a saga of one family’s achieving the American dream in Rosenberg, Texas

Mom, me, and Dad in front of our home

at 1021 Timber Lane in Rosenberg, Texas circa 1968

Rosenberg is now a city of 39,468 (2021 census) inhabitants and a part of the Houston – The Woodlands – Sugar Land metropolitan area. When my parents moved forty miles north from our home in Brazoria to Rosenberg in June of 1964, I was a new summer school student at the University of Texas at Austin. How new, you ask? Well, when I wrote my folks to tell them I had found a ride home for a weekend visit in July, my dad wrote back something to the effect that I needed to come to Rosenberg because he and Mom lived there – not in Brazoria where we had lived for the past five years. New jobs for both Dad and Mom, new rental house, new church, everything new. I was horrified – I had hoped to see my friends from high school who stayed at home for the summer instead of going off to college. Why move to Rosenberg, I wondered. Mostly I felt hurt that they hadn’t prepared me with the truth.

The Rosenberg years in the 1960s and early 70s for my parents were good years for them. They were finally able to purchase their own home (1021 Timber Lane pictured above) in 1965 after nearly twenty years of marriage. My mother taught second grade in a much larger school district where my father was assistant superintendent for the Lamar Consolidated schools that continued to grow as Houston expanded south and west. Mom played piano for a Southern Baptist Church as she had done her entire life wherever we were, and Daddy sang in the choir.

Daddy and Mama with their three bird dogs Rex, Dab and Seth

those old dogs couldn’t hunt,

but they did love the sofa in our den on Timber Lane

Daddy with his small grill where he loved to cook steaks

in the driveway of Timber Lane – his one attempt to cook

When I graduated from UT in the summer of 1967, I moved to Houston to take a job with Arthur Andersen, one of the top eight CPA firms in the nation at that time. Sundays often meant driving the half hour from my apartment to see my folks in Rosenberg, making sure I was there in time for church.

This picture is such a favorite of mine because Mom and I are laughing together – I remember she was trying to help me learn how to place my feet at an angle when I stood in high heels. That advice never resonated with me…

…but I did have fun trying to make her happy

I never felt that Rosenberg was my home, but my parents loved their jobs, church, frequently seeing relatives and friends who lived in the Houston area, finally able to purchase their own home on Timber Lane that allowed them to experience the American dream their immigrant ancestors crossed oceans to find. I loved my parents dearly, but I was off to new adventures in the Pacific Northwest three thousand miles from the house on Timber Lane in Rosenberg.

Clouds loomed on all of our horizons as a new decade brought unimaginable losses.

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Please stay tuned.