By John McElligott
My first memory as child is standing on an old asphalt sidewalk in my underwear (A.K.A. “Tidy Whities”). I looked at my brothers, Tom, Bruce and their friends all dressed in their jeans and shorts. I ran into our home, the old military barracks, and quickly put on some shorts and went back out to face the world. It’s here in Terminal, Texas, a plot of 220 acres between Midland and Odessa, Texas, that my journey began. Terminal was later purchased by Midland County, and as you will learn, Midland is where I drank the water until 1965.
Lots of kids of all ages gathered on that sidewalk. We all shared one thing in common in that we all lived with hard working parents in an abandoned Army military airbase. How did they get there? I don’t know, but we all lived near the sidewalk in either a one- or two-story barrack. Most were two income working families with one car. Most worked as roughnecks, pumpers and chemical operators for the oil companies or were employed with the airlines. There were also ranch hands, barbers, grocery store operators, and a lot of teachers. My mom was a part-time teacher, and sold tickets at the Texas Drive Inn Theater at night. My dad worked for the airlines.
One of my most vivid memories is the sewer plant where we played tag and often ran around the 3-foot pools of poop and water. If you fell in the sewer water, you could expect ass kicking time when you got home, since we did not have any extra sets of clothes and the sewer smell never went away.
I distinctly remember the sewer plant operator, Mr. Davis. He looked just like Santa. Mr. Davis went off one day, got a gun and held up the Terminal Police and the Texas Highway Patrol. I think the smell of the poop must have driven him crazy. I don’t remember ever seeing him again.
Terminal also had its own post office. My mother was appointed Postmaster General by President Dwight D. Eisenhower on April 2nd 1958. After she was appointed, we moved downstairs behind the post office. The fondest memories include roller-skating upstairs. We also had 6 toilets and 8 shower heads, and when we flooded the bathroom, we could swim. My brothers and I lived there until we graduated high school.
I met some of my lifelong friends on that sidewalk. This includes families like the Fishers. They had 10 kids (9 boys, 1 girl)! Other families included, the Rawles’, Myers, Galloway’s, Allen’s, Hammock’s, Pittman’s, Robert’s, Reed’s, Roberts, Thornton’s, Price’s and many more. Most of these kids started school at the Terminal Texas Independent School District.
In 1963, at the age of 17, I graduated Midland High School. I was told to go to college, work or join the military. After failing at the first two, I joined the Navy in 1965. I breezed through boot camp due to my upbringing in Terminal and Midland Texas. I could do everything with exceptional ease and success thanks to the water I drank and the sidewalks I walked in the place we called home, Midland, Texas.
You make another Midland girl proud. I graduated MHS 1961
John, I’m so happy to find this collection today. I think something I wrote several years ago to my brother and sisters about the Terminal experience is apropos here:
A TERMINAL BEGINNING
In a dusty, windblown, tumbleweed-populated out-of-the way place in West Texas, I made a decision that would govern my entire life to follow. I was approaching eight years old in the spring of 1956 ─ spring, when new life emerges everywhere, even in the unforgiving harshness of the desert. The rains had come and the cacti blossomed in resurrected vitality. My sister Vicki was born that year, and this was her first home. This was the right time for my new birth.
In those days the place was known as Terminal and was home to maybe 1,000 residents who lived in old Army barracks built in World War II for bombardier trainees. During the war, the base was designated Midland Army Air Field, and there the training in the ultra-secret Norden Bombsight took place. In 1946 the military ceded the airfield to the city of Midland, which for a few years rented out the extant barracks to civilian families. My family was one of those. We lived across the street from the Tri-County Orphanage, and I recall with delight riding the bus with those children first to Sam Houston Elementary School and then to North Elementary School in Midland. At home we had an old television with poor reception to the two, sometimes three on clear days, area stations, so as often as I could I stole away to the nearby fire station at the landmark red-and-white checkered water tower, where the firemen allowed me to watch their color television, the first I had ever seen. I often crawled through an unlocked window to play in the grain-filled Webb-Davis warehouse down the way.
My upbringing was not a religious one. I recall having attended church only once before that life-transforming night in the spring. It was at the invitation of the large family living across the street from us, who brought me to their Sunday school class. Afterward, I only remembered the teacher writing the word “SIN” in large letters on the blackboard.
Months after that visit I lay on my bed in the dark reciting a poem-prayer that I had recently read somewhere: “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” Prior to that night I typically would then drift into sleep. But this night would be different, monumentally different.
I began to tremble in a mysterious fear as I finished my prayer. Would I die tonight? Then in the darkness, Someone pulled the reassuring bed covers up over me, and my trembling stopped. The door neither opened nor closed before or after this experience, yet Someone’s presence became wonderfully palpable to me. Intuitively, I softly called into the darkness, “Lord Jesus, forgive my sins.” Even before my cry found completion I had an unmistakable sensation that the Presence which had been only outside me now flowed inside me. I prayed, “Thank you, God.” and went into a serene sleep.
After that night, I could not fully understand, much less explain, that event. But immediately there was an undeniable consequence of my personal cataclysm: my conscience had sprung to life—I no longer had the ability to lie that I formerly had, and as time went on, I could not participate in the destructive deeds of my peers, such as vandalism, theft, and the setting of fires in vacant lots. All such misdeeds would bring a conscience full of condemnation even in the contemplation of them. Intuitively, I fled from all such wrongs, and my fleeing has continued to this day.
Even more meaningfully, I received God Himself as my new life. Through a difficult human experience, including war combat, I have relied on Him and sought His counsel in all things as my real “inside Man.” In my years since Terminal, I have found that He has well-equipped me with the sensitive spiritual capacities of intuition, conscience, and loving divine companionship. From that pivotal night in the spring of 1956, He has not for one moment neglected me or abandoned me. So for me, to live simply means that I keep my spiritual eyes constantly turned and focused on Him within. My oxymoronic beginning in Terminal set a sure course for the rest of my life, for which I am eternally grateful.
DBE
8-19-17
David
Thanks for your story, it was very moving. Now please us tell us more about your life after the Terminal Texas event. Most of us terminal kids had amazing lives. Some died without leaving any semblance having lived. I suspect like me and you God/Jesus Christ was a significant reason why we are here. As a Corpsman in Vietnam and then a Doctor I was able to save many lives. And our Terminal living, and North Elementary experience certainly helped us both, I am sure. I also try to go to Mass any time I can day or night.
Tell us more if you can. And thanks for joining the What’s in the Water Blog. Remember we want to hear your stories.