Music: Galveston - Glen Campbell

Gasoline was about 25 cents a gallon around 1967, and diesel fuel was about 13 cents a gallon. We lived on the north side of Houston, and we went to Galveston on quite a few week ends. I had a 1950 Ford pickup, and we used it to go to Galveston. I bid on it, and bought it from Kroger for $101. It was designed to be a gasoline burning truck, but I used diesel fuel in it successfully. Gasoline engines won't start on diesel fuel, but once they're started they will run on diesel fuel, if they are low compression. We had John Deere tractors that had two tanks; a small gasoline tank and a big diesel tank. We'd turn on the gasoline to start the engine, and then switch it to diesel after it was running. I would put gasoline in the Ford pickup at the start of the trip, add diesel fuel on the way to Galveston and put in gasoline when I got there. It smelled like a diesel.

Hurricanes are a problem in Galveston. There were several hurricanes while we lived in the Galveston area. One of the houses on Sea Isle was round. The roof was designed so the wind couldn't lift the outside edges, and deflected the wind from any direction. Quite a few dwellings were damaged or completely destroyed by the hurricanes, but the round house was unscathed. As much as four feet of beach sand was washed away by the hurricanes, and in some cases four feet of sand was removed from the area under the houses. The eroded area then filled with water.Water covered areas became the property of the state of Texas.

There was a cow pasture on one side of Sea Isle. The cows make paths in the vegetation. When the tide came in, the cow paths would have about a foot of water in them. If you walked in the flooded cow paths for some distance, fish would swim away in front of you.

Those are precious memories.