My Roots

I suppose any decent memoir should begin saying a bit about how I came to be. fI certainly believe what came before forms us in ways we don’t always realize.


My Dad, Grady, grew up in a small agricultural community called Forest Hill near Petty, Texas. His parents (and he) worked in the cotton fields as sharecroppers. How did this come to be?


The Wicks side goes back to Southeast Tennessee, and before that, Alabama and Virginia. The earliest verified ancestor on that side dates from the early 1800’s. There’s a Wicks Cemetery Road still by the old homestead near Fayetteville, Tennessee. Some of them were killed in the Civil War, but Dad’s grandfather made his way to Bonham, Texas. After his wife died, he remarried a much younger woman. Hard times and some family drama (that younger woman I mentioned) left my Grandpa Jimmy Wicks to take up sharecropping to survive. I’ve got lots of stories about him and his wife Ollie, but I’ll work that in later. It was hard work and harder times for Dad growing up. He was all prepared to move to Alaska when he finished the 10th grade (the school didn’t go longer than that in their rural community and sharecropping was not his dream job by any stretch). Instead though, his Aunt Johnnye and Uncle Luther convinced him to come stay with them in Amarillo where he could finish school, though he would have to work to pay his way. He agreed and there he finished high school and one year of college before the war started.


Mom, Rachel Ann Williams Wicks, grew up on a farm in Southern Arkansas near the town of Bearden. Her family came there from various areas in the south and east. One line in her ancestry traces all the way back to the 1500’s where our forefathers worked in the constabulary at Windsor Castle. For years I had heard we were related to the Tudors, but my research shows that story probably found its origin because our family worked where they did. Mom was one of the most independent minded women I’ve ever known, with a fierce temper and the heart to back it up. In her rural Arkansas community when she was 17, a preacher “preached her into hell” and she knew she needed to leave. She packed up on her own, moved to Little Rock where she attended business school. After finishing that she moved to Amarillo, and that is where she met Dad.


In Amarillo mom found a job with American General Insurance and her desk was by the window on the second floor. Across the street was a service station. There my Dad worked paying his way in college. This was an era before air conditioning, and he saw her and would walk across the street and talk with her. Eventually he asked her out to go dancing and she said yes.


Funny story here. He had already asked someone else out. So he arranged to set the other woman up with his brother, so he could date Mom. The other person was not too happy though she did go along, but my parents to be hit it off right away. On Christmas Day, 1940, they drove across the state line and were married at Duncan, Oklahoma by a Justice of the Peace.


World War II happened in ‘43, and Dad was sent to California, then to the Pacific where he worked in an engineering unit with the US Army Air Corps building air strips at various islands during the war. Mom worked in a bomb factory for a time, and when he came back, well, like a whole lot of other folks back then, they began to think about a family. Dad had a job as surveyor and they were living in Oklahoma City for a time.


There in Oklahoma City at St Anthony Hospital at 8:11 PM on July 9, 1947, I was born. Named Grady Roland Wicks II (after my Dad) with the gender marker saying “boy.” I would go by the name Roland, they decided. They got that whole gender and name thing wrong, but how could they know? Mom and I stayed in the hospital for a week before coming home. Nothing was wrong, but they just did that back then. The total bill was less that $200.00. Imagine that today! It was on that hot July day that my story began to play out. Those stories coming in future posts.