On that dirt-poor ranch his father and mother had scratched out a living while raising a brood of seven kids. Dallas had been the next to the youngest girl Beverly. Above them were three sisters and two brothers. All the kids had worked on the ranch and the acreage being farmed. Tomatoes and corn grew in long rows in the red clay of the Red River valley, the soil fertile for years and then suddenly worth nothing but dust and heartache. The dust and heartache part would come later when Dallas was in high school. But by the time Dallas was a dozen years old his two older brothers had fled the farm and were working oil fields in Oklahoma at ages nineteen and twenty-two.

The family appeared happy on the outside. Mom always smiling as they arrived all scrubbed up and in their Sunday best at the small Baptist church on the outskirts of the small Texas town, population 1,422 and decreasing annually. The main industry in the town had been the paper mill employing three hundred and forty seven and producing an olfactory odor that caused people passing through to gasp and cover their noses.

The people of Johnson Creek were long ago immune to the noxious odors of the paper mill considering them just a small price to pay to keep their men employed and the life of the small Texas town vitalized. Very few women worked in the mills, only the few in the front office. Dallas' Dad worked there and by the time Dallas was twelve had been employed steadily for twenty years. Suddenly the manager of the paper mill realized the growth of tall lumber pines manning the hills of east Texas were over-cut and under reforested resulting in a sudden reduction in logging runs into the mill.

The first step was a layoff of twenty percent of the workforce and Dallas' Dad Harvey escaped that initial cutback. But late in 1963 a few weeks after President John F. Kennedy's assignation in Dallas the axe fell on the small family trying to make a living in the Texas dirt and lumber industry. Many in the small town claimed the closing of the plant was a curse on the people of Texas for what they had done to that "poor Massachusetts fellow and his purty wife" as one local spat it out in front of the general store. Whatever the cause, the weekly check of seventy-two dollars and forty-seven cents no longer flowed into the Mills household and their entire income was dependent on what they could scratch out of the earth and farm on the chicken-shit Texas ranch.

The ranch was not the kind you saw in the movies or in watching Dallas on television. The Mills were no Ewing's, their meager existence dependent on the eight dozen chicken they used as egg layers and the several hundred brooders they raised to slaughter and supply the two local grocery's in Johnson Creek. That is until the new Piggly Wiggly opened out on Spring Road and brought in all them Goddamned fryers from that damned Tyson's in Arkansas. No longer could the local markets compete and slowly they sold their stores and moved on down the road joining a steady cavalcade of trucks and U-Hauls filled with ratty furniture.

Now the chicken ranch became a ghost ranch, the Mills living on the produce on their seven acre truck garden and the slaughtering of their own chickens and hogs for meat. Dallas sat down to eat chicken four nights a week and the other three were some form of pork product off the slaughtered pigs. He swore every night when he fell into bed in an exhaustive stupor when he got big all he would eat would be steak and lobster, the latter a treat he had never tasted but, according to his chums, was something only rich people could afford. ......(cont)