I was born February 8, 1936, during a Texas High Plains blue norther. Daddy had rigged a wire through the radiator of the Model A so that he could work the choke while cranking. It was probably the cold rather than the excitement, but he said he almost lifted the car off the ground on the first pull of the crank, and it started. Thankfully, I got to be the first sibling born in a hospital—Payne-Shotwell Hospital in Littlefield, Texas.
I had a good childhood and fret sometimes that I can't blame my parents for my shortcomings. I was alone often, but never lonely during those preschool days on the farm. What a great place to explore and to recreate Roy and Gene's picture-show exploits. I was nine and mid-stream in the third grade when we left Sudan for Jayton, Texas, with a crop-year interlude in Lorenzo, Texas. Dad's asthma forced him to leave the dust of the Plains and become a grocer -- later a farmer again. Thus, I became a town boy.
Jayton, population about 630, would never make me a city boy. But it supplied high adventure, no-nonsense teachers who would stay after school to coach me in poetry recitation, six-man football, with thirteen boys participating, and a whipping by the coach (well, he made the two of us trade licks) on my last day of high school in 1954. But I did finish in the upper percentile of my graduating class—of fifteen.
A 38-acre dryland cotton crop and summer jobs on road and building construction, rough-necking on an oil rig, measuring cotton allotments, and driving ambulances got me through Texas Tech in 1958 with a baccalaureate in Agricultural Economics.
I married soon after graduation and had three lovely children by 1962 when I made the trek to Austin, Texas to begin a 31-year career with U. S. Department of Agriculture's National Agricultural Statistics Service. In addition to Austin, my family and I were privileged to work about five years respectively in Washington, D.C.; Orlando, Florida; Little Rock, Arkansas; Phoenix, Arizona; and Nashville, Tennessee. I retired in 1993 as State Statistician for Tennessee, having reached all my career goals.
In 1998 I decided to leave beautiful Tennessee for an equally grand, but much drier Ruidoso, New Mexico. After those early years on the Plains, I determined to finish my years surrounded by trees. And the Texas and Southwest history that is encoded in my DNA will probably keep me near the Rio Grande and Pecos Rivers all my remaining days.
The Lord has blessed my life with abundant grace and mercy, redundantly unmerited, for which I maintain a continual spirit of praise and thanksgiving.. I also thank the Lord for my Christian parents. It was an honor and a pleasure to tell their story in "The Brantners – Kay P. and Pearl Marie." I hope their story will take you, the reader, back to your own grand memories of childhood and of those ancestors who "were there first, and got the best things."
Ron Brantner
Ruidoso, New Mexico
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