82nd Birthday Celebrated By Uncle Hob

My mother's baby brother, for who I am named, was born on this day, August 26th, in 1927. Howard Robert Giesler celebrates his 82nd birthday today and, thanks to a stroke of good luck and a life time of taking good care of himself, can continue to boast of being healthy, happy and mentally alert. So, here's a toast to my Uncle on his birthday! "May you live forever . . . and may the last face you see be mine."

My mother told me when I was a child that she named me after her favorite actor, Spencer Tracy, and her only brother. My name is Robert Tracy Gupton, and my cousin Gary, the youngest son of my mother's sister Yvonne, is named Gary Howard Broadway, also carrying our uncle's name. Mama used to tell me that they were going to name me Tracy Robert instead of the other way around, but she didn't want my initials to be T.R. She and my father used to take us kids fishing when we were children and when we would catch a small fish that my father would extricate from our hooks and toss back in the river he would say that was just a little T.R. and that it wasn't worth keeping. My parents informed me that T.R. stood for "turd rustler," thus I was given the name Robert Tracy instead of Tracy Robert.

I would have to say that my mother's brother was one of the best role models I had as a child growing up in West Columbia. While the majority of the adults I grew up around smoked cigarettes and drank beer and whisky, I would always hear another side when listening to my uncle in East Columbia. "Oh, she's one of those cigarette-sucking women," he would say about one of the many women in town who smoked. I never, in my lifetime, witnessed my uncle drink any alcoholic beverage or smoke cigars or cigarettes. He rarely used profane language, especially around us kids, and no matter how hard he had worked on any given day, when he drove into the driveway of his East Columbia home back in the 1960's when we were children Uncle always had time (or made time) for his nephews and niece. Spending time in East Columbia at my grandmother's house during my childhood years was always a pleasurable experience for my brother Cody and sister Kelli and I. And those visits to DeeDee's and Uncle's house were even more enjoyable when Aunt Yvonne and Uncle Jack were visiting as well. For there presence in East Columbia usually meant that their four sons were there with them. Although the older two Broadway boys, Randy and Danny Louis, were quite a bit older than me, the younger two were just the right age for playmates. My cousin Lynn Broadway is one year younger than my older brother Cody and Gary Broadway is one year older than me; so the four of us were like little stairsteps in size and age difference, with me being the youngest of the group.

And the biggest kid of all in that little Giesler Gang from the early 1960's was our uncle. Hob, as he was usually called, did so many wonderful things with my cousins and my siblings and I when we were children and teenagers that I will forever be indebted to him for not taking the "Get out of my way kid" tact. Instead we all got to go for rides in his jeep across the rough terrain of the wooded banks of the Brazos River, take boat rides with him down Varner Creek and out into the big Brazos, and have an "older" buddy to confide in and talk to about so many different topics. I recall one jeep ride in East Columbia where Uncle hit a deep rut with his jeep and my cousin Gary was bounced clean out of the back of the jeep. We had to yell for Uncle to stop because he didn't realize that he had lost one of his passengers. Luckily Gary was uninjured and laughed it off, having landed in soft river sand. As a small child, among some of my earliest memories are sitting with Uncle at the dinner table or at his desk and watching him draw horses on a piece of paper. I would try to mimic his artistry on my own sheet of paper but his ability to draw well did not get passed along in the gene pool.

What did get passed along are many similar traits I share with my uncle that I am thankful to have inherited from both my mother and her brother and sister. Their mother deserves a great deal of the credit too, for she instilled so much into her children that has been passed along to the next generation, of which I am a part of. I can only hope and pray that my children and their children pick up a fraction of the good sense and honorable behavior genes that started with Pauline Giesler and her three kids. I neither drink (much) nor smoke, and am still struggling to get a grip on my cursing. My uncle lets a curse word slip ever so often so I know that we are all only human. He keeps the foul language to a minimum and that is what I continue to strive to do. I guess you could say I am still a work in progress while my uncle is much closer to the finished product.

As I grow older I find myself rehashing the past a lot more than I used to do. There is much in my rearview mirror that leaves a bitter taste in my mouth and, as the Sinatra song goes, "Regrets, I have a few, but then again too few to mention." I go through my parents' boxes of old family photos more and more. I look on the backs of old photographs that were my grandparents and my parents, in search of some identifying line or a few words to inform me who the people are in the old pictures of people who are a long time gone. The majority of these old pictures have no writing on the back at all. Most of the pictures I have taken in my lifetime are in the same shape. Procrastination is one family trait that unfortunatley was passed along from my grandmother to her children and on down to me. But perhaps some day I will get all of the old photos identified on the backs for future generations to identify who the people are in the pictures. And perhaps some day I will be able to tell my Uncle Hob how much I appreciated what he meant to me and my siblings and cousins throughout our lives. He's one of those rough and tough older men who hunted and fished and put his life on the line during the Korean War and was lucky enough to come back home in one piece to continue his life. So it's not easy to tell him I love him very much and will never forget the great childhood I experienced, with so many of those wonderful memories involving him and his mother and the entire East Columbia gang that I grew up around.

That upbringing I experienced is truly the stuff great novels and movies are made of. But as I grow older those long ago days of my childhood seem so very distant. I know I can never recapture the days of my youth. The majority of the adults from my childhood days have passed on and the few survivors, like my Uncle Hob, are now in their eighties and nineties. So I simply wish for the best for my uncle. Continued good health and happiness. And until you go to "that great big reservoir in the sky," as you like to put it, I can only hope that you and I can find a way to spend a lot more time together. Maybe you can show me once again how to draw those horses' heads you were so adept at back in the early 1960's. I still stink at it.

Pauline Giesler was known as DeeDee to my siblings and I when we were growing up. The Broadway boys all called her Grandma. But she was just "Mama" to her three children. Pauline is pictured below at my parents' dinner table in West Columbia in the 1970's with her daughter Verna Gupton (left) and her son Howard Giesler (right). I fondly recall the many holiday and birthday gatherings we used to have as a family unit in my younger years. The cake and ice cream my mother and her brother and their mother are enjoying in this photo taken by me many years ago was more than likely for some family member's birthday. My uncle, who celebrates his 82nd birthday today, is the lone survivor of his immediate family.

A life-long bachelor, Hob earned a living for the majority of his life as a commercial fisherman. He had the ideal environment for his vocation at his home on the banks of Varner Creek in East Columbia. The Brazos River runs within a brief walk from Hob's house and he always had a boat or two on the creekbank near the house when I was a kid, ready for him to shove in the water and head out with his faithful dog "Pup" that used to go boat riding with Uncle Hob and all of his nephews. My sister Kelli is the youngest member of Pauline Giesler's grandchildren. So, until she came along in 1960, Hob had nothing but nephews to entertain. Yvonne Broadway (the eldest of Pauline Giesler's three children) and her husband Jack had four sons: Randy, Danny Louis, Lynn and Gary. And my older brother Cody and I made six nephews before the first and only niece joined the family picture for the East Columbia Giesler family whose roots were in Illinois.

The photos above were taken in 1951 when my mother's brother Hob was home on leave during the Korean War. Howard Robert Giesler was 23 or 24 years old when these pictures were taken at the East Columbia home he shared with his mother, Pauline Giesler. My mother, Verna Giesler, had married my dad, Rex Gupton, two years earlier in 1949, and her older sister Yvonne Giesler was married to Jack Broadway. Jack and Yvonne's eldest son Randy is pictured with "Uncle Hob" in the photos below. Hob was a medic in the Army who proudly displayed a plaque on his living room wall during my childhood years that honored him for his meritorious efforts on the battlefields in Korea.

My cousin Randy Broadway is pictured with our uncle, Howard Robert Giesler, in the two photos above that were taken by my mother, Verna Giesler Gupton, in 1951 at the East Columbia home where Howard and his sisters Verna (my mom) and Yvonne (Randy's mom) grew up. Howard, nicknamed "Hob" by his sisters and friends, was home on leave from the U.S. Army during the Korean War.