When I was a little boy on the farm near Lohn, there was someone I could hardly wait to see. My brother Charles. After Charles moved away to Freeport, I would sometimes climb onto the roof of our farmhouse and look down the dirt road. Then I would wait. And wait. I might sit up there for hours, watching for a car to appear in the distance. I was waiting for Charles to come home. He was my older brother. But to me, he was more than that.
Charles was my idol.
The Little Boy Who Was Bullied
It may seem strange that the brother I eventually looked up to so much began life as a very small boy who was particularly susceptible to being bullied. But he did. One of my earliest memories of Charles has never left me. He had broken his leg playing soccer. His leg was in a cast, and when he returned to school, he had to walk on crutches. I was not even old enough to be in school yet, but I went with him to carry his books.
One day at recess, Charles tried to join the other boys. A boy named Larry Walker, the class bully, walked up to him. Charles was standing there on crutches with his leg in a cast. Larry pushed him down. I saw it. I was only a little boy, but that image burned itself into my mind. It never went away. Perhaps that is one reason what happened later seemed so remarkable to me.
The Leg Again
A few years later, Charles broke the same leg again. This time the injury was serious enough that doctors put a steel rod in his leg, and once again he was placed in a cast. While he recovered, Charles stayed in Brady with Aunt Donna and Uncle T.H. Then his life took an unexpected turn.
Freeport
My Aunt Lola and Uncle Buster Curry lived in Freeport, Texas. Their daughter was disabled, and she had specifically asked that Charles be the person who would take care of her if anything ever happened to her parents. So, Charles left the farm and moved to Freeport to live with them. That move changed him. Uncle Buster enrolled Charles in the Golden Gloves boxing program. The little boy who had once been pushed down while standing on crutches began learning how to defend himself. He trained.
He boxed. He did road work. And he became strong. I remember when he would come home to visit. Charles would put sixteen-ounce boxing gloves on me and tell me to hit him in the stomach. I would punch him. His stomach was as hard as a rock. Of course, I was so little that there wasn't much possibility of my hurting him. But to his little brother, Charles had become something entirely different from the boy I remembered being pushed down on the playground.
The Charlie Horse
Uncle Buster also allowed Charles to build a racing boat. Charles raced it on the old Brazos River. He named the boat: The Charlie Horse. By then, between boxing and all the road work that went with it, Charles had learned exactly what a charley horse was. It hurt. The name stuck with him. Years later, when he formed a band in Lohn, the name would come back again.
Back to Lohn
After Charles learned to box, he wanted to return to Lohn for his junior and senior years. This time, he was not the same boy who had left. Charles convinced the high-school coach to allow him to set up a boxing ring in the school gymnasium. Then he invited some of the boys who had once given him trouble to get into the ring with him. Nobody volunteered. Not even Larry Walker. Larry was about twice Charles's size. Years earlier, he had been willing to push Charles down when Charles was on crutches.
Now Charles was standing in a boxing ring and inviting him to come in. Larry declined. There is a lesson in that somewhere. Bullies are often much braver when the other person cannot fight back. Charles also played six-man football at Lohn. The watermelon raid I described earlier took us to Mrs. Faulkner’s farm beyond Pear Valley; she was the English teacher. It was one of the adventures I shared with the brother I admired so much.
The Lohn Golden Gloves
Since nobody seemed interested in settling old scores in the ring, Charles did something much more useful with it. He started a Golden Gloves program in the Lohn area, which connected with the program in Brady. The boy who had once needed someone to protect him was now helping other boys learn how to protect themselves. That is quite a transformation. There is another detail about Charles's senior year that tells you something about how small Lohn School really was. There were only two boys in his senior class.
Charles was one. Larry Walker was the other. And by then, Larry wanted to be Charles's friend. Of course he did.
“It's in the Book!”
Before Charles became known for playing music, he had already discovered that he could entertain an audience. Lohn School sponsored a talent show.
Charles had a record by Johnny Standley, recorded in 1952, called “It's in the Book.”
The comedy routine treated the nursery rhyme “Little Bo Peep” with the solemn seriousness of Scripture, repeatedly insisting:
“It's in the book!”
Charles decided to pantomime the record. He dressed in a black robe and wore a hat that made him look something like a professor. Then he acted out the recording. He brought the house down. I still remember how funny it was. Charles had not yet become a musician. But he had already learned something that would serve him well later. He knew how to entertain people.
Then Came the Guitar
Kent Finlay taught Charles guitar. The Charlie Horse name, first used for Charles’s racing boat, later became the name of his band. I learned by playing with him and spending time around the musicians he knew. I am still looking for the result of Charles and Kent’s 1956 State FFA contest in Dallas.
Back to Freeport
After graduation, Charles returned to Freeport. He went to work selling automobiles for Uncle Buster at his Ford dealership. My father also went to Freeport trying to find work. But Dad never got the new beginning he was looking for. He suffered a heart attack and died. He was only fifty-two. During the summer before my sophomore year, Charles moved Mother, Jimmy Lynn, and me to Lake Jackson. He was helping his family, but that move also changed the direction of most of my adult life.
Charles on the Radio
Music continued after we moved to the Gulf Coast. Charles was eventually given an hour-long radio program in Freeport where he presented local musical talent. I remember the Moore Brothers performing on his show. They sounded remarkably like the Everly Brothers. Years later, in the early 1980s, I would hear and sometimes perform with the Moore Brothers again in Houston. Music has a strange way of bringing people back into your life.
The Hootenannies
Then came the folk-music era. Charles became involved with the Brazosport-area Hootenannies, which he hosted. I performed on those shows too. One night after I had played, the City Manager of Freeport approached me. He had a son named Penn Pennington. He asked if I would teach Penn to play guitar. I agreed. Penn had a gift. Only a month later, Penn and I appeared together on the Hootenanny program. We played the Beatles' “That Boy” and “Pipeline” by the Chantay’s. Those were not easy songs for a beginning guitar player.
But Penn wasn't an ordinary beginning guitar player. He kept playing. And playing. Eventually, that young man I had been asked to teach went much farther in professional music than I ever did. Penn went on to perform at the Grand Ole Opry for several years and became Jack Greene's lead guitar player. I have always been proud of that. Charles had helped music reach me. Then, through one of Charles's shows, I had the opportunity to help music reach somebody else. That is how these things sometimes travel from one generation of musicians to another.
Charles and Eileen
Charles married Eileen. They had one daughter, Melinda. They had a wonderful marriage. Charles also became very successful in business. He built a successful insurance business associated with Lincoln Liberty Life Insurance. For a time, things had worked out very well for the little boy who had once been pushed down on the Lohn school playground. He had a wife. A daughter. A successful business. Music. A life. Then something changed.
When the Business Was Dissolved
The insurance company was dissolved. For Charles, the effect was devastating. His business began to falter. He tried selling real estate, but that did not work out. And gradually, alcohol became a larger part of his life. Then larger still. Eventually, it destroyed his marriage. There is a painful symmetry in Charles's life. As a child, he had been knocked down physically. He learned to get back up. He became a boxer. He made himself strong. He learned to defend himself against men. But there are things in life you cannot defeat with boxing gloves.
The loss of his business wounded him in a different place. And this time, my brother never completely recovered.
2012
Charles died in 2012 of a stroke. He was seventy-seven years old. He died alone in his apartment in Clute, Texas. I don't like writing that sentence. It seems terribly lonely compared with the Charles I remember. Because when I think about my brother, I don't first see an old man alone in an apartment. I see something else.
Deer Hunting
I remember deer hunting with Charles and my sons, Ben and Bryan, when the boys were just old enough to hunt. We hunted at Uncle Buster's ranch outside Mason, Texas. Four generations were together. Uncle Buster, Charles. Me. My boys. And, naturally, there was music. There was almost always music when our family got together. Those are the memories I prefer to keep.
Waiting on the Roof
But if I had to choose one picture of Charles to keep forever, it would not be the boxer. It would not be the musician. It would not be the successful insurance businessman. And it certainly would not be the lonely apartment in Clute. I would choose the dirt road outside our farmhouse. I would see a little boy sitting on the roof. Waiting. Watching the horizon. Hoping to see a car turn onto that road. Because Charles was coming home. I could sit there for hours.
That is how much I wanted to see him. Charles was not perfect. Neither am I. His life contained tremendous successes and terrible disappointments. But none of those things changes what he was to that little boy sitting on the farmhouse roof. He was my big brother. He was my hero. And I loved him.