh, you know, they just, you’d run over a staub, and it’d be hard not to run over a staub
Ken: Sure
Milton: ‘cause you had to make roads, sometimes, to get into the place
Ken: Right
Milton: You had to cut your way in (laugh)
Ken: (laugh) I heard that!
Milton: and, but I sat there, with Buford’s wife, he married her, she married Lackeys and they cut cedar for Buford for a while, and his Dad was, and he used to, he used to, he didn’t have any teeth, they just gummed food. It always amazed me as a kid, you know, just looking
Ken: Buford’s wife was a Lackey?
Milton: I always observed
Ken: She was a Lackey?
Milton: Yes. His first wife
Ken: Because the Lackeys -- That’s a Liberty Hill name.
Milton: Yeah. They lived over there, Lackey, and I don’t know a lot about them, but she was a nice lady. I always knew her as kid. They used to go up around Bull Creek, her and my sisters, and they’d dive off those rocks and stuff up in there. Somewhere in my family is old pictures of that. You wouldn’t know where it’s at today, hardly.
Ken: Beautiful country
Milton: The memories I’ve got of that, in here, I can’t reproduce. And people tell me, they say “why in the world did you move away from that beautiful….” I said “you don’t know half of it. It’s not pretty to me now. It’s ugly if all them old houses out there in Highland Acres. That used to be a …
BREAK
Milton: He’d roll A cigarette. Bull Durham.
Ken: Uh-huh
Milton: and he’d roll it, _____ it, smoke a cigarette. He couldn’t roll it over about an inch long, you know, then twist the end of it
Ken: Uh-huh
Milton: Stick it in your mouth. And I asked him, I said, and he knew what he was doing. He was steering with his feet, his knees and rolling that cigarette and then he’d put it in his mouth and he swapped it back and forth. I was just a little old kid, just watching, loved watching. I wasn’t missing anything. That’s the way a young kid, what I’ve figured out, is kids thought that was a way to get to be an adult. So you couold smoke and do all that stuff that adults do
Ken: Um-hum
Milton: and I asked him something and he said “son, don’t ever smoke.” Just like that.
Ken: Um-hum
Milton: And I never did.
Ken: Good!
Milton: That’s how much -- I loved my Dad, and I didn’t realize how much, when I lost him, what was wrong with me through the teenaged years. Because I wasn’t a, I wasn’t a good person to be around. My wife says I’m not now sometimes. (laugh)
Ken: (laugh)
Milton: But, it was because I lost my dad
Ken: Uh-huh
Milton: I was still mourning that, and they didn’t have anybody to come in and coach you through that, counselors and stuff like that to get kids through it. And I carried it all inside. You were just left to carry it all inside.
Ken: Absolutely
Milton: And I carried it from the time I was ten and a half to the time I was sixty years old. And I didn’t realize that. And I knew what was wrong with me, ‘cause I changed after I moved to Dallas.
Ken: Um-hum
Milton: I was pretty much an introvert. And if I pointed to any one thing that changed me it was, I learned to fly an airplane.
Ken: Huh!
Milton: And
Ken: It gave you a different view of the world
Milton: It opened up, It opened up and you have to do some things. You know, sometimes you don’t feel worthy. You know, you don’t. And, because I came from, and kids did, they put a, a pretty much deal on you, you know, if you were poor, you know.
Ken: Yeah,
Milton: And I deserved it, don’t get me wrong. I didn’t know anything about deodorant and stuff like that (laugh)
Ken: Right
Milton: I didn’t know. I thought, I had Brogan shoes. I don’t think I got out of them until I was, ‘til after Daddy died. That’s all I had was a dollar ninety-eight Brogan shoes, you know, people make fun of you.
Ken: Uh-huh
Milton: Shoot, I was lucky to have shoes!
Ken: Yeah!
Milton: (laugh) But it’s just, you know, stuff like that, and, and, uh
Ken: Did yall have a place to take a bath?
Milton: When we grew up? Not in the house. We had a #3 wash tub and we had a wood stove, we had a wood stove, an outhouse, uh, we had, we finally got electric lights, the kind that dropped down from the ceiling
and water in 1941 when we moved up there to the, the State moved our house up there, and bought that land
Ken: Uh-huh
Milton: And Daddy put water in, and, we had a well, down there when we first moved out there, we had an outhouse, and we didn’t have any lights. Daddy wired the house for lights when we got up there.
Ken: Uh-huh
Milton: and got electricity, and water, but we didn’t have a bathroom in the house until 1953. My brother-in-law put a septic tank in for us and, and tub, and things
Ken: Yeah. You know I think a lot of those kids in Eanes, they didn’t have any, they didn’t have running water, you know, that lived out in West Lake and stuff like that.
Milton: They lived by creeks.
Ken: They lived by creeks.
Milton: That’s the reason why I said we lived …
Milton Lentz (ML004)
Milton: My mother still ironed with an old iron
Ken: Um-hum. Charcoal?
Milton: No. A heating iron – a wood stove. You’d put an old cast iron
Ken: Oh, yes, Uh-huh
Milton: iron there, and she’d iron cloths with that. Her and my sisters
Ken: Yeah
Milton: All during the War, and we, then when we finally got electricity, uh, she ironed clothes for people. She crocheted. She made quilts. I could, uh …
Ken: But you know, it’s no wonder those, so, when they put that Eanes School in that old rock school out there, you know, where West Lake Drive hits, uh, Bee Cave Road
Milton: Yeah
Ken: They put in a shower. This was, this was pretty late, right in the ’40s, at least, and they put in a shower. Then the kids started coming to school. Because this is the only way they could ever take a bath.
Milton: Yeah
Ken: And, uh, they enjoyed it.
Milton: Yeah
Ken: You know, if you think about where their reputation came from, there is – I cut a lot of cedar in my life. Not with an axe. With a chainsaw – but there is nothing dirtier and hotter, you know, and you’ve got that cedar bark all over you and
Milton: If you had an axe
Ken: If you had to carry a post, well then you’re gonna have wax all over you and everything is going to stick to it.
Milton: Yeah
Ken: and if you can’t bathe … I thank the Lord every day.
Milton: Well, you perspire
Ken: I know. When I work on the ranch, I don’t ever take a shower without saying a “Thank you for this shower!”
Milton: You know, it’s, people really don’t appreciate this world we’re in.
Ken: I know
Milton: You really don’t appreciate the body that God gave you because it’s a miraculous thing until you start losing it. I wear hearing aids and I couldn’t hear you if is wasn’t for these hearing aids
Ken: Uh-huh
Milton: But for many years I didn’t need ‘em. But your eyes, and your body healing things yourself, people lived back then, if it wasn’t for blueing for wasps stings, uh
Both together: kerosene
Milton: for cuts
Ken: Yep
Milton: And stings, and stuff like that I would have never got to eighteen. I saw my first doctor when I got, when I was nineteen years old and I got a physical to get married.
Ken: Uh-huh, yeah. So,
Milton: And, and think
Ken: It’s little wonder – that’s such a different life
Milton: It is
Ken: from living in the city
Milton: You can’t appreciate it
Ken: You can’t. And that’s why, I guess, these kids would call ‘em names and stuff like that. Because they
Milton: Oh, yeah, well, you smelled. And we, me and this other kid, when we was about the fifth grade, I had to grow through that. I had to get used to it, you know. And I thought, you know, fighting – I saw all these old movies, Hopalong Cassidy, and I saw him jump up and hit him, looked like he was hitting him, and it didn’t hurt him or anything and I thought that’s the way it was until I got hit a few times (laugh)
Ken: (laugh) It does hurt, doesn’t it?
Milton: But I got a friend. We started grade school out here, and it’s funny. We get to talking some times. But, uh, they’d all run you down, but they’re not that way now. People are not that way.
Ken: Unt-uh
Milton: But it was because the friction, you know. I’d hump up with it, you know, and you’d take it, and a lot of time people were kidding, and you didn’t know how to take kidding. You didn’t kid
Ken: I know
Milton: You didn’t kid with Dick Simons and Harve Simons and those guys, and the Boatrights
Ken: Uh-huh
Milton: You didn’t go up and say “well, you’re losing all your hair”, or “you’re doing all this”
Ken: Uh-huh
Milton: a little kidding, you know.
Ken: Right
Milton: And they just – this guy said, told me one time, he lost all his hair, and I never paid any attention to that, but he said “you know, God really must love me.” And I said “why is that?” And he said “loved my face.” I said “why, why is that?” And he said “well, he give me such a long one.” (laugh)
Ken: (laugh)
Milton: And it’s just – you don’t… They drank and they cut cedar and it was a hard old life. Keeping the ... I’ve seen my brother, on Sundays, afternoons when he fixed all these old cars and it’s hard to keep- he lived up there, he cut, he cut land on, if you go across the dam up at Marshall Ford,
Ken: Um-hum
Milton: He lived right around there. And right around there was an ‘ol boy who had a ranch and he cut cedar right there and hauled it in. But he lived just a little ways in a little old house, you know, and, uh, he and his wife and Don was born there, and these boys, you know. And he lived there and made a good living up until he was thirty years old. But he had always had that old truck. He wouldn’t take a brand new truck.
Ken: Into the cedar breaks
Milton: There was no trucks, back then. Dick drove a Diamond T.
Ken: Um-hum
Milton: An old Diamond T truck, and I remember that, ever since, you know, I met him. And my brothers had all kinds of trucks, uh, Daddy had that ’37 Chevy, but, of course, he wasn’t driving it. He was driving my brother’s truck when he got killed. Anyway, it’s so much a different world. The food. I didn’t know there was anything but round steak on a cow until I was thirty years old.
Ken: (laugh) Yeah
Milton: And it’s just, it – people didn’t know. You knew a lot. I’m amazed at how much I know – I remember from being a kid. And I can tell my brothers and sisters things. I know that talking in the family, you can get stories straight, but this, even you didn’t even know anything about it
Ken: You know, I think people’s attitudes are changing. I, for instance, I listen to country music and I really didn’t listen to that much country music when I was a kid. I was more into Elvis Presley and, you know, people up, but I think there is a rediscovery of your roots, I think, going on in Texas. And, I think people are proud. They’re going to be proud. That’s my impression of having, of their daddy or themselves, having raised a family with a cedar axe.
Milton: Well
Ken: That’s a pretty amazing thing to do.
Milton: They worked all different kinds - my Dad worked all different kinds
Ken: Sure
Milton: he was bus driver, you know, he’d farm and ranch if he’d get a good deal, but, anyway, he didn’t, the guy wanted to change to somebody else, or if he wasn’t making any money, or his tax thing – farming has always been a tax write off
Ken: Yeah, and the ‘50s were tough on farmers
Milton: And if you didn’t make the money to, to support a farm, you couldn’t own one.
Ken: Right, you had to have a big one
Milton: So, you had to be able to write it off, and things, and kind-of save some of your money and create equity
Ken: Yeah
Milton: But, it’s uh, they, those people inherited a lot of that land from their daddies that had come in and settled it, and they got it from grandfathers, a lot of that. The Hughes used to own land, Leonard East, you’ve heard the name Leonard East, he used to have a chicken killing factory there on Fifth and Red River.
Ken: Um-hum
Milton: I worked right next door into a garage, I worked for Duke’s garage right there
Ken: Um-hum, there’s a name
Milton: that I, for a summer, I think, while I took summer school up at Austin High, and when I think about the things that I’ve done in my life. I’ve got a deal, my wife did it for me, and, those were all business. This is not when I was going to school. I always worked. I worked until eleven o’clock at night and go to school the next day and I wonder why my grades weren’t that good. And I wasn’t never surprised. In fact, I run into my second grade school teacher, when I worked for the power station down there. She married a guy that retired from the Army, and then uh…she was an old maid school teacher, I thought. She married him late, you know. She said, “well Milton, I thought you”, you know I’d had this guy named Bill Allen, that we run around together. We sold stuff at the ball games and things when we were in grade school. We’d ride our bicycles down there and sell things, and she said “I was so worried about you and Bill and everything.” But I, dumb me I didn’t know --- I said “what were you worried about us for?” We were so skinny – we were so skinny that, you know, you are raised on beans and corn bread and working and busy like a kid is, you don’t get fat.
Ken: Uh-huh
Milton: And I look at these kids now up here at Temple School, and I look, people coming up, and I knew this thing was coming with them. These kids don’t have P.E., they are not forced to take P.E., they are not doing this, not doing that, and they’re riding a bus to school. I never rode a school bus in my life. Not in my lifetime. I paid to ride the transit bus when I went down to UJH, when I graduated from Reagan down at UJH. I rode that a few times, but then I got a car when I was fourteen.
Ken: Uh-huh
Milton: And that’s kind-of an interesting thing. But that hasn’t got anything to do with the cedar.
Ken: (chuckle)
Milton: But it’s just, uh, I
Ken: It is a different world.
Milton: Yeah, it is
Ken: and that’s …
Milton: And the guys that, you know, if you didn’t have a job, you know, guys thought, there was a lot of guys that thought they wanted to cut cedar to make some money.
Ken: Really?
Milton: They were out of work, you know. Couldn’t get jobs. So they thought they’d want to cut it. But when they saw really how hard it is
Ken: Uh-huh
Milton: You had to – it cost you, you had an old truck, you had to have an axe, and you had to have a file to keep that axe sharp.
Ken: Uh-huh
Milton: and some of ‘em liked gloves. My family never used gloves. I can’t work with gloves on.
Ken: Huh
Milton: I, even when I built fence, you know, handling barbed wire? I just got over a scratch right there
Ken: Yeah, I hate barbed wire
Milton: I went up there the other day and I just leased my place out. And it’s, and I got into it. Every time you get across it you cut it.
Ken: Absolutely. I get two feet from barbed wire and I’ve got scratches on me. I hate it.
Milton: Yeah, and it’s Dick, but, they cut all those posts down for me and I trimmed ‘em up, you know, but he just, he just went through it, whop, whop, and downed about twenty of ‘em just, I mean
Ken: Just two or three licks
Milton: He had big ‘ol long arms
Ken: Uh-huh
Milton: and, man, he could take that axe and, he and my brother, were the most magnificent thing I could see with an axe. You’d be … if I could put them back together at the age they were when I saw them, you would be amazed. It looked like a bulldozer going, pushing things out, with them cutting side by side.
Ken: And how old were they when they were doing that?
Milton: Oh, he was twenty five, twenty eight years old, and Dick was probably fifty.
Ken: Oh, fifty, Uh-huh
Milton: I would bet. Maybe forty
Ken: Uh-huh
Milton: Well, Clarence and Dexter, and they had a girl, his wife was named Edith. Edith Simons, and Dick and, Dexter was the oldest and there was a girl, and she died here a while back. My brother was telling me. And then there was Clarence. Clarence played football, but he was a big guy, man.
Ken: Really?
Milton: I don’t know why
Ken: You know, he was tiny when he was born. He was born prematurely. Did you hear that story?
Milton: I hadn’t heard that.
Ken: Erlene told me this story, and, uh, his mother’s sister was killed by a Pierce, her husband. There in the Bull Creek area, I think it was. Berry Pierce. And, that sent his mother, grieved, and had Clarence prematurely. Apparently he was this tiny little thing and they put him in a drawer, the top drawer of the dresser drawers.
Milton: I heard such thing (laugh)
Ken: (laugh) That’s why they called him Baby Clarence,
Milton: Baby Lee
Ken: Baby Lee, yeah
Milton: I don’t know, I think Dick’s name might have been Lee. Lee – they called him Dick, you know. They always give everybody nicknames
Ken: Everybody had nicknames – I know. I think there was an Eva, maybe she was a Simpson, Eva Simpson.
Milton: Yeah
Ken: And she was, she was killed by her husband for no good reason, apparently.
Milton: Well, there was a lot of people that killed. I know those, there are some brothers that used to live up there on Bee Caves Road, up on Bull Creek Road, well it’s 2222, I guess, goes through there, that cut-off that goes back over to the Park that’s on Lake Austin.
Ken: Yeah,
Milton: They lived right on the
Ken: Anderson, Anderson Mill?
Milton: I’m trying to think of it, Burt, his name was Burt, I can’t think of their last name. But his son, his Dad, Burt was the one we knew, and, uh, his brother, I think, almost beat his Dad to death with an axe handle up there. They got in a fight. I never saw, I asked my brothers, I said “did y’all ever fight when you was a kid?” He said no, they never did. That’s my Dad’s calmness coming through
Ken: Um-hum
Milton: They didn’t even fight with each other. Now they’ve had to fight at schools, and things, when they went to school. They used to call my oldest brother “Ears”, they said his ears stood way out, so they called him “Ears”
Ken: Oh, they were bad back then
Milton: messing with him
Ken: Yeah, all the time
Milton: They’d just, but, uh, the cedar, uh, they cut cedar up there in Spicewood Springs. My brother lived up there a while. He cut cedar longer, it ended up, than my other two brothers.
Ken: Um-hum
Milton: When my oldest brother went in the Army, after he came back he was, uh, they, they cut cedar for a little while and hauled it
Ken: Did Buford go in the Army?
Milton: No, he was, had asthma, and they wouldn’t take him
Ken: Oh, right. OK
Milton: They wouldn’t take him. And, of course, his education wasn’t, he didn’t, uh
Ken: Did they require you to have a
Milton: Well, he couldn’t read and write
Ken: They required you to be literate?
Milton: And he learned, his wife taught him. I don’t I’ve never figured that out. I didn’t know he couldn’t read and write until he was, uh, sixty five years old. He’s ninety-one now. I didn’t know that. Now that’s, if my mother had been alive I’d of asked her. I don’t know what happened to him. He’s not dumb. He’s a smart person
Ken: Uh-huh
Milton:
Milton Lentz (ML005)
Ken: Didn’t go to school
Milton: Well, he told me, he said, “well, we’d go to school and every time they’d move and we’d go to a different school.”
Ken: Right.
Milton: And military kids go through that, but not quite as bad as Mama because they’d live here a couple years, this that and another
Ken: Right
Milton: and, I guess my Dad felt like if he had to add and do this, but I don’t know what happened. My Dad used to read, he could read.
Ken: Uh-huh
Milton: He, my other brother told him Daddy used to read to him, you know, on nights and times when he was a kid
Ken: Uh-huh, Uh-huh
Milton: and my mother could read. And my mother, uh, she’d write letters and I never saw anything wrong with the English and I’m not an English major, you know, I
Ken: Yeah
Milton: But it’s just, uh, but he cut cedar up there all over that place and they used to have a ferry up there on Lake Travis and I don’t remember where that was. I’ve ridden it with a load of cedar posts and I’ve been with him in that old truck when it gets so hot in the summer. I bet it’s a hundred and ten out there in the cedar breaks.
Ken: Yeah, there’s no place hotter
Milton: And the cedar starts out gassing. It gets so hot, and if you struck a match it would go up, just like that. In fact, I was trying to work for the volunteer fire department when I was running for commissioner, and he said “well, what would you do?” and I said “I’d cut all that cedar out of there because it’s too thick. Those people had it in their yards, and I said I’d go out there, and around the oaks, because they afraid of fires because they had too much fuel on the ground. You know, twigs, nature, and I said I’d put a ring around those trees and I’d get me a pump out of that lake and then, if a fire started around there, a grass fire, I’d fill those rings around with water. But, anyway, that’s, a, he cut cedar all over. When we was at that cedar yard up there on 620, we had taken, uh, they cut cedar off that Hughes places, and Leonard East bought it later on from the Hughes, Thom and Fritz Hughes, they bought it from them. And, you know, owners of land change
Ken: Um-hum
Milton: And so, he didn’t allow them to cut any cedar for a while. And then they started cutting cedar back, but. It made a living for a lot of people and a lot of, a lot of people run liquor and everything else back then. It was because of the Depression and no money, And demand. And corn, corn, you couldn’t get any money for corn, you know. So they’d make that corn liquor and sell it in town and make money. I didn’t know about that thing of Dick on the capital grounds there, but let’s face it, most of the guys that was arresting for things, they drank too.
Ken: I know. All the congressman did, senators
Milton: Yeah, and
Ken: Yeah
Milton: It’s – people get carried away with that and some families, I think what the biggest thing that aggrevated my family with others, and they tied a name to it, thieves, and stuff, stealing and stuff like that, more so than anything else.
Ken: It aggrevated them, other people stealing, being a thief
Milton: Yeah. You wouldn’t your kids, wouldn’t want us to be friends or something with a bunch of kids and a bunch of thieves.
Ken: Right. That’s what Emmet Shelton had a really interesting quote. You know, he’s Mr. West Lake. He made these tapes. He called ‘the Cedar Choppers’, and he said, he said, they were honest people. I’m more-or-less paraphrasing. They were honest people. Now, they did a lot of fighting and mayhem and stuff like that, but they wouldn’t steal. They were honest people. So that’s what the meaning of honesty was.
Milton: Yeah
Ken: Do you remember Petmekey’s store on Congress Avenue?
Milton: Who?
Ken: Petmekey’s .
Milton: Yeah
Ken: My Daddy was a hunter, a big hunter
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