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| Bunyon Oco Norris Painted by my Aunt Kassie, his 3rd daughter |
My grandfather’s name was Bunyon Oco (Bill) Norris.
He is my mother’s father who influenced and directed the fundamental Baptist beliefs under which I was born and reared.
“Papaw” as he was known to his grandchildren, was named after John Bunyon (1628-1688), author of the Christian allegorical classic, “Pilgrim’s Progress” as well as several other controversial Puritan Christian writings.
Both of my grandparents left a profound influence on my life in very different ways, but my Papaw’s influence was the most penetrating because of his commanding, often invasive fundamental Baptist beliefs and his extreme conservative political positions.
My family lived in the house my parents had built on 2 ½ acres of property Papaw had sold them. It was right next to he and “Mamaw,’s” house—the house he built with his own hands. My mother lived there with them from her early teen years until she married my dad at 18 years of age.
I can remember many things about my grandparents during those years next door since my siblings and I had access to them almost every day. They had both been retired for many years and both in poor health, so they were usually always home when we were.
Mamaw was diagnosed in her 40’s as a “Brittle” (hard to manage) diabetic. Papaw gave her an insulin shot every morning and she could not stray from her very strict diet at all, or she would get “woozy” (hypoglycemic) and eventually go into what they called a “coma” (episodes where she would lose consciousness and begin seizure-like jerking motions).
In that event, someone would have to force her to swallow a cup of orange juice with a teaspoon of sugar while she was in the throes of these seizure-like episodes.
Not an easy feat.
Additionally, someone would have to hold her tongue down with a teaspoon so she would not choke on her own tongue. Papaw would have great difficulty doing this on his own so he would often have to call someone from our house next door to help.
On several occasions, that help was a less than 13-year-old me.
At times, I would be the only one with her, so I quickly learned how to recognize Mamaw’s ‘woozy’ spells and learned to immediately get her to drink her sugared orange juice before she progressed to a full-on “coma”.
I remember several occasions when we could not get her to come out of it and she would be rushed to the Sugar Land hospital, thankfully, only 2 miles away.
Traumatic, to say the least.
Papaw had physical and emotional injuries related, if not caused by, his combat experience as a soldier in the Rainbow Division during World War 1.
More about that later...
I don’t have many details of his day-to-day life growing up, but I do know that his father (my great grandfather, William Isiah Norris) was a wealthy businessman who owned a chain of grocery stores but lost much of his wealth to an accountant who “robbed him blind”-- as the story goes.
The Norris brothers were a mischievous bunch.
My Papaw told me some of the shenanigans they pulled while their father was literally ‘minding the store.’
One story was about a prized, very expensive saddle my great grandfather owned.
While he was ‘minding the store’ one day, the Norris boys decided it would be great fun to try out their father’s saddle on his equally prized Brahma bull.
Predictably, the bull didn’t appreciate this insult to his dignity and once saddled and mounted, bucked his way to a very muddy, mud puddle.
It doesn’t take much imagination to envision the effect on the saddle!
As was reported to me by the main instigator, my Papaw, "We all got the “strapping of our lives” when their dad got home and assessed the damage.
But it was their dying mother’s prayer and heart’s desire that all her boys would grow up to be preachers. Turns out, she got her wish. All those rascally boys became just that... Baptist preachers...eventually.
In my years as an adult, I have often reflected on the events of those years and come to realize how much trauma had occurred in my grandparents’ lives.
And how much and in what ways their trauma was passed down to their children and grandchildren.
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| Papaw, Mamaw and their four children. My mother is the youngest |
I was a child witness to many emotional and physical events that were direct effects of the extreme traumas and near catastrophes my grandparents as well as my mother and her siblings survived.
My great grandmother who died of cancer many years before I was born, dictated her dying wishes to her family who were present at her deathbed. Those words are recorded in the Norris family history compiled by my mother, Barbara Norris Martin a few years before she died.
At the beginning of those deathbed wishes, the person recording them wrote that one son, Bill Norris, my Papaw, was at that very moment on a ship headed to France to fight in The Great War. It was May 1918.
That war was the beginning of my Papaw’s world of many sorrows.
Though he barely survived that war, as a young man of only 24 years, he would suffer more trauma than many, modern-day Americans would ever know in their lifetimes,
Because his traumas did not end when the war ended.
Read more about the famous Rainbow Division.
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