105-year-old Texas cowboy loses houses to wildfire

105-year-old Texas cowboy loses houses to wildfire

The Associated Press
Friday, Apr. 15, 2011

ASPERMONT, Texas — N.L. Winter says that in his 105 years on the rolling plains of West Texas, he has never seen anything like the fires of the past week.

The man known to friends and family as "Boss" saw three of the homes where he has lived burn in a vast wildfire that spread across his ranch and parts of four counties north of Abilene.

"It is the worst fire I've ever seen," he told the Abilene Reporter-News.

Among the places reduced to ashes was the half-dugout where he was born on April 30, 1905. Five years later, his father built a two-room house about a half-mile away. That's gone now, too. So is the house where Boss and his late first wife, Leta, raised their three children.

"He's cried a few tears," said daughter Betty Rash Whigham, 81, of Abilene.

Gladys Winter, Boss' 99-year-old second wife who married the lifelong cowboy in 1991, lost the home where she lived for 46 years.

"It was devastating," she said.

The houses, all unoccupied, were among eight buildings that burned on Boss' 1,400-acre Winter Estate ranch that burned in what the Texas Forest Service had named the Swenson Fire. That fire blackened 162 square miles of rolling plains about 50 miles northwest of Abilene and 170 miles west of Fort Worth.

Boss says he remembers the day in 1910 when, at age 5, his family moved into the two-room house. His chin quivered as he used two canes to move up close to its ruins.

"It stood right where he put it until last week," he said. "When I see this, I think about home sweet home."

Boss still likes a chew of tobacco, saying that he started sneaking chew from his father when he was 4.

"He kept it in-between the mattresses to keep it moist," he said. "I'd slip in there and get me a little chew while he was out."

Although this week has been the worst, Boss Winter is no stranger to drought.

When he was 13 in 1918, a drought forced his father and him to drive their horses and cattle about 110 miles to the northwest to near Palo Duro Canyon on the High Plains. He remembers the covered wagon they used to get there and the tent in which they lived.

Abilene Reporter-News/Victor Cristales via AP

N.L. "Boss" Winter, 106, and his daughters Marie Hogue, left, and Betty Rash Whigham visit the burned remains of the home where he grew up 10 miles north of Aspermont Tuesday, April 12, 2011. The home, which stood since 1910, burned in the Stonewall County wildfire last Thursday. Winter told the Abilene Reporter-News that it's the worst fire he's ever seen.

Wow! It's kind of hard to even wrap one's wits around just how much history this one individual has seen and experienced. Woodrow Wilson's disastrous passage of the 16th and 17th Amendments, WW1, WW2, the Korean War, the Cold War, the Vietnam War, Kennedy's assassination, Johnson's "Great Society" abortion, MLK's and RFK's assassinations... and so very, very much more - all the technological innovations. It just blows my mind that there are still people alive who can remember covered wagons and living in tents.

It is amazing. One day I'll be telling people how I used to surf the 'net on a computer. God knows what it'll be in 40 or 50 years... but it sure won't be like this.

Oh yeah... and how we used to drive cars.

TexasBlue wrote:It is amazing. One day I'll be telling people how I used to surf the 'net on a computer. God knows what it'll be in 40 or 50 years... but it sure won't be like this.

Oh yeah... and how we used to drive cars.

I'm already telling kids how I used to type up press releases on an actual typewriter on carbon paper and deliver them by automobile all over the city. It would take a full day to deliver a single press release when I first started in PR. We didn't have "Xerox" machines back then. It's just mindblowing how rapidly technology has advanced in the last 70 years.

dblboggie wrote:

TexasBlue wrote:It is amazing. One day I'll be telling people how I used to surf the 'net on a computer. God knows what it'll be in 40 or 50 years... but it sure won't be like this.

Oh yeah... and how we used to drive cars.

I'm already telling kids how I used to type up press releases on an actual typewriter on carbon paper and deliver them by automobile all over the city. It would take a full day to deliver a single press release when I first started in PR. We didn't have "Xerox" machines back then. It's just mindblowing how rapidly technology has advanced in the last 70 years.

Remember these? I do... from 8th grade.

That "Fortran statement" is not ringing any bells. What the hell is it? Some kind of primitive computer program?

kronos wrote:That "Fortran statement" is not ringing any bells. What the hell is it? Some kind of primitive computer program?

This explains it better than I can.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card

Then there's Windows 1.0 (released in 1985)

TexasBlue wrote:

dblboggie wrote:

TexasBlue wrote:It is amazing. One day I'll be telling people how I used to surf the 'net on a computer. God knows what it'll be in 40 or 50 years... but it sure won't be like this.

Oh yeah... and how we used to drive cars.

I'm already telling kids how I used to type up press releases on an actual typewriter on carbon paper and deliver them by automobile all over the city. It would take a full day to deliver a single press release when I first started in PR. We didn't have "Xerox" machines back then. It's just mindblowing how rapidly technology has advanced in the last 70 years.

Remember these? I do... from 8th grade.

I remember those from my time in the Army. I worked at a Naval installation in San Diego that used these cards and the computers that went with them...

That was also where I saw my very first fax machine - a prehistoric beast that used a metal drum and a stylus and worked I know not how... and it took ages to send or receive a "facsimile" transmission.