Wishing I could talk to him…

A relative stopped by our home last week to drop off a box containing historical items from my father, Vic Lamb. The box included memorabilia, artwork, old newspapers, business papers and other things his second wife had kept over the years.

There were some things that I expected to find in the box and some that I didn’t. There were several copies of the Ruidoso News that my father and mother owned from the early 1950s to the late 1960s. They’ve been great fun to read through. I enjoyed seeing reports of events, the names of people and local businesses I knew in the then very small town in the mountains of southern New Mexico where I grew up.

In the box, there were a three of his pen and ink drawings and some of his cartoons that I recognized, I’m going to have one of his drawings of an old juniper tree in Ruidoso re-framed sometime in the next month of two. My sister and I remember sitting outside in a meadow on a fall afternoon watching him work on the drawing. He was very talented artistically.

There was also a really old Oliver typewriter that he had acquired sometime in the past, probably after I had gone off to college. Below is a photograph of it. I think it still works, but I’m not sure what I’m going to do with it.

There was a welcome history of his family, which I had been wanting for many years. It confirmed quite a bit of what I knew, but had some other insights that were new and valuable to me.

What impressed me the most were some hand-made newspapers that he “published” in 1928 under the name of the “Ellis County Eagle.”

Ellis County is south of Dallas, with Waxahachie the county seat. My father’s “newspapers” claim to have been printed in Ray, Texas, which I cannot find on the map. I suspect it was a suburb of Waxahachie, but I’m not certain. There are other oddly named unincorporated towns of villages on the map in Ellis County, like Maypearl, Italy, Boz, Lone Cedar and Onion Springs, but no Ray I could find.

Anyway, the Ellis County Eagle was all hand created by my father, including articles and illustrations. I’ve copied some of the pages of his publication and included them in this post. They are tattered and have yellowed over time, but I think you can get an idea of his work. In the three copies of his newspaper, there were stories about an attempt to fly an Ford Tri-Motor airplane from the United States to Australia (or maybe the other way). That attempt, along with what I suspect was a failed attempt by an airship to set some kind of flight record, seemed to capture his imagination. I’m not sure where he got details about the flights.

He also put a notice at the top of his front pages when the newspaper was “off the press” at a specific time.

What is amazing is that he produced these when he was just 16 years old. He never finished high school, yet seemed to have good writing skills and a sense of what was newsworthy. He said his father was a newspaperman all of his life. I’m sure he developed his ability to draw cartoons by himself without any guidance from an art teacher. He continued to draw cartoons for the rest of his life before he succumbed to Alzheimer’s in the early 1980s. He included his drawings in several of the newspapers he operated, including the Ruidoso News and a few in the Texas panhandle. He entitled his artwork “Vix Pics”

In his “Ellis County Eagle,” he did a Sunday section with its own comics, also shown below.

Granted, his comics were pretty corny, but that was his sense of humor that served him well. over the years.

I’ve already posted some items that I found when reading through some of the old newspapers from 1966-68, and I’m sure I’ll find other entertaining things in the future.

In the meantime, it’s been kind of sad to think about my dad while wishing that I could have spent more time with him learning about his life. He was an eternal optimist, a trait I wish I had inherited.

I guess most young people who are anxious to break out of the nest have a tendency to miss learning more about their parents. I was certainly focused on getting out on my own at the time and I was strapped to the necessity of working full time while putting myself through college in five years.

So young readers, be sure you take time to talk to your parents and learn from them. When you realize you should have done that, it’s probably too late.