The Goat Man

This is a story from Patsy's childhood.

Do you have one you would like to share?

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STORIES FROM MY CHILDHOOD
“Nell and the Goat Man”
Sometimes I think about how much the world has changed since I was born in 1938.

I was born in Gladewater in northeast Texas.

My parents moved to Ft. Worth when I was a year old.

We lived in a duplex on the South side until the summer after the 6th grade

(there was no kindergarten back then).

Our house was probably built around 1900.

I think in today’s world it might be called Arts and Crafts architecture,

but really it was just a big old house.

It sat high off the street (804 Malta St.) with about six stairs

going up to the huge covered front porch.

It was so deep that I could sit on the porch playing Jacks during a rainstorm and not get wet. The porch had columns all around.

In the summer, the adult neighbors used to sit and talk on the
front porch steps at dusk while the children caught lightning bugs and put them into jars.

We also made rings out of the glowing bugs.

We stayed outside until it cooled down

because none of us had air conditioning.

The porch wrapped around one side of the house

with a bannister all the way around.

There was a rock-edged flower bed with large shrubs

between the porch and the yard.

I spent endless hours climbing up on the bannister

and leaping over the shrubs into the front yard.

Back then, almost all neighborhoods had sidewalks,

and I used to spend endless hours skating.

I knew every crack and uneven spot on the sidewalk.
Our living arrangement was somewhat unique, too.

Our landlady, Nell Myers, lived on the other side of the duplex.

She had a rock driveway on our side leading to a double garage.

One side of the garage housed her car (very old, black; I don’t know what year

but older than 1938) which she seldom drove.

The other side of the garage was filled with every nut, bolt, screw, nail, piece
of leather, cloth, wood, string, tool, etc. that you could imagine.

Nell WAS the proverbial packrat.

It’s a good thing we didn’t have a car because there

wouldn’t have been room in the garage.

We didn’t have a telephone either but that never seemed to be a problem.

Nell had cut a hole in the wall in our hallway so that she could

pass the phone through to us if we got a call.

It was a candlestick phone, now a valuable antique.

I didn’t realize for a long time that the phone was in a closet on her side.

We also shared a refrigerator with Nell. It was kept in a small back
room between the two apartments. It had a tiny freezing compartment so that if we bought ice
cream, we could only buy a pint and eat it right away.

There was also a cellar that you entered by
a door in the floor in the room with the refrigerator.

Nell had a lot of canned goods in the cellar,
but I was sort of scared to go down those stairs because of the cobwebs and spiders.
The backyard was large with a fence dividing the front part from the back.

I loved to eat the seeds from the pomegranate tree that grew on one side of the yard.

There was a honeysuckle vine on the fence on the other side of the yard.

Whenever I smell honeysuckle, I still think of my childhood.

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There was a man who lived a few blocks from us that we called the Goat Man.

He lived in a shack on a big lot and kept goats.

The goats would run in and out of the house

because the door was always open.

He also saved newspapers, and you could see them stacked neatly in the
house. He left a narrow path so that he and the goats could walk through the house.

The Goat Man had a long white beard and wore old, raggedy clothes.

He used to walk down the alleys and
go through all the neighbors’ garbage cans and put food into a tow sack.

Nell didn’t like him going through her garbage so she built a platform as high as the tall back fence with steps going up from the inside of the yard.

She put her garbage cans on the platform. The garbage truck would come down the alley and the workers would empty the cans without leaving the back of the truck.

There was a local legend that the Goat Man had a lot of money under his house.

One day walking home from school, my friends double-dog dared me to go look under his house. I was really scared, but of course, I had to do it.

I ran up to the house and quickly looked under.

I didn’t see any money, but I got out of there in a hurry.

At least I saved my pride.

In today’s world, if you had a man in your neighborhood keeping goats in his house, hoarding newspapers, and scavenging through everyone’s garbage, you would probably report him to the proper authorities who would investigate him and give him counseling or something.

We just ignored him and called him “The Goat Man”

because he really didn’t bother anyone except Nell.
Patsy #108

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Fabulous story, Patsy! You bring back a lot of memories.