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With
grim determination, a normally peaceful, law-abiding man who’s just learned he’s
been done wrong starts to strap on his six-shooter aiming to make things right.
Enter his pleading wife, who with tears or threats or both prevails on her husband
to put the gun away and turn the figurative other cheek.
It’s a cliché
Western movie scene, but in my family, one time it really happened. The injustice
that nearly triggered an episode of Old West-style violence did not stem from
the need to avenge a killing, deal with a philanderer or handle a horse thief.
On a hot summer afternoon in the early 1900s, it had to do with ice.
The
protagonist in this real-life Western episode was my great-grandfather Adolph
Wilke, a first-generation Texan whose father had come to Fredericksburg
from Germany. It happened in Ballinger
about a hundred years ago.
As my late granddad, L.A. Wilke told the story,
his father for a time made his living operating an ice wagon in the West
Texas town of Ballinger.
He got his sawdust-packed ice wholesale via train from Austin
or San Antonio. After loading the
standard 40-pound slabs into his wagon, he cut them down into 12.5-pound or 25-pound
blocks and made his rounds selling them for five or ten cents a block.
Though
frozen and often cloudy with ammonia that stunk when it melted, ice was a sure
seller back then because electric refrigerators were not yet available. In fact,
the first self-contained electric refrigerator did not hit the market in the U.S.
until 1923.
Great-grandpa’s customers placed a block of ice into wooden
ice boxes that had pans beneath them to collect the water as the ice slowly melted.
Ice deliveries usually were daily.
While he peddled a popular product,
Great-grandpa Wilke did not enjoy a monopoly. Another man, my granddad recalled
his last name was Haley, also sold ice in Ballinger.
One day, the competitor pulled his team up outside the depot and picked up a shipment
of ice intended for Great-grandpa and started selling it.
On learning
of this, as my granddad later put it, “Papa put on his gun (a .38 revolver) and
was going to go to town” to discuss the matter with the other iceman.
At
that point, my great-grandmother interceded and kept her justly furious husband
from settling the theft issue in the manner of the late frontier. Granddad did
not go into detail as to how his mother stopped his father from leaving their
house with his gun, but he said her action likely averted a killing.
In
the end, neither my great-grandpa nor his business rival prevailed in the market.
As Ballinger continued to grow
and the technology got cheaper, someone finally opened a local ice plant and established
their own delivery service.
Handy with a gun since his earlier days as
a cowboy, Great-grandpa got a job as a Runnels County sheriff’s deputy.
Thirty-six miles down the railroad tracks from Ballinger
was San Angelo,
where my future grandmother, Viola Helen Anderson, lived with her family.
She
remembered the excitement that came when the first ice factory opened in San
Angelo. Her father would carry ice home with tongs. Their first ice box was
just that, she said, a box with sawdust in it. Later, they got a commercial wooden
ice box.
“I thought we were the richest people in the world when we got
our first real ice box,” she later recalled.
Ice distributors printed
cards for people to display outside their homes so deliverymen would know how
much ice the family needed. They would carry the ice on their back and take it
straight to the ice box.
“You better have everything out of the way when
they came in,” she said.
She and Granddad got married in 1916. They did
not get their first electric refrigerator until the mid-1920s, when they lived
in Fort Worth. Even then, she
hadn’t wanted one, she said. She was satisfied with the old ice box method.
Talking
about it years later, Granddad interjected that he had somehow tricked her into
finally getting one. “You were tricked a few times yourself,” Grandmother countered.
Grandmother remembered one funny incident indirectly concerning ice. In May 1910,
when she was 12, the family living next door had small pox. A yellow flag fluttered
from their porch, signifying that the house had been quarantined.
Another
neighbor was a widow whose son worked for the local daily, the Standard.
One
day the young man came running home from the newspaper office to announce the
world was coming to an end, apparently because of the approach of Haley’s comet.
The widow rushed over to Grandmother’s house to tell her mother of the impending
disaster.
The woman was very frightened, but my great-grandmother scoffed
at the report.
“Well,” she finally said, “if the world’s coming to an
end, we might as well make some ice cream.”
She told my grandmother to
start breaking up some ice and then cranked up the central telephone exchange
for a connection to the people next door with the small pox. The end time at hand,
she said, they might as well forget about the danger of contagion and come over
for some ice cream before they died. That scared the fretful widow even more,
grandmother said.
Of course, the people with small pox stayed put and
Haley’s Comet continued its interplanetary journey, leaving Earth no worse for
the wear. But the Andersons and their nervous neighbors sure enjoyed their ice
cream.
© Mike Cox
"Texas
Tales" August
22, 2009 column
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