Preface To 1976: Thugs Hangout Late

I was eight years old for three hundred & forty-six of 1976's three hundred & sixty-six days. (It was a leap year.) I was in second grade when it started, & lived at that time in an apartment complex on Kingsley Road in Garland, Texas, called the Lockwood Arms. (It's still there, but the name has changed. (I wrote about that place here.) We moved to another apartment complex a street over called Little Brook Apartments some time during the year. I was too young to know why we moved. I just know we did.

In our apartment at Little Brook was me, my little brother Chris, my sister Karin, & my older brothers Ralph & Steve. I'm not sure if Ralph was calling himself Ralph yet. His full name is James Ralph, but he started getting people to call him Ralph because everyone was calling him "Jamie," which I suppose seemed feminine to him. My oldest sister Pat & my oldest brother Eddie had already moved on. I believe both were married - Pat married that year. She & her husband got married in a civil ceremony at City Hall, so I wasn't invited to a wedding that year. The apartment had, if I recall correctly, three bedrooms & two bathrooms. Chris, Karin & I slept in one, Ralph & Steve in another, & Mom (& her boyfriend Ed) in the big one, which had the second bathroom. I remember the main bathroom did not have a lock that worked. That sucked. Lots of walking in on Gary doing number two!

I have many memories of Little Brook Apartments. It was close to my elementary school, Caldwell Elementary, so we walked there, rain or shine (more rain than shine in Garland, Texas) & hot or cold (more hot than cold). I had a couple of really good friends there, & I even remember being more than smitten with a girl - but I can't remember her name now. The property at the time was fenced on three sides (the front was open) but the area behind it was empty & there were a couple of abandoned, dilapidated houses which, when we discovered them, seemed like heaven to us, but we were told not to go to them by our mother & because I suppose we (I mean me & my little brother, we were inseparable then) were obedient, we didn't go back. The area behind the apartments was a dirt bike & go-kart trail, & once my little brother stepped into a fire ant hill & had an allergic reaction. I remember crying & thinking he was going to die.

Across Cranford Road was an empty load with pecan trees. One of the few memories I have of my father was him walking with us to a convenience store on Kingsley Road, called the Time Saver (which would figure heavily in my teen years), & showing me which pecans were good to eat. He was most definitely drunk at the time, but I didn't know that.

The place is still called the Little Brook Apartments, which means it's had the same name for probably as long as I've been alive. It even still sort of looks the same, although it used to be brown:



The apartment is now in a "bad part of town," which means, in Texas, it's predominantly poor & Hispanic. You can read a few bad "reviews" of the place here. I am especially fond of the comment, "Thugs hangout late roaming the Cranford St."

I have a particularly happy memory from that place. The apartment was a little under a half mile from train tracks, & every morning about six-thirty - usually when I would wake up to get ready to go to school - a train would come by. I learned to wake up to that train. Especially on sunny mornings, it seemed so nice to know this train was passing by regularly, & I would always wake up to it.

I remember throwing away old comics at that apartment. Bad Gary! I also had a terrible experience with a disc jockey at that apartment - but I'll tell that story tomorrow.