January 3, 2000

This is a continuation of last week’s article regarding how I have acquired much of the historical items about Aubrey. While I was in the Army, Grandma had an elderly couple, Mr. and Mrs. Mitchell living with her. This situation did not work out for her, so she moved in with my parents, Jim and Reina Goin. The house was then rented to Mr. Robert Crowsey and his family, then to the Tommy Wright family who lived in the house until Jackie and I moved in the house with our family of two girls. I had changed jobs and was working for the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the move made my commute to work shorter. My Daddy deeded the old place over to me at that time

Aunt Sis (sister of my Daddy and Uncle Joe Goin) passed away during the year of 1970. She was kind hearted and generous in her thoughts and love. While Aunt Sis didn’t possess all that much, we can describe her assets as modest. She left everyone in her immediate family of Uncle Joe and my Daddy in her will, to be shared with her daughter Billie, who was the administrator of the estate. Billie asked me to help her go through all of the stuff at the Belmont Street apartment in Fort Worth, as she disposed of the belongings in the apartment. She loaded her truck with as much as she could to take back to Houston, but this left loads of valuables to be stored. There were books by the trailer-load and I hauled a lot of the books to my sister Mary, because we didn’t have a dry place to store it all; everything had a value to one person or another, none of it was thought of as trash.

We were about to leave when I suggested to Billie that we look up in the scuttle hole in the small breakfast nook. It all seemed so insignificant, but I took a ladder off the track and pushed up on the plywood door (about 24 inches by 24 inches). I pushed up on the plywood and discovered that the little ceiling door was what I thought was a fake door; however, this didn’t make logical sense, so Billie and I both kept pushing on the door. Both Billie and I are 6 feet tall and equal in pushing power, so we decided to push again with all our might. We were able to budge it just a little and after tugging and tugging and pushing up we decided it would move, and with a lot more effort we found it to be loaded down with about 200 pounds of old books.

Aunt Sis was real handy to save everything that had just a little bit of history, and many times it pertained to family and thus as time goes by I find myself and Billie too, that we definitely inherited a part of Aunt Sis. We find it interesting to have obtained this art of collections and so here we go. I have a lot more to go.

We cleared the huge pile of old books out of the way trying to make room to squeeze up into the attic, and as we pushed our way up, we found a pull chain light. We surveyed that there were several truck loads of the valuables neatly stacked in order with little notes on the boxes. We immediately knew that we had discovered the answers to many questions, yet we still have more questions that don’t have answers. Billie and I generally have a pretty good way of reaching a unity in our thoughts, as well as, what we want to do. We decided that both of us had all we wanted or needed and that I should load it all up the next day, and haul it to a barn that Giles V.(my brother) and I had built on a farm we jointly owned. The barn was located near where the water tower at the Isle de Boise State Park is now. It would take us forty-five minutes to get across over to the barn after leaving the highway. The property was land-locked, there were no public roads to the property. We simply had no other place to take the loads of books and valuables, we just couldn’t let it go as trash. Billie took off south to Houston and I went north to Aubrey.

Next week I will begin to tell you what valuables we found in the many boxes and piles of books.

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