Making it work: Sweetwater couple celebrates 75 years
SWEETWATER – Bill Brock can still remember the first time he saw his wife, Willadean.
“She was in a little bunch, a-winding a maypole, out at the old Eula School grounds,” he recalled. “There was no lights, just cars all gathered around it.
“I thought she was a pretty cute, little thing.”
It took about 16 years, but eventually those feelings were returned and the couple married. Monday will mark 75 years since that date.
If you’re doing the math in your head, you’ve probably come to a realization. Those kids were really young when they first met.
How young?
“Six,” they both replied.
“I met her when I was fixing to start school. It was 90 years ago,” Bill added. “So, it's been a while.”
For her part, Willadean said she didn’t remember Bill at the maypole, but she does from later on.
Her first impression?
“That silly kid?” Bill offers.
“Yeah, just another boy,” she replied, and they both chuckled.
There wasn’t much dating at the start. Bill said it was a long time until they got to that.
“Yeah, it was just friends playing together,” his wife said.
Finding their way
As time went on and they grew up, Bill graduated, turned 17 and enlisted in the U.S. Navy during World War II at arguably the best possible time – right at the conflict's end.
“The war was nearly over,” he said. “I always said they must’ve heard us coming.”
Bill was assigned to Camp Wallace in Galveston County. Formerly used to train anti-aircraft gunners and house prisoners of war, the camp had been transferred to the Navy late in the war and eventually became the Naval Personnel Separation Center.
“It was a demobilization center for the service,” Bill recalled. “We discharged nearly 1,000 men a day down there for over a year.”
Bill was a Seaman First Class, an E-3 ranking in later years that would be shortened to just Seaman. He could have tried for a designated office rating like Yeoman, it would have given him more rank and better pay, but that wasn’t Bill’s plan.
“I never did take a rating because if I did, then I was stuck,” he said. “I wanted to go home with the rest of them, even though I hadn't been there long. And everybody was going home.”
Discharged a year later in that big drawdown, Bill returned to Eula and thought about his next move. He enrolled in Draughon’s Business College in Abilene.
“I think, if I'm not mistaken, it was over there on South First and facing the railroad,” he recalled.
His first job after graduating was with a produce company until he caught a break with United States Gypsum who called him up to apply.
“I guess USG had asked the college for a reference and they gave them my name,” he recalled. He eventually spent his whole career with them working in office management.
'Desperate for teachers'
As Bill went off to the Navy, Willadean began to maker her way in the world, too. After three years of college, she became a teacher for at the Americanization School in Big Spring.
“At that time. It was all young, Mexican kids that hadn't had enough opportunity to learn English and so I taught first grade there,” she said. “I tell you they were desperate for teachers, everybody was in the war.”
Her aunt and uncle lived in Big Spring at the time and had suggested she speak with the school superintendent.
Americanization programs proliferated among immigrant communities across the nation during the years following the Civil War. In Indianapolis they were established to socialize German immigrants and their children to middle-class American life.
Abilene had its own Mexican-American Americanization School that opened in 1920 but was relocated in 1936 to where the G.V. Daniels Recreation Center is now, operating until 1948. A historical marker for the school can be found at the intersection of North Sixth and Cottonwood streets.
Back in Big Spring, Willadean was hired on the spot.
“I thoroughly enjoyed it,” she said of teaching there.
About a year later, she found herself closer to home.
“I taught at Denton Valley,” she said. “I had first and second grade there and I loved those kids.”
Mischief in his eye, Bill chuckled at a memory.
“I always kid her a lot. One of her jobs at Denton Valley was girl’s basketball coach and you know, these little country schools, there’s not 100 students in them,” he said.
“Well, I was the girl’s coach for lower grades, not high school,” she corrected.
“I know, but I always claimed you was the coach, Willadean,” he laughed. “And you were, I loved it!”
She cocked an eye at him.
“Yeah, the coach of grade school.” They both burst out laughing.
No dancin' in...Eula?
Their lives stable with good jobs and the war fading into the past, their interests took a more domestic turn and after reconnecting, they soon began dating.
What’s a typical date in 1947 for a pair of Callahan County kids?
“Movies,” they both answered.
“Gosh, when we were dating we went to a lot of movies,” Bill said. “We loved that Paramount Theatre, didn’t we?”
“Yeah, Gone with the Wind. That’s one of our favorites,” answered Willadean.
If there was a movie playing at the Paramount, they went to see it, with the exception of the horror genre.
But a date wasn’t always a movie. Sometimes it was a picnic, or maybe even a ball game.
But never dancing.
“Not in Eula, no,” Bill remarked, laughing as Willadean shook her head. “Not in Callahan County. That was a little risqué for us over there.”
The Question
It was on one of those return trips from the Paramount, parked on a side road near Eula, that Bill worked up the nerve to ask Willadean to marry him.
How’d that go?
“Well, I said yes,” she deadpanned.
They were married on Sept. 18, 1948, on Saturday in the home of Kenneth Kerrick, an Abilene Baptist minister on Oak Street. Seventy-five years later, their union has produced four children, 11 grandchildren, 14 great-grandchildren, and mountain of stories too numerous to fit in these pages.
Bill’s favorite thing about his wife?
“Oh, she's pretty. She was a beautiful little girl and she still is,” he said. “We’ve always like to travel and she’s always ready to go.”
"I’ve enjoyed the people and the scenery and history of the places we traveled to,” said Willadean. “I always liked visiting with the children of those countries.”
On the road again
Working for USG often meant travel for the entire family as they periodically moved where the company needed him. They’ve made lifelong friends at locations around the country thanks to his work.
When their kids were grown and Bill finally retired, the couple took a Chevy van, replaced the back seat with a bed and drove east from Alaska across Canada, turning south when they were somewhere over the Dakotas.
“That's all that hard wheat country. All those old Russians moved up there and planted all that wheat,” Bill said. “We enjoyed meeting those people every place we stopped at.”
Even though Willadean had a driver’s license, it was Bill who did all the driving, despite his occasional entreaty to convince her otherwise. After all, it’s more fun to be the passenger and watch the country go by.
They’ve had their adventures. Trips down the Amazon River, hikes into Peru’s Machu Picchu, the beauty of the Maritime provinces of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island.
Not to mention the monster roundabout of Edinburgh, Scotland.
“We had been up to the golf course over there,” Bill said.
“St. Andrew’s,” Willadean supplied.
“We’d rented a car and I was looking for the highway south, and so we got on that loop,” he continued.
But while entering the roundabout was easy, escape for these Eula kids wasn’t nearly as painless. After his second trip around the traffic circle, Willadean began to take notice.
“I knew the road but there were so many lanes, I couldn't get over to get off,” he said, chuckling as he looked at his wife. “She remembers it well, I’m sure. That’s the reason I remember it.”
Her thoughts at the time?
She laughed. “I said, ‘Damn, did you do it again?’”
Bill laughed as well, “That's what she said! She never used bad words, otherwise.”
'You work at it.'
It helps that Bill and Willadean grew up with each other. By the time they started thinking about dating, each already had a clear idea of the other’s personality. They were friends and it wasn’t difficult to envision something more.
Still, the big question remains: What does it take to make 75 years last?
Willadean gave the question a moment of thought before answering.
“You back down a lot, you don't argue unless you just can't get out of it. Cooperation,” she said.
Bill nodded. “Oh, yeah. You might get kinda aggravated occasionally, but –“
“You don’t give up,” she added. “Somebody always has to give a little.”
“You always realize there's two sides,” Bill said.
Willadean smiled.
“You work at it.”
This article originally appeared on Abilene Reporter-News: Making it work: Sweetwater couple celebrates 75 years
