Of Snakes and Roughriders

Mattie’s Corner

• Of Snakes and Roughriders
• Of Snakes and Roughriders

Snake is an ugly word to many of us. We have been warned about bringing in our ferns and other pot plants from the outside to keep until spring. Snakes and lizards sometimes hide in the outside plants and after being brought inside crawl out.

This is a portion of a column I wrote for the paper about 15 years ago about a young woman from Center who lived in Dallas who was watching television when she saw a snake crawling in the deep pile of her carpet. The snake moved fast and crawled under some furniture. Frantically, she put her shoes on and went outside and got a hoe from the storage shed and came back in to look for the snake. What seemed like hours, she found the snake and was able to kill it. Trying to figure out how the snake was able to get in the house, she remembered that she had brought in a large pot plant which had been outside on the patio. Since then she never brought any more pot plants inside.

This story appeared in the Hemphill Reporter recently. It seems that a man was explaining why he had been in the hospital. He said his wife had brought a bunch of pot plants and hanging baskets into the house from outdoors to keep them from being frozen by the cold weather that was due to occur that night.

It so happened that a green snake had hidden in one of the plants which was carried inside. Soon after the pot and soil got warm the snake slithered out of the plant and his wife saw the snake and let out a scream that could be heard all over the neighborhood.

He was taking a bath at the time and he leaped out of the tub and ran to see what was the trouble. When she told him about the snake and that it had gone under the sofa, he got down on the floor to peep under it. About that time, their dog came up and cold-nosed him. He thought it was the snake and he fainted.

His wife thought he’d had a heart attack and called 911 for an ambulance. The ambulance attendants rushed in, loaded him on a stretcher and started to carry him out when the snake came slithering out from under the sofa toward them. The ambulance men saw the snake, dropped the stretcher, which caused the breaking of the poor fellow’s leg, and that’s why he was in the hospital.

The Shelby County American Legion Post is named for a young Shelby County man who was killed in World War I, Norman G. Crocker. He was the son of the Rev. C.A. Crocker and a relative of Reba Taylor. The young man was a student at Texas A&M College and volunteered for service.

After training in camps, he was among 2.177 American soldiers on board the British ship Tuscana in route to France when the ship was torpedoed by a German U-Boat in Feb. 1918 and sank.

It was estimated that 113 of the American soldiers were lost on that ship which was the first to be sunk by the enemy. The Tuscana was being convoyed by British destroyers and was sunk off the Irish coast within 15 miles of land.

The body of Crocker and others were recovered and buried in Scotland. After the war, Norman G. Crocker’s remains were shipped back home and buried in Shelby County.

J.M. Ferguson of Timpson was also on the same ship with Crocker and he was saved.

There was a question recently about whether the SFA Lumberjack football team had ever had an opponent other than a college foe. According to the SFA football media guide, the Lumberjack’s first gridiron battle was against Center High School team in 1923. SFA won 1200.

Our team didn’t have the Roughrider name until 1926. At that time Weldon Sanders, editor of the high school newspaper ran a contest among the student body for a name for our new team.

Robert Harkrider, a first cousin of Catherine Davis Pinkston, submitted the winning name of “Roughriders”. Henry Munnerlyn and James Lemons drew the first pictures of a bucking horse and rider for the school paper.

Mattie