Bill & Gladys James, and Somerset Texas
In 1848, twelve years after the battle of the Alamo, the original location of Somerset was founded southwest of San Antonio by a group of Baptist families from Somerset, Kentucky. Today the Old Rock Baptist Church still stands there at that same location and is still active. In 1909 when the railroad came through the town was moved north a few miles. In 1913 oil was discovered and later coal, and Somerset grew. At one time there was a state bank, a hotel, several machine shops and blacksmith shops. In 1920 the Post Office and the Somerset Independent School District were formed. After a few boom years the oil and coal and their supporting businesses played out. But the community thrived as a great place to live and raise kids, in large extent due to the strong school district.
In 1915 William Marshall James, Bill, was born at his parent’s home about midway between the two Somerset town sites. In 1917 Gladys Pearl Spellmann was born at Rocky Creek, about 90 miles to the east in Gonzales County. When the Somerset School District was created Bill was 5 years old and Gladys was 3 years old. Their lives would lead them to the Somerset classrooms and playing fields where they both found the place to invest their lives.
Bill and Gladys James served in the Somerset Independent School District from the 1930s to the 1980s. Bill James served 40 years as a teacher, principal and superintendent. For most of Gladys’s 44 years in the classroom she was “the” English teacher in the district. They lived in the heart of Somerset in a modest home across the fence from the school. In the early years they each sponsored a different high school class. This resulted in vigorous completion between their classes on who would win the coveted blue ribbon for the best parade float at the November 11th Armistice Day/Homecoming Day Parade. When they married in 1941 they joined forces as co-sponsors of the Senior Class, a force to be reckoned with.
Visiting the James’s during the weeks leading up to the Homecoming Parade would find the home full of dashing athletic boys grinning big with flat top duck tail haircuts, and pretty girls in bouncing poodle skirts with multiple puffed petticoats. The girls were also very capable in their basketball and track outfits. The parade floats were converted hay trailers overflowing with paper Kleenex flowers, so every corner of the James home was stacked tall with piles of fluffy snowdrifts of bright white or blue or red or yellow flowers. Each flower was hand folded and tied and fluffed by circles of laughing and joking teenagers sitting on the floors. In the kitchen Gladys and the girls swirled globs of syrup and pecan cluster pralines onto waxed paper to cool and harden.
Bill would be outside in the carport surrounded by several handy students attaching the wood and chicken wire skirt all around the trailer. Several boys would be on top of the trailer building whatever structure was needed for that year’s theme. One year the float consisted entirely of the pretty girl’s formal dress flowing from the middle out to all corners of the float, all covered by thousands of yellow tissue flowers. At the parade everyone wanted to know how they got her up there and into that dress. They had actually rigged a hoist in the rafters and lowered her in. After the parade they had to take the float apart to get her out.
The James’s hosted many Senior Class trips including Galveston. Padre Island, and the Longhorn Caverns. In those early years the entire senior class and several teachers could all fit on one bus. The yearly trip to Laredo for example included excited students and teachers’ crossing the border to tour the colorful Mexican markets and exciting culture of the bullfights. Departure time was 4am Sunday morning and everyone would meet at the old bus barn and load into the school bus. The senior boys always stayed up all night, and this often proved to be humorous at the traditional mid-morning stop for the church service in Hebbronville. During the service at least one of the boys would usually drift off to sleep with his head tilted onto his shoulder. When it was time to sing and everyone stood up, a classmate sitting by him would have to elbow him awake to stand up. He would quickly jump up and waver a little, standing up like everyone else. The elbow also worked during the sermon, when the slumbering boy would get the elbow in the side again and scramble to get up and stand up straight, and finally open one eye and realize that everyone else was sitting down looking at him. It was also perilous to go to sleep on the bus on the trip home. If Mr. James wasn’t driving, he enjoyed the benefit of several pranks up his sleeve.
Today, with the skyline of San Antonio in the background, Bill and Gladys are at home on the hill overlooking the land they loved from the vantage of Bexar Cemetery in Somerset. Resting there, Mr. James is buried a mile from the home where he was born. As a youngster working barefoot in the peanut fields he was better known as Billy and sometimes Willie, usually spoken fondly and with a Mexican accent. Growing up, when away from home and school he mostly spoke Spanish with a little Tex-Mex flavoring, out of choice and necessity. Some folks believe that he did his thinking in Spanish and translated to English. A strong indicator is that when he got kicked by a cow, the knee-jerk verbal response came out in Spanish. As a teenager he was recognized as the arm wrestling champion in Bexar County, and enjoyed a few of them hiding in the cemetery at night and wetting down surprised passersby.
When he was 15 his father Luther took him out of school to work in the fields as with his older brothers. But his uncle Fred, a member of the school board, came and got Billy out of the field and ushered him back to school where he graduated at 17 years old. When he was 18 years old a peanut thrasher removed his left arm. It was good that he had finished high school. He attended Texas College of Arts and Industries (Texas A&I) in Kingsville and graduated in 1931. From there he returned to Somerset to begin his teaching career.
Mrs. James was born Gladys Pearl Spellmann in 1917 at Rocky Creek near the town of Smiley in Gonzales County, Texas. Her forefathers had landed at Plymouth Rock but more recent ancestors came to the Indiola and Galveston areas from Germany in the 1800s. One ancestor, Zadock Woods and his family were number 300 on Stephan F. Austin’s legendary list of “The Old Three Hundred.” Zadock fought in the battle of Gonzales, the battle of Concepcion, the Grass Fight and the Runaway Scrape. In the Mexican invasions of 1842 Woods and his sons fought with Mathew Caldwell’s troops against General Adrian Woll, where Zadock was killed in the Dawson Massacre. The Mexican lance that Zadock wrestled from and used to kill a Mexican soldier is displayed in the Alamo. The family was well entrenched in south Texas. Gladys grew up there out in the country with her seven brothers and sisters. At twelve years old she was “the” teacher for the Rocky Creek school. She graduated at 16 and attended Texas State Teacher’s College in San Marcos Texas. Gladys arrived in Somerset with a flourish and as their English teacher began to introduce the boys and girls to Shakespeare and Chaucer other fun things.
Bill James’s first grade teacher was Miss Winnie Briggs, a stalwart member of the community. Her life consisted of serving the school and the church and the community, and her invalid brother. Mr. and Mrs. James three children, Francine, Billy, and Randy, also had Miss Winnie was their first grade teacher. She retired after Randy, and 50 years.
One of the images I remember of the Somerset School District growing was Dad pulling up to the school in his green pickup truck and trailer stacked high with loads of surplus landing mats from Kelly Field or Lackland AFB. These were used to build the walls of the new gymnasium, the first gymnasium.
When I was in college, someone who would know told me a few things about my dad. He said that it was his experience that Dad would not accept reimbursement or payment from the school for his overtime or use of his personal vehicles.
That fits with the powerful image I often remember of watching my Dad throw the last few bales up on top of the hay trailer because the high school boys that worked for dad, for a good wage, with names like Healer and Sadler and Eichman and Trapp, couldn’t get the last few the bales up there that high. So my Dad, using a leg and one arm to toss the bales, got them up there, one way or another. That’s also what I remember about Dad and the school. He just did whatever it took for him to give his best for the students..
A couple of summers when I was about twelve were a little different. For some reason Dad and I went to the school alone and cleaned the rooms. We did this extra work all that summer, but especially the weeks just before school started. There was a lot of other stuff to do too. This was extra, sometimes on Sundays. We went through all of the rooms but Dad was especially particular about the restrooms. I will just say that as a young teenager I was glad that no one saw me up there doing that work. I did my best but after I was done Dad usually came in and gave everything a good going over, especially the girl’s restrooms. He wanted them “spic and span.”
Years later a man told me what was really going on. The custodian had come in to Dad’s office and turned in his keys. He said that he really wanted to work but had a terminal illness. He was a good man. I liked him a lot. He tried to turn in his keys and Dad asked him to pick them up and just do what he could. That’s when Dad began to spend his own time off at the school cleaning. And then he took me with him. He always made sure the restrooms were done well. The same thing the next year, Dad asked the custodian not to quit yet, to pick up his keys. Finally one year the man said that he couldn’t even lean on his broom any more. He handed Dad his keys and Dad took them. The man explaining this to me said that by that time, the custodian had worked long enough that when he passed, his wife would get his retirement.
When I was about five or six years old I came home with a puffy red face. Mom (Gladys) asked me what happened. I said that I was playing down by the railroad tracks and got beat up by a kid three years older than me, the brother of a good friend of mine. She asked why I was fighting. I said he beat me up because I said that my Father owned the town. I said it several times and he beat me up several times. She subdued a chuckle and asked why in the world I would say such a thing like that. I said that Dad had to own the town because when the grass got too high he was always out mowing those vacant lots all around Somerset. It was simple to me. I just figured if he was taking care of them, they must be his.
Ex-students tell me their experiences where they call my dad Uncle Bill and others get that misty look in their eye when they talk about my parents and how their lives turned out better – who felt that they were special, and felt that they belonged to the Bill James’ family too. I tell them they are right, and it is a wonderful thing for all of us!
It is a great thing to be able to think back and relate to you how Mom and Dad loved the students at Somerset. I thought it was just the way the world was.
These examples of dedicated teachers are not unique or intended in any way to be overly boastful. Many students can make similar accounts of their teachers. This simple statement of the quality and intensity of their investment as teachers is also certainly true of Bill and Gladys James. I am proud to make this statement in support of their work in and love for the Somerset School District.
One final favorite ex-student story. At a reunion he walked up to me and grabbed my shoulder and said that Mr. James had changed his life. He said that Mr. James had taken him hiking, him and a half-dozen other boys. He said Mr. James moved up the hills and through the trees like a deer, sure-footed and strong. He said they made a campfire in the dark and he couldn’t believe how strong Mr. James was. He told them about things he had seen and done. He said they sat by the crackling fire enthralled by what this man was telling them. About as a kid figuring how to get a Model T going but not how to make it stop, and a man running him down and catching him on horseback. About catching himself on fire on top of a tractor trying to put fuel in it while it was running, after his father told him never to do that. He said that Mr. James told them about his arm. He said Mr. James told them about life.
The man said he was a young nothing, a nobody going nowhere. He said that Mr. James told him that in Somerset everybody is somebody. He looked me in the eye and said that after listening to that man with one arm doing all of that, he figured he could too. He said he graduated and joined the Merchant Marine and he saw the world. He said that one-armed man changed his life.
Dad wasn’t perfect, Mom was.
Billy James,
William Marshall James, Jr.