Thinkin' 'bout the Good Ol' Days

Ruth Ryan

October in Texas has always been my favorite month of the year. The Brazoria County Fair, Oktoberfest, Halloween, the Come and Take It weekend in Gonzales, high school and college football games, cooler weather, and the World Series are just a few things that make me smile. Just last month I was in NY (that in itself makes me glad to be a Texan) for the US Open tennis tournament, and my cab driver (originally from Rumania) was curious about Texans. That got me thinking about my favorite towns and favorite time of the year.

As a child, the first week in October always meant Brazoria County Fair time, and my sister and brothers and I would beg my dad to drive us to Angleton on the first Friday night of the fair. As soon as I jumped out of the car I could smell the intoxicating, though distinct, blend of the sweet cotton candy mixed with the aroma drifting from the animal barns. Sometimes the nights would be hot and muggy, but it was a lot more fun if the air was cool and crisp from a weak cold front.

If we ran out of money, we would just cruise the carnival, searching for friends and stopping to watch people try their luck at throwing darts at balloons or tossing rings around coke bottles. Something about the smell of the rodeo, the bright lights of the carnival, and the hopes of winning a big stuffed animal were exciting to us small-town kids. My mother, however, never shared our excitement when we came in holding up little plastic bags of goldfish or if we came home sick from eating too much junk.

Another treasured aspect of small-town life in those days was walking or riding my bike all over town. In October my sister and I liked to pick pecans under the looming trees next to the old Presbyterian church. We would spend hours there on Saturday or Sunday afternoons, hoping to find enough for our mother to make brownies or cookies. For some reason my own children didn’t think that picking pecans was that much fun…. Guess I’ll have to work on my grandkids.

When I was a little older, my favorite activity was playing football with other kids in the spacious front yard of a friend who lived on Booth Lane in Alvin. The leaves were starting to fall and the October air took some of the humidity away…we had some great times. As a junior high cheerleader, I couldn’t wait for the first cool front, which meant we could wear our sweaters and wool skirts instead of our cotton jumpers.

At the end of October, Alvin always held a Halloween carnival at the school, which meant costume contests, games, cake walks, and performances by the school choirs. To this day, I can still remember all of the words to the songs from The Sound of Music that we performed at the carnival. The high school kids elected a Halloween coronation king and queen with their court of dukes and duchesses, princes, and princesses.

We were always allowed to trick-or-treat unsupervised, not just in our own neighborhoods but all over town. This, of course, is unheard of in today’s world, and we never worried about someone putting anything dangerous in our candy. It’s true, those were simpler times, but I just hope that today’s kids have half as much fun as we did.

Small towns in Texas are known for their festivals, and October is the most popular time of the year for these. Oktoberfest in New Braunfels, the Round Top Antiques Festival, and the Come and Take It festival in Gonzales are but a few. Because baseball season ended that time of the year, we often took our kids to our ranch in Gonzales on that first weekend in October.

I still laugh when I think about the chicken-flying contest held in the middle of the town square. A man would put his chicken inside a mailbox mounted on a 20-foot pole, open the mailbox, and push the chicken out with a plunger. The chickens would squawk and fly, and the contest was seeing which chicken flew the farthest distance. If the chicken landed on a nearby building, it was immediately disqualified. This popular contest lasted many years until PETA came along and spoiled all the “fun.”

For me, baseball and October seem to go hand in hand. In 1969, Nolan’s father spent his birthday in New York watching his son pitch in a World Series game. Then last October, Nolan took our grandson to Chicago to watch “his Astros” in their first World Series…. Special memories from a very special time of year.

Editor's Note: Ruth Ryan is a contributing writer for The Buzz Magazines and wife of baseball Hall-of-Famer Nolan Ryan.